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Bangkok — Refugees from Myanmar seeking shelter from their country’s grinding civil war in neighboring India tell VOA they fear a wave of arrests and forced returns following the Manipur state government’s recent moves to start deporting them.

Earlier this month, on May 2, Manipur Chief Minister Nongthombam Biren Singh announced the deportation of 77 “illegal immigrants from Myanmar” on his social media page, calling it the “first phase.”

In comments on social media again last Wednesday, the chief minister said the process of deporting some 5,400 more “illegal immigrants” was “underway.”

The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, says nearly 60,000 refugees have fled to India since Myanmar’s military toppled the country’s democratically elected government and seized power in 2021, setting off a bloody civil war that has claimed thousands of lives.

The refugees are spread across three provinces in India’s far east on the border with Myanmar, but authorities in Manipur have taken the most aggressive steps to send them back. Officials there blame the refugees for fueling the state’s own spate of deadly communal clashes over the past year.

India does not officially recognize refugees and has not signed the U.N. refugee convention.

Refugees in Manipur say the recent deportations have put them on edge. Some have begun to relocate to avoid the government’s anticipated dragnet.

“That is the very thing we are afraid of. That’s why … we moved here to another border village, because we are afraid of the Manipur government,” said Seithang Haokip, speaking with VOA by phone from a hiding place a few kilometers from the border.

“All of us are very afraid of both sides, from both sides, of being arrested by the Manipur government and by the Myanmar military regime,” he said.

Seithang Haokip said he crossed into India illegally about two years ago from Myanmar’s Chin state, where he had joined a nationwide civil disobedience movement and was helping lead local strikes against the regime.

He and others say they fear for their lives if they were to be arrested and returned to Myanmar.

“They [the Myanmar military] already opened many files on me, so military junta already wanted me, so definitely they will arrest me and they will put [me] in jail for long time, or they can maybe kill me,” said Myo, another refugee from Myanmar who is in hiding near the border. Myo asked that his full name not be used for his safety.

Myo told VOA that he also crossed into India illegally a few years ago after joining Myanmar’s civil disobedience movement. He and his wife and son now share a small hut with two other families. He said they all have been on constant alert since the news of the recent deportations.

“When we hear [sounds] of truck or car or police or army coming around us, we are ready to run away or hide, so this kind of fear every day,” said Myo.

“We all feel like that. This is a signal that we are no more safe in India,” he said.

Right groups say their fears are well founded.

United Nations investigators have accused Myanmar’s junta of widespread war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the rape, torture and murder of both civilians and rebel fighters in detention. They say indiscriminate air and artillery attacks against the resistance have razed whole villages. Some 2.5 million people have been displaced by the fighting inside Myanmar itself, according to the U.N.

In April, the junta also began enforcing a years-old conscription law that requires all men between the ages of 18 and 35 serve at least two years and banned military-age men from leaving the country.

At 31, Salai Dokhar, another refugee, said he could be forced to fight for a military he loathes and ordered to kill his fellow countrymen if sent back to Myanmar. Even in the relative safety of New Delhi, India’s sprawling capital, more than 2,000 kilometers from the border, he said he too has a growing fear of being arrested and deported.

“I stay home. Except for emergency issues I never go out. We have to hide ourselves from the authorities to [not] be arrested,” Salai Dokhar said.

“Most of the people who entered to India are not safe in the hands of the [Myanmar] military, including me,” he added.

With the civil war in Myanmar still raging, Human Rights Watch says Indian authorities should allow the refugees to stay until they feel ready to return on their own.

“Conditions are extremely dangerous for civilians in many parts of Myanmar, where there is an ongoing armed conflict. Many civilians have been forced to flee to seek safety in India,” Meenakshi Ganguly, the group’s deputy Asia director, told VOA.

“The Indian authorities should protect their rights,” she added. “Although India has not signed the refugee convention, it is still obliged to not forcibly return refugees to Myanmar when there are such extreme risks to life and liberty.”

In a statement last week, the International Commission of Jurists said India was bound by other conventions it has signed to not force people back to countries where they are likely to be in danger. The commission has also urged Indian authorities to stop the deportations.

Refugees say they believe authorities in Manipur are currently holding well over 100 people from Myanmar in detention centers and fear that any day they may be the next to be deported.

The state government and chief minister of Manipur did not reply to VOA’s requests for an interview or for comment.

Refugees and rights groups say the state’s deportation drive is political, motivated by a bid for votes by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in a nationwide general election that started in April and runs until June.

Biren Singh, a member of the Hindu nationalist BJP, has blamed the refugees for stoking the communal clashes that have torn through Manipur since May 2023, pitting the majority and predominantly Hindu Meitei against the minority Kuki, who are mostly Christian. The Kuki are also kin to the ethnic Chin of western Myanmar, who make up many of the refugees in Manipur.

“Unfortunately, the refugees from Myanmar are being used by the ruling Biren Singh government in Manipur, and his BJP party, to stoke communal divisions. For petty political gains, the Biren Singh administration has created rifts between communities that will take a long time to heal, with hundreds killed and tens of thousands displaced,” said Ganguly.

“They detain the Myanmar refugees to play their political games in general election,” echoed Salai Dokhar, an ethnic Chin himself. “We are in a political game, for sure.”
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BANGKOK — The whereabouts of a Chinese citizen journalist who served four years in prison for reporting on the early days of the pandemic in Wuhan and was expected to be released Monday are unknown, raising concern from activists.

Zhang Zhan, who had been sentenced to four years in prison on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a vaguely defined charge often used in political cases, has finished serving her sentence at Shanghai’s Women Prison.

Ren Quanniu, a former lawyer who previously represented Zhang, said he could not reach her father and expressed concern that Zhang would be released only to be put under another form of control by police.

Monday was the last day of her four-year sentence, confirmed Ren and Jane Wang, another overseas activist who launched the Free Zhang Zhan campaign in the U.K.

Zhang was among a handful of citizen journalists who traveled to the central Chinese city of Wuhan after the government put it under total lockdown in February 2020, in the early days of the pandemic. She walked around the city to document public life as fears grew about the then-mysterious coronavirus.

Other citizen journalists have also spent time in jail for documenting the early days of the pandemic, including Fang Bin, who published videos of overcrowded hospitals and bodies during the outbreak. Fang was sentenced to three years in prison and released last April.

Chen Qiushi, another citizen journalist, disappeared in February 2020 while filming in Wuhan. Chen in September 2021 resurfaced on a friend’s live video feed on YouTube, saying he had suffered from depression but did not provide details about his disappearance.

During her prison stay, Zhang staged a hunger strike and was hospitalized at one point in 2021.

Zhang’s family has faced police pressure during her stay in prison, and her parents have declined interview requests from media. Her family at times could only speak to their daughter by phone at the prison.

Shen Yanqiu, who had planned to go with Zhang’s family to receive her at the prison, declined to speak to The Associated Press, saying she had been “invited to drink tea,” a euphemism for a police interrogation.

Calls to Zhang’s brother went unanswered. Calls to the Shanghai Prison Administration office also went unanswered.

China’ s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Wang Wenbin declined to comment on the case when asked Monday, saying “I’m not aware of the situation.”

The coronavirus remains a sensitive topic in China. In the first week of May, a Chinese scientist who was the first to publish a sequence of the COVID-19 virus staged a protest after authorities barred him from his lab, after years of demotions and setbacks.

An Associated Press investigation also found that the government froze domestic and international efforts to trace the virus from the first weeks of the outbreak.
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SYDNEY — An investigation by Australia’s public broadcaster accuses China’s secret police service of tracking down dissidents living overseas.

A former Chinese spy now living in Australia told Australian Broadcasting Corp.’s Four Corners program that a unit of the Chinese secret service had been operational in Sydney as recently as last year.

The spy – named only as “Eric” – has described a shadowy world of deception and abduction.  The former Chinese agent told ABC how he’d been ordered by the secret police in Beijing to target dissidents overseas, including in India, Thailand, Canada and Australia.

‘Eric’ said he would gain their confidence and lure them to countries where they could be kidnapped and sent back to China.  

He told journalists from the investigative Four Corners program that he fled last year to Australia.  

Australia’s domestic spy agency has not confirmed any of the details of the alleged Chinese spy ring.

‘Eric’ said he worked as an undercover agent for a unit within China’s federal police and security agency, the Ministry of Public Security, between 2008 and early 2023.

The specialist division is called the Political Security Protection Bureau, or the 1st Bureau, and targets so-called enemies of the Chinese state.  It is alleged to have been working in Sydney as recently as last year.

‘Eric’ told the ABC that he was speaking out to expose the truth.

“I believe the public has a right to know the secret world.  I worked for the Chinese Political Security Department for 15 years,” he said.  “Today, it is still the darkest department of the Chinese government.”

The ABC said is the first time anyone from China’s secret police has ever spoken publicly. It is using a pseudonym to protect his identity.

Peter Mattis is a China analyst at the Jamestown Foundation, a U.S-based conservative defense policy research organization.  He told the ABC’s Four Corners program that Beijing wants to curb dissent among the Chinese diaspora.

“The Political Protection Bureau has also had a role in trying to silence dissidents as well as to map dissident networks.”

The ABC has said that it has seen hundreds of secret documents and correspondence that back up ‘Eric’s’ allegations.

The broadcaster has reported that Chinese authorities have used anti-corruption campaigns to return more than 12,000 alleged fugitives to China in the past decade.

Chinese authorities have not yet commented on the allegations made in the Australian documentary.

There has also been no response from ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization to the claims.
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Washington — Two Air Force fighter jets recently squared off in a dogfight in California. One was flown by a pilot. The other wasn’t.

That second jet was piloted by artificial intelligence, with the Air Force’s highest-ranking civilian riding along in the front seat. It was the ultimate display of how far the Air Force has come in developing a technology with its roots in the 1950s. But it’s only a hint of the technology yet to come.

The United States is competing to stay ahead of China on AI and its use in weapon systems. The focus on AI has generated public concern that future wars will be fought by machines that select and strike targets without direct human intervention. Officials say this will never happen, at least not on the U.S. side. But there are questions about what a potential adversary would allow, and the military sees no alternative but to get U.S. capabilities fielded fast.

“Whether you want to call it a race or not, it certainly is,” said Adm. Christopher Grady, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Both of us have recognized that this will be a very critical element of the future battlefield. China’s working on it as hard as we are.”

A look at the history of military development of AI, what technologies are on the horizon and how they will be kept under control:

From machine learning to autonomy

AI’s military roots are a hybrid of machine learning and autonomy. Machine learning occurs when a computer analyzes data and rule sets to reach conclusions. Autonomy occurs when those conclusions are applied to act without further human input.

This took an early form in the 1960s and 1970s with the development of the Navy’s Aegis missile defense system. Aegis was trained through a series of human-programmed if/then rule sets to be able to detect and intercept incoming missiles autonomously, and more rapidly than a human could. But the Aegis system was not designed to learn from its decisions and its reactions were limited to the rule set it had.

“If a system uses ‘if/then’ it is probably not machine learning, which is a field of AI that involves creating systems that learn from data,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Christopher Berardi, who is assigned to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to assist with the Air Force’s AI development.

AI took a major step forward in 2012 when the combination of big data and advanced computing power enabled computers to begin analyzing the information and writing the rule sets themselves. It is what AI experts have called AI’s “big bang.”

The new data created by a computer writing the rules is artificial intelligence. Systems can be programmed to act autonomously from the conclusions reached from machine-written rules, which is a form of AI-enabled autonomy.

Testing an AI alternative to GPS navigation

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall got a taste of that advanced warfighting this month when he flew on Vista, the first F-16 fighter jet to be controlled by AI, in a dogfighting exercise over California’s Edwards Air Force Base.

While that jet is the most visible sign of the AI work underway, there are hundreds of ongoing AI projects across the Pentagon.

At MIT, service members worked to clear thousands of hours of recorded pilot conversations to create a data set from the flood of messages exchanged between crews and air operations centers during flights, so the AI could learn the difference between critical messages like a runway being closed and mundane cockpit chatter. The goal was to have the AI learn which messages are critical to elevate to ensure controllers see them faster.

In another significant project, the military is working on an AI alternative to GPS satellite-dependent navigation.

In a future war high-value GPS satellites would likely be hit or interfered with. The loss of GPS could blind U.S. communication, navigation and banking systems and make the U.S. military’s fleet of aircraft and warships less able to coordinate a response.

So last year the Air Force flew an AI program — loaded onto a laptop that was strapped to the floor of a C-17 military cargo plane — to work on an alternative solution using the Earth’s magnetic fields.

It has been known that aircraft could navigate by following the Earth’s magnetic fields, but so far that hasn’t been practical because each aircraft generates so much of its own electromagnetic noise that there has been no good way to filter for just the Earth’s emissions.

“Magnetometers are very sensitive,” said Col. Garry Floyd, director for the Department of Air Force-MIT Artificial Intelligence Accelerator program. “If you turn on the strobe lights on a C-17 we would see it.”

The AI learned through the flights and reams of data which signals to ignore and which to follow and the results “were very, very impressive,” Floyd said. “We’re talking tactical airdrop quality.”

“We think we may have added an arrow to the quiver in the things we can do, should we end up operating in a GPS-denied environment. Which we will,” Floyd said.

The AI so far has been tested only on the C-17. Other aircraft will also be tested, and if it works it could give the military another way to operate if GPS goes down.

Safety rails and pilot speak

 

Vista, the AI-controlled F-16, has considerable safety rails as the Air Force trains it. There are mechanical limits that keep the still-learning AI from executing maneuvers that would put the plane in danger. There is a safety pilot, too, who can take over control from the AI with the push of a button.

The algorithm cannot learn during a flight, so each time up it has only the data and rule sets it has created from previous flights. When a new flight is over, the algorithm is transferred back onto a simulator where it is fed new data gathered in-flight to learn from, create new rule sets and improve its performance.

But the AI is learning fast. Because of the supercomputing speed AI uses to analyze data, and then flying those new rule sets in the simulator, its pace in finding the most efficient way to fly and maneuver has already led it to beat some human pilots in dogfighting exercises.

But safety is still a critical concern, and officials said the most important way to take safety into account is to control what data is reinserted into the simulator for the AI to learn from.
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