The newcomers on this tiny Pacific nation are young and in limbo, scared that they’ll be arrested if they’re sent back to their native land. Most speak no English, but they say they’re astounded by the generosity of Palau and its people.
They are not the Chinese Muslims from Guantanamo who made world news last week when Palau’s president said the country would take them. Instead, they are 11 asylum seekers from Myanmar — and they may offer the best idea of what the freed detainees’ new lives might be like.
“They didn’t know us,” Aye Aye Thant, 34, the group’s sole fluent English speaker and de facto spokeswoman, said on Sunday. “We are not workers, and we don’t serve their country. But we are treated as their own siblings.”
Fearing arrest for their political activities, the 10 men and one woman fled military-run Myanmar to Malaysia and then to the Philippines, always moving on because they thought the countries might deport them. They had never heard of Palau, but friends suggested it. It also offered an attractive feature — visa-free entry.
They arrived in late February, and Palau has mobilized to protect them.
Once their money ran out, the local Roman Catholic Church offered to house and feed them. Yesterday, a senator — the president’s younger brother — will take over, letting them stay at his farmhouse as they await word on their application for asylum.
The Myanmar asylum seekers say in tropical Palau, one of the world’s smallest countries, they finally feel free.
“We were going to be arrested by the military government [in Myanmar],” said Aye Aye Thant, a former English teacher who openly opposes Myanmar’s ruling junta.
She decided to leave after a family friend and police officer warned her father that she appeared on a government arrest list. She had made unauthorized trips to the Irrawaddy Delta region, hit hard by last year’s Cyclone Nargis, to pass out donated supplies and money.
Her cousin Agganana, another asylum seeker who goes by one name, said he led various anti-government demonstrations at home.
All but one in the group, which includes two Buddhist monks, are members of the overseas offshoot of the National League for Democracy led by pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Aung San Suu Kyi currently is on trial on charges of violating the terms of her house arrest by harboring an American who swam uninvited to her lakeside home.
In Palau, a tropical island nation of 20,000 people, local residents approach them from time to time, offering what they can to help.
Their main benefactor from the Catholic Church, Father Rusk Saburo, stopped by on Sunday afternoon to check on them before their move.
Saburo, one of Palau’s three Roman Catholic priests, said the Church has been paying US$500 a month for the apartment. It also has provided groceries and medical care.
“The goal of life for us is you help a stranger,” he said, sitting between the two Buddhist monks. “No questions asked.”
At their new home starting yesterday, the men will help out on the senator’s farm in return for housing. And Aye Aye Thant said she may be able to start teaching English informally.
Even though the group seems happy with their transition to Palau, Saburo admits he has concerns about the Uighurs’ expected arrival. How will they fit in after a life spent largely in dry western China? Where will they live? What will they do?
Saburo said he must practice what he preaches, regardless of religion.
“Whether the president has other motives or not is another matter,” he said. “For humanitarian purposes, I am a Christian, so I accept anybody who comes in peace. I’m sure a good number of my parishioners feel the same way.”
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
RSS