US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday announced new visa restrictions on Chinese officials for their actions to repress ethnic and religious minorities both inside and outside the nation.
In a statement, which provided no specific details on which officials would be targeted, Blinken also reiterated a call for China to “end its ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity” in Xinjiang.
Xinjiang is in the grip of a years-long “anti-terrorism” campaign that has seen more than 1 million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities detained in a sprawling network of “re-education” camps, rights groups say.
Photo: AFP
REPRESSION
Blinken said that the visa restrictions would be focused on Chinese officials complicit in policies aimed at repressing religious and ethnic minorities, as well as other dissidents, human rights advocates and journalists.
He said that the actions by Chinese officials extend outside China’s borders, including into the US.
“The United States rejects efforts by PRC [People’s Republic of China] officials to harass, intimidate, surveil, and abduct members of ethnic and religious minority groups, including those who seek safety abroad, and US citizens, who speak out on behalf of these vulnerable populations,” Blinken said.
“We again call on the PRC government to cease its acts of transnational repression, including attempting to silence Uighur American activists and other Uighur individuals serving the American people by denying exit permission to their family members in China,” he said.
PRESSURE
The new actions come only a few days after US President Joe Biden spoke via videoconference with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), in which Biden sought to pressure Xi not to provide support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS