China is warning of “severe damage” to relations with India and increased regional instability if exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama proceeds with a visit to a disputed area along their still-unsettled border.

Beijing has expressed its concerns to New Delhi on numerous occasions and urged India to “avoid offering a state for the Dalai Lama to carry out anti-China separatist activities,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at a daily briefing Friday.

“The invitation to the Dalai Lama by the Indian side to the contested area between China and India will inflict severe damage on the China-India relationship and peace and stability in the China-India border area,” Geng said.

The highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism was to visit Arunachal Pradesh in coming weeks. China claims the partly ethnically Tibetan Himalayan state as its own territory and the frontier between the two nuclear-armed Asian giants remains tense more than 50 years after they fought a brief but bloody border war high in the peaks.

China claims about 90,000 square kilometers (35,000 square miles) in Arunachal Pradesh, referred to informally by some Chinese as “Southern Tibet.” India says China is occupying 38,000 square kilometers (15,000 square miles) of its territory on the Aksai Chin plateau.

More than a dozen rounds of talks have failed to make substantial progress on the dispute, although there have been relatively few confrontations in recent years.

The Dalai Lama fled into exile in India after a failed anti-Chinese uprising in 1959. He last visited Arunachal Pradesh in 2009 and while China protested the trip, there was no major impact on relations with India.
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As Saudi Arabia and Indonesia signed a $1 billion investment deal during King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud’s historic visit, many ordinary Indonesians aired their grievances with the desert kingdom. In Jakarta, several dozen protesters brought attention to the ongoing maltreatment of Indonesian migrant workers in Saudi Arabia. Also seeking answers were the families of Indonesian citizens killed in two accidents at the 2015 Hajj in Mecca, who have received no compensation from either government nearly two years after the tragedy.

This is the first time a sitting Saudi monarch has visited Indonesia in 47 years, and citizens rolled out the red carpet for King Salman and his entourage of 1,500 in Bogor and Jakarta. But the king is spending the better part of his trip, from March 4 to 9, vacationing in Bali. As he wrapped up his third and last day in Java by leading prayers at Jakarta’s Istiqlal Mosque, aggrieved Indonesians suspect they are still far from resolving their concerns.

Migrant workers

About three million Indonesian migrants seek overseas work, due in part to high domestic unemployment. Estimates of the number of Indonesian workers in Saudi Arabia differ wildly, from 379,632 (according to the Asian Migrant Center in 2013) to 38,104 (according to Indonesia’s National Agency for the Protection and Placement of Indonesian Migrant Workers in 2014). One reason for this variance is the difficulty of accounting for illegal or undocumented migrants. Indonesia has discouraged its citizens from working in Saudi Arabia due to poor working conditions and some high-profile criminal convictions.

Two Indonesian women, Karni Bt. Medi Tarsim, 37, and Siti Zaenab Bt. Duhri Rupa, 47, were separately convicted of murdering their bosses and executed in 2015, which caused a furor in Indonesia. Human rights groups objected to their convictions, citing the dire circumstances that the women claimed provoked their crimes. As of 2013, the majority of migrant workers on Saudi Arabia’s death row are Indonesians, according to the London-based newspaper, The Guardian.

Despite the ongoing debate about the allegedly inhumane working conditions for Indonesian workers in Saudi Arabia – including physical abuse, sexual violence, overwork, and withheld payments – there was no mention of migrant workers in the Memorandums of Understanding signed between Indonesia and Saudi Arabia this week.

On Thursday, dozens of activists protested outside the Saudi embassy in Jakarta to lobby for explicit recognition of worker rights during the state visit. About a dozen men were arrested shortly after the protest began and removed from the site by police. The group, which called itself the “Big Family of Indonesian Migrant Workers,” urged King Salman to free 25 Indonesian citizens on death row. Up to 279 Indonesians faced death row as of April 2015, according to a Manpower Ministry official.

Ultimately, activists were largely resigned to the fact that migrant workers were not mentioned in discussions between President Joko Widodo and King Salman.

“The eleven MoUs [Memorandums of Understanding] signed on Wednesday focused on economic issues, so they were not the best place in which to discuss human rights,” said Wahyu Susilo, executive director of the advocacy group Migrant Care.

“But that’s not to say the government should give up on this issue,” Wahyu told VOA. “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs needs to be more proactive about diplomatic protections for Indonesian emigrants. And the Ministry of Finance must supervise the worker recruitment process much more closely.” He said many underage Indonesians, for instance, are recruited with falsified documents and brought unsuspectingly to work in “dangerous countries” like Saudi Arabia.

Several members of Indonesia’s parliament have also appealed to the king to grant clemency to convicted migrant workers and for the government in Jakarta to raise the issue with the visiting monarch. President Widodo’s administration has not commented on the matter and it is not clear if the issue was raised in his private meeting with the king.

VOA was unsuccessful in its efforts to reach a presidential spokesman for comment. Spokespeople from the Ministry of Religion and Widodo’s office told VOA they were unable to comment on what transpired in the private meeting between the president and King Salman.

Hajj tragedy, quotas

In 2015, Indonesians were affected by not one but two deadly accidents related to the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. One hundred twenty-seven Indonesians were among those killed in a deadly stampede in September and 12 more were killed a week before the Hajj officially started, when a crane collapsed near the Grand Mosque.

Saudi Arabia promised one million riyals, or about $267,000, as compensation for the 12 Indonesians killed and 49 injured from the crane accident. But nothing has been received as of February 2017, according to the Indonesia daily newspaper, the Jakarta Post.

The annual Hajj quota is extremely important to Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation. Its current quota is 221,000 people, the most of any country in the world, but some citizens still wait over 20 years for their chance to be a pilgrim. Although Indonesian officials hoped to increase their quota this year, this issue too seems to have been omitted from the agreements signed this week.

Preserving the quota may have been one reason why Indonesia didn’t press Saudi officials harder on compensation for the Hajj victims, said Dadi Darmadi, a researcher at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta.

“Any ‘failed efforts’ at Hajj organization would be unappealing for the masses,” Darmadi told VOA. Since the Hajj has long been a “top priority” for officials, he said, if they somehow jeopardized the country’s allowance, “people could easily think the government is not serious in handling religious affairs” – anathema in the profoundly religious country.

“I think the Indonesian government is also using political sensibilities not to be too pushy about it … such a rare visit by King Salman also is like a moment of ‘unfreezing’ the heat of the political temperature in the country during the [contentious] Jakarta election,” said Darmadi.

The Ministry of Religious Affairs reaffirmed its commitment to compensating the accident victims in a comment to VOA. According to a ministry spokesperson, the process has been held up by the fact that all of those affected have not yet submitted their “victim data” to the Saudi Embassy.

“It’s not possible for the Indonesian government to force Saudi Arabia to accelerate the process, because the authority lies with their government,” the spokesperson said. “And as per the Minister of Religious Affairs, Lukman Hakim Saifuddin, Raja [King] Salman himself promised to take care of it, eventually.” He added that the Saudi government has set up a team headed by the Governor of Mecca to work on the cases.

Besides the unresolved issues raised by labor activists and families of Hajj victims, King Salman’s trip fell short by other metrics. Before his visit, government leaders hoped for investments of up to $25 billion, but ultimately, the king signed only one new deal, for $1 billion, to finance infrastructure and sanitation projects.
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America will continue to patrol the South China Sea to ensure freedom of navigation and overflight in the disputed region, a U.S. admiral said Friday amid questions whether U.S. involvement in one of Asia’s potential flashpoints will change.

“We will be here,” Rear Adm. James Kilby said on board the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson as it steamed through the gentle blue waters, with F18 fighter jets landing, taking off on catapults and zooming over the mammoth warship.

“We have operated here in the past, we’re going to operate here in the future, we’re going to continue to reassure our allies,” Kilby said. “We’re gonna continue to demonstrate that international waters are waters where everyone can sail, where everyone can conduct commerce and merchant traffic and that’s the message we want to leave with people.”

A commercial ship gingerly cruised several kilometers (miles) away as the Carl Vinson’s kilometer-long flight deck, where crewmembers checked several parked F18s, a surveillance aircraft and helicopters, throbbed with activity under a mild breeze.

Kilby’s comments followed reported Chinese moves to install missile defense systems on islands it recently built, and the inauguration of a new U.S. president who has raised questions about America’s role in Asia.

The U.S. military took a group of journalists to the aircraft carrier during a routine patrol of the South China Sea, one of the world’s security hotspots, in a mission that U.S. Navy officials said has continued for decades.

A U.S. administration official has said the Carl Vinson strike group’s deployment in the South China Sea, a month after President Donald Trump took office, signaled U.S. intent to have a more active naval presence in the region.

Accompanied by a guided-missile destroyer and aircraft, the Carl Vinson began “routine operations” in the South China Sea on Feb. 18. It last deployed to the Western Pacific in 2015 when it conducted an exercise with the Malaysian navy and air force, according to the Pentagon.

The official declined to comment on whether the aircraft carrier group would undertake a freedom of navigation operation, a right that American officials have asserted in the past. The official requested anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to journalists on the administration’s policy.

Under the Obama administration, the U.S. Navy sailed close to islands built by China from previously submerged disputed reefs on so-called freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea, provoking warnings and protests from Beijing.

During his Senate confirmation hearing for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson stirred controversy by comparing China’s island-building and deployment of military assets to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, and suggesting China’s access to the island should not be allowed.

Defense Secretary James Mattis, however, has stressed the importance of diplomacy in resolving disputes in the South China Sea rather than military maneuvers.

U.S. Navy officials said Friday the Carl Vinson was patrolling waters somewhere between China’s southernmost island of Hainan and the Scarborough Shoal off the northwestern Philippines. China seized the shoal in 2012 after a tense standoff with Philippine government vessels, but the U.S. Navy officials said no incidents had occurred in two weeks of sailing in the busy waters.

“I would say everyone we’ve encountered so far has acted professionally as we would hope they would do in accordance with international rules, standards, norms and laws,” Kilby said.

China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei have long contested ownership of the South China Sea, which straddles one of the world’s busiest sea lanes and is believed to sit atop vast deposits of oil and gas.
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Senior Taliban officials say a suspected American drone strike has killed a key Taliban commander who told captured U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl “Don’t come back to Afghanistan” moments before releasing him to the U.S. military in a prisoner swap three years ago.

The U.S. military, however, told VOA Friday, “Neither U.S. forces Afghanistan nor Resolute Support conducted any strikes in Pakistan or in border areas of Afghanistan on Thursday.”

Taliban sources confirmed Friday that slain Qari Abdullah Mairaj was among two men hit by what the Taliban believes were U.S. missiles the previous day in the southeastern Afghan province of Khost, bordering Pakistan.

The insurgent group agreed to free Bergdahl after nearly five years in captivity in exchange for five Taliban members from the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Taliban later released a video of the May 2014 transfer in the Ali Sher district of Khost, showing a masked man, at one point, telling Bergdahl in the local Pashto language: “Don’t come back to Afghanistan. You won’t make it out alive next time.”

The Taliban later identified the masked man as Qari Abdullah Mairaj, and sources close to the group say he was among those killed in an airstrike Thursday. The sources would not discuss details about the other dead militant accompanying Mairaj.

Reports Thursday said the two militants were riding a motorcycle in Kurram when a drone targeted them.

With the U.S. military’s comment Friday that it did not conduct such a strike, it is not clear exactly how the militants were killed.

It was also not immediately possible to ascertain the exact location of the incident because the volatile Pakistan-Afghanistan border region is beyond the access of journalists and aid workers.
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The political turmoil in South Korea over the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye is exposing a sharp division in the country over national security policy, with conservatives who solidly support the U.S. alliance and progressives who want to maintain friendly ties with China.

Park has been suspended from office while the Constitutional Court reviews the impeachment motion that was passed in December by the National Assembly. Allegations that the president and a close friend secretly schemed to trade political favors for multimillion-dollar donations lie at the heart of the scandal that prompted this political crisis.

The court is expected to soon rule on the impeachment, and if upheld a new presidential election would be scheduled within 60 days. If the court strikes down the impeachment, the election will be held at the end of this year as Park’s single five-year term ends in early 2018.

While allegations of government corruption have triggered the current crisis, the political debate has evolved to include the North Korean nuclear threat as well.

THAAD

During Korea’s Independence Day on Wednesday, Park’s allies and opponents held competing demonstrations in Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Square separated by 16,000 police and more than 100 buses.

For many protesters at the pro-impeachment rallies, opposing Park also means opposing her hard-line approach to dealing with North Korea, which they say has failed to slow Kim Jong Un’s resolve to increase his country’s nuclear and ballistic missile capability. 

In the last year, North Korea conducted two nuclear tests and multiple missile launches, in defiance of increased international sanctions.

Many oppose the controversial U.S. THAAD missile defense shield that the Park administration agreed to deploy and Acting President and Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn continues to support.

Beijing has strongly denounced THAAD as an unnecessary and provocative military escalation that also poses a potential threat to China.

China is reportedly increasingly retaliating against South Korea by informally putting limits on imports and tourism. The Lotte Group, the Korean conglomerate that is providing the land where the THAAD will be deployed, saw a massive project in China’s northeastern city of Shenyang put on hold in December and was recently fined 44,000 Chinese yuan for violating Chinese advertising laws.

Many anti-Park activists say the potential military advantage of THAAD is not worth the growing tension it is causing with China.

“South Korea is caught in the middle and it cannot do anything. But many of us are against the deployment of THAAD,” said one protester at Wednesday’s rally.

Pro-American

The pro-Park rallies have been growing significantly in number in the last few weeks as hard-line conservatives downplay the corruption allegations and emphasize their stance on national security and sovereignty.

At their demonstrations, many of the president’s supporters wave American flags to show solidarity with the U.S., and to denounce attempts by Beijing to purportedly pressure the South Korean government to withdraw its support for THAAD.

“China is not our friend or ally. Because China is a close ally to our common enemy. We are against any Chinese attempt to intervene in any decision making process on the Korean peninsula,” said Chulhong Kim, a conservative activist and associate professor at the Presbyterian College and Theological Seminary in Seoul.

Presidential candidates

Many in the two political protest camps see the THAAD debate as a clear policy choice between embracing the strong military alliance with the United States or to side with China and take a less confrontational stance with North Korea to restart dialogue and reduce tensions.

However, the potential South Korean presidential candidates from the three largest political parties all hold somewhat moderate positions.

Acting President Hwang has come out strongly in favor of THAAD as a “vital defense measure” but said his government for now will try to resolve its differences with China through negotiation. Hwang is considered a possible conservative candidate for the ruling Liberty Korea Party that recently changed its name from the Saenuri Party in an attempt to disassociate itself from the presidential corruption scandal.

Moon Jae-in, the frontrunner candidate for the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea, has voiced support for the U.S. alliance but wants to postpone a decision on THAAD until after the election, and supports reopening dialogue and cooperation with Pyongyang.

Ahn Cheol-soo, who is a candidate for the People’s Party that also supported Park’s impeachment, holds a similar position to that of the ruling party. He is also a strong supporter of the U.S. alliance and THAAD and opposes any attempt by China to coerce South Korea on national security issues.

“Even when you are really upset and angry, there are certain boundaries that you should not cross over. For that reason I am deeply concerned about the ongoing situation being caused by China,” Ahn said.

But Ahn also said Seoul does not have to choose between Beijing and Washington, but through dialogue can manage its strategic partnerships with both.

Youmi Kim contributed to this report.
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Every March, the curtains go up in Beijing for two major events in the political calendar.

The “lianghui,” or “two meetings,” as they are known, attract thousands of delegates from across the country for sessions of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.

In a country where most key decisions are made behind closed doors, even a peek through half-closed curtains is rare for photographers working for foreign news organizations in China.

The annual gatherings include numerous highly choreographed events, many taking place inside the Great Hall of the People to the west of Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing.

Built in less than a year in 1959 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, the main auditorium can seat 10,000 people.

Parliament’s largely ceremonial advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, begins its meetings Friday, in sessions that run  parallel with the NPC. Made up of business magnates, artists, monks, noncommunists and other representatives of broader society, it has no legislative power, however.

Some delegates and officials attending the “two meetings” wear traditional ethnic clothing, while others are in military uniforms or simple black suits, a color that contrasts with the dominant red of the Great Hall.

Exact details of the topics of discussion, including economic growth targets and the budget, are kept under tight wraps ahead of the sessions.

On Sunday’s opening day of the NPC, Premier Li Keqiang will announce key economic targets in his state-of-the-nation-style address. The meeting will end with Li’s carefully choreographed annual news conference.

This is not China’s biggest political event of the year, though.

Far more important is the autumn party congress, at which President Xi Jinping will unveil a new generation of senior leaders, positions that entail a lot of behind-the-scenes jockeying at parliament.
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China’s state media is calling for sanctions and a boycott of South Korean goods after a Korean conglomerate approved a land swap deal at home that paves the way for the deployment of a controversial U.S. missile defense system. How China could go about punishing South Korea without hurting its own economy is already proving to be a difficult question, and as VOA’s Bill Ide reports, not all agree that boycotts are a good solution.
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Pakistan is moving to merge its troubled tribal areas with Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, in part to crack down on extremist groups that have sought refuge there, allegedly plotting and launching terror attacks elsewhere in the country and across the border in Afghanistan.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s Cabinet on Thursday approved the recommendations of a consultative committee that was formed in November 2015 to examine how to carve out a better future for the poverty-wracked Federally Administered Tribal Areas, depriving groups like the Taliban of support and recruitment grounds.

The plan still must be approved by Parliament. If enacted, it would set up a five-year merger process, a 10-year development plan and a major upgrade of the legal system, including an additional 20,000 police officers in the sprawling region where lawlessness has been rife under direct federal control.

“Time has come that the tribal people will be brought into [the] mainstream to end their sense of deprivation,” Radio Pakistan quoted Sharif as saying.

Merger a political move

While the merger is touted as critical to bring the area into the political mainstream and tackle the underlying causes of extremism by creating jobs and improving the local economy, some also see it as a political move by Sharif’s government to win support of tribal people in next year’s elections.

The recommendations were the result of discussions with 3,500 tribal leaders and elders, representatives of all political parties, traders, lawyers, youth and FATA Parliamentarians, then input from the National Security Committee. A media campaign resulted in 30,000 comments from the public.

Pakistan and Afghanistan have long accused each other of failing to crack down on extremist groups that have claimed responsibility for deadly attacks in both countries, particularly from strongholds near their border.

The attacks have intensified mistrust between the two neighbors, preventing them from cooperating effectively to fight Islamic State and other groups that seem intent on destabilizing both governments.

Border closed

After a rash of recent terrorist bombings that killed more than 150 people in Pakistan over several days, the government ordered the border closed two weeks ago and gave Afghanistan a list of alleged terrorists that it wanted arrested and handed over immediately.
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