Myanmar's Year of Brutality and Resistance: Daily Brief

Exactly one year ago tomorrow, the military in Myanmar executed a coup against the country’s elected civilian leaders, including State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint, in early morning raids in the capital, Naypyidaw. In the ensuing weeks, millions of people across the country joined the anti-coup Civil Disobedience Movement, peacefully protesting the junta through mass demonstrations and general strikes. Security forces responded with increasingly excessive and lethal force, including live ammunition and grenades. Police and soldiers massacred protesters in cities and towns across the country. The security forces have killed nearly 1,500 people since the coup, including at least 100 children. "How many more people does Myanmar’s military have to detain, torture, and shoot before influential governments act to cut off the junta from its flow of money and arms. Myanmar’s people, who have not given up their fight for democracy in the face of daily atrocities, need to know they have the global community’s support,” says Human Rights Watch's Asia director Brad Adams.

As the Winter Olympics begin this week in China, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has announced that its president, Thomas Bach, will have “dinner and a meeting with Peng Shuai” in Beijing – along with representatives of Chinese Olympic Committee, the state-controlled body that is the IOC’s partner in staging the games. It is impossible to know if the tennis player and three-time Olympic athlete is in a position to reject this dinner invitation or if she could have asked for a different type of encounter with Bach or other members of the IOC, such as safely outside China. But what’s clear is that the Chinese government regularly silences and forcibly disappears people whose views or conduct it sees as embarrassing, employs extralegal forms of detention, and publishes or televises forced confessions to make prosecutions appear legitimate.

In some ways, the 2008 and 2022 Olympic Games in China could not be more different. The 2008 Games were Beijing’s “coming out party,” while the 2022 Games face diplomatic boycotts because of the Xi Jinping regime's horrible human rights record. At least 10 governments have declined to send diplomats to the 2022 Beijing Olympics specifically in response to Beijing’s human rights violations, while five others said they made the decision due to COVID concerns. More striking is the range of governments and officials who will show up for Beijing’s party even as the authorities commit crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and crush freedoms in Hong Kong. The 2022 Olympics opening ceremony will include the usual suspects, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, who says he will attend in a display of unity. But it will also feature senior diplomats from democratic governments, such as Norway, which seems to be prioritizing business interests over human rights. Official attendees will most likely also feature Muslim-majority governments that have cooperated with Beijing on its global hunt for Xinjiang’s Uyghurs, persecuted precisely because of their faith. Finally, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres—whose tenure has been marked by a lackluster performance on human rights—will attend to promote “peace in the world. But the gold medal for spectacular complicity in human rights abuses should go to the IOC.

According to a new report by the Foreign Correspondents Club of China, the Xi Jinping regime keeps finding new ways to intimidate foreign journalists, their Chinese colleagues and their sources. Harassment has reached such a high level that at least six correspondents have left the country.  

Egyptian security forces have forcibly disappeared a man after the unscheduled landing of his flight in Luxor. The authorities should immediately reveal his whereabouts and the legal basis for his arrest, says HRW. On January 12, 2022, Hossam Menoufy Mahmoud Sallam, 29, an Egyptian national, was traveling on a direct flight from Khartoum to Istanbul when the plane made an unscheduled landing at the Luxor International Airport, friends and family of Menoufy told HRW. After all passengers disembarked to the transit lounge, security officers summoned Menoufy and checked his passport and travel documents. He was last seen by witnesses in the custody of Egyptian officials. In recent years security forces in Egypt have disappeared hundreds of people, who have reappeared after weeks, months, or sometimes years before they are charged or released. Egyptian security agencies have carried out arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, and torture against perceived dissidents, including many alleged members or sympathizers of the Muslim Brotherhood.

And did you know that inaction against spyware has put all of our phones, and data, at risk? Make sure you read this Washington Post op-ed by Lama Fakih, director of HRW's Crisis and Conflict division, on how she found out she was targeted with Pegasus spyware, and about what should be done now to reign in the surveillance industry, and powerful countries that use spyware to target dissidents, reporters and human rights defenders.