Month: January 2024

London — China’s arrest of a man allegedly working as a spy for Britain could be retaliation, analysts say.  

The case, which was announced on Monday by China’s Ministry of State Security, comes amid growing and vocal concern in Britain over Beijing and the security threat the communist country poses. It also follows last year’s arrest of a British parliamentary researcher on suspicion of spying for China. 

According to a post Monday on the ministry’s official WeChat social media account, Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency recruited a man surnamed Huang in 2015, who has since then passed 17 pieces of intelligence to and recruited personnel for the agency using spy equipment provided by the British government. 

Chinese authorities did not reveal Huang’s nationality or gender but said the alleged spy was from an unspecified “third country” and underwent recruitment and training in Britain and other locations. They also said the individual was working under the guise of being an overseas consultant.

The ministry did not provide evidence to support the claims nor disclose Huang’s current condition or whereabouts. But it did say that state security “promptly reported and arranged consular visits, protecting Huang’s lawful rights in accordance with the law.”

When contacted by VOA, Britain’s Foreign Office on Tuesday replied: “It is our longstanding policy to neither confirm nor deny claims relating to intelligence matters.”

Peter Humphrey, a former journalist who later worked for more than a decade as a fraud investigator for Western firms in China, said the case looks like “a complete joke.”

“Firstly, I think this is the continuation of Beijing’s attack on Western consultancies. Secondly, I think Beijing is trying to find a case to throw back at us because we have caught them doing things in the U.K., America, Belgium, etc.,” Humphrey told VOA in a telephone interview. “Beijing is desperately looking for a case to throw back at us.”

The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday said a Chinese American U.S. Navy service member was sentenced to 27 months in prison and ordered to pay a $5,500 fine after pleading guilty in October to taking bribes to give sensitive military information to a Chinese intelligence officer.

Britain has accused Chinese spies of targeting officials in key ministries, while China has unveiled multiple cases accusing foreign citizens, including British and Americans, of espionage.

In September, The Times newspaper reported that Britain’s intelligence agency arrested British parliamentary researcher Chris Cash on suspicion of spying for China. Cash has close ties to Minister of Parliament Alicia Kearns, the current chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Tom Tugendhat, the former defense secretary and security minister.

Another policy researcher working in the British Parliament, who asked to remain anonymous in an interview with VOA because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the issue, said the level of security at parliament has changed since Cash was arrested. 

“Within about a month, they changed their entire security protocols. And so now the application process is completely different,” the researcher said, adding that the golden age of British-China relations is dead. 

Benedict Rogers, co-founder and chair of the Britain-based rights group Hong Kong Watch, told VOA the accusations made by China not only worsen Sino-British relations but also significantly impact foreign citizens and companies operating in China. 

“Whether there is any truth in China’s allegations or whether it is a tit-for-tat retaliation in response to allegations of Chinese espionage activities in Westminster remains to be seen, but either way, this incident contributes to a more risky and dangerous environment for British citizens doing business in or traveling to China,” he said. 

David Moore, a policy researcher at the British Parliament, said Britain shouldn’t fear retaliation from the Chinese government.

“About time we need to crack down on Chinese espionage, whether it be trying to infiltrate our institutions or on our streets with Chinese police stations that have been operating across the Western world,” he told VOA referring to alleged policing by Chinese security forces in foreign countries including the U.S. 

In a speech in July at the British Embassy in Prague, the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service said China was their single most important strategic focus. “We now devote more resources to China than anywhere else, reflecting China’s increasing global significance.”

VOA reached out to the Chinese Embassy in London for comment, but by the time of publication, no response had been received. 

Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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LONDON — 2024 will pose a major test of democratic rule as an estimated 4 billion people in more than 50 nations — almost half the world’s population — are set to vote in national elections, with the outcomes likely to shape global politics for years or decades to come.

Bangladesh began 2024 with the first major election of the year as Sheikh Hasina won a fourth consecutive term as prime minister Sunday. Opposition parties boycotted the vote over complaints that it was neither free nor fair.

A crucial presidential election is due to take place on the self-governing island of Taiwan on January 13. China’s threat to retake the island by force looms over the vote, with political parties divided on how to approach Beijing.

“We are not only choosing Taiwan’s future leaders to decide on the country’s future but also deciding on the peace and stability of the Indo-Pacific region,” William Lai, the presidential candidate for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, told supporters at a campaign rally earlier this month. Lai is ahead in the polls.

In February, Indonesia is set to choose a new president to rule the nation of 277 million people, making it one of the world’s biggest votes held on a single day.

Pakistan will hold parliamentary elections in February; opposition leader and former Prime Minister Imran Khan remains jailed on charges of leaking state secrets, which he denies.

Russians will vote in presidential elections in March — although observers predict incumbent Vladimir Putin is all but certain to win as he is able to control the electoral process and state media.

“Putin is not going to have any genuine opponents,” said Ian Bond of the Center for European Reform. “He has control of all the administrative machinery required to make sure that a crushing vote in favor of him is delivered and we get another six years of Putin up to at least 2030.”

Largest democracy

India — the world’s biggest democracy — will hold parliamentary elections in April and May, with the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, ahead in the polls.

Veteran Indian political journalist Pushp Saraf believes the opposition will struggle to make headway.

“It all depends how united they are,” Saraf said. “Otherwise, if they stay disunited, as they appear to be many times, they have little chance of succeeding against BJP, which is organizationally very strong, and with Narendra Modi, who is riding high on the popularity wave, at least in the Hindi heartland.”

“These are very significant elections because there are clearly two opinions in the country at the moment. One is that BJP is polarizing society along the communal lines. And on the other hand, there is the opinion that BJP is focusing more on national security,” Saraf told The Associated Press.

On June 2, Mexico is due to hold its presidential election, which could herald a new milestone for the country, “because of the possibility that, for the first time, a woman will govern Mexico,” according to Mexican pollster Patricio Morelos. Mexico’s ruling party has selected Claudia Sheinbaum, a former mayor of Mexico City, as its candidate.

The European Union, representing more than half-a-billion people, is set to hold parliamentary elections in June. Polls suggest a resurgence in support for right-wing populist parties in many countries, including France, Germany and Italy.

“There is a real possibility, I think, that the far right will do well in European elections. Not to the point of running the European Parliament, but conceivably to the point where anyone who wants to run the European Parliament has to take account of what they’re saying and doing,” Anand Menon, professor of international politics at Kings College London, told VOA.

Britain is scheduled to hold elections before the end of the year, with polls suggesting opposition Labour Party leader Keir Starmer is on course to end a tumultuous 14 years of Conservative rule, with five different prime ministers.

“We had the Brexit wars that dominated everything, then we had COVID-19, now we’ve got the cost-of-living crisis. We’ve had government instability… the instability itself has become a political issue,” Menon said.

On November 5, the United States is due to hold a highly anticipated presidential election as Americans decide whether to give Democrat Joe Biden a second term as U.S. president or choose a Republican alternative, with Donald Trump seemingly his most likely opponent — although the challenger faces numerous legal hurdles in the run up to the vote.

Worldwide effects

The impact of many of these elections in 2024 will likely be felt around the world, said analyst Menon.

“Yes, all politics is local — but there are global trends. Immigration is going to figure a lot in many elections around the world. It will figure in the U.S. election, it will figure in the European elections, it will figure in the U.K. election,” Memon said.

“Insecurity will be a major factor. One of the things we’re living with in the West now is an increased sense of insecurity, both economic — but also in security terms, given the war that’s going on in Ukraine and given the doubts about what the Taiwanese election later this month might mean for Taiwan-Chinese relations.

“So, there are common factors, but those are refracted through the prism of the local and domestic in each country, so they play out in different ways,” Menon said.
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The coming year will be a major test of democratic rule as an estimated 4 billion people in more than 50 nations — almost half the world’s population — are set to vote in elections. As Henry Ridgwell reports, the outcomes will likely shape global politics for many years to come.
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MOSCOW — Russia has detained and brought drug-related charges against U.S. citizen Robert Woodland, who was apprehended by law enforcement earlier this month, a Moscow court said Tuesday.

Moscow is holding several American nationals on espionage and other charges, as tensions between Russia and the United States balloon over the conflict in Ukraine.

“On January 6, the Ostankinsky District Court of Moscow ordered Robert Romanov Woodland to be placed in detention for a period of two months, until March 5, 2024,” the court said on social media.

He is accused of the “illegal acquisition, storage, transportation, manufacture, processing” of drugs and faces up to 20 years in prison.

Russian authorities have arrested several U.S. citizens in recent years, with critics accusing Moscow of using detainees as bargaining chips to exchange Russians jailed in the United States.

Paul Whelan, an ex-US marine was sentenced in 2020 to 16 years in jail on spying charges that he denies.

In late March 2023, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich became the first Western journalist to be held on espionage charges in Russia since the Soviet era.

US-Russian dual citizen, journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, was arrested in October. She has been charged with failing to register as a “foreign agent” and spreading misinformation.

In December 2022, Russia released basketball superstar Brittney Griner in exchange for notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout — known as the “Merchant of Death” — who had been jailed in the United States.

 
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KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine has exported 15 million metric tons of cargo through its Black Sea shipping corridor, including 10 million tons of agricultural goods, Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said Tuesday.

Ukraine launched the corridor hugging the western Black Sea coast near Romania and Bulgaria in August shortly after Russia withdrew from a 2022 U.N.-brokered Black Sea grain export deal and threatened to treat all vessels as potential military targets.

“Over the five months of the corridor’s operation, 469 new vessels have called at our Ukrainian ports for loading,” Kubrakov said in a statement.

He said that currently, 39 ships were being loaded in the ports of Odesa, Chornomorsk and Pivdennyi while another 83 vessels had confirmed their readiness to call at the ports and export 2.4 million tons of various cargoes.

Ukraine, a major global grain grower and exporter, says its exportable grain surplus totals 50 million tons in the 2023/24 July-June season. It had exported 19.4 million tons of grain as of Jan. 8.

 
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KYIV, UKRAINE — Ukraine’s new draft legislation on military mobilization will not conscript women or introduce a lottery, a lawmaker said late Monday, a day before the parliament’s security committee was due to vote on what to do with the bill.

“I can definitely say that there will be no lottery for conscription, no mobilization of women,” Deputy Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence Yehor Chernev told Ukraine’s public broadcaster.

“There will be no unconstitutional positions.”

Tens of thousands of men volunteered to fight for Ukraine in the first months after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, but enthusiasm has waned 22 months later, prompting President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to consider a new draft law.

But proposed changes to rules on army mobilization that would enable Kyiv to call up more people and tighten sanctions against draft evasion have faced public criticism. The parliament’s human rights commissioner said some of the proposals were unconstitutional.

The European Business Association said Monday in a statement on its website that after reviewing the earlier proposed draft law it had concerns about several proposed provisions, including risks of corruption.

The Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence has been reviewing the proposed changes to the bill since Thursday. On Tuesday, it will either approve the proposed changes or send the bill back to the government for revisions.

“We have worked on the draft law on a clause-by-clause basis,” Roman Kostenko, secretary of the National Security Committee, told Ukraine’s Radio NV. He added the discussions involved hours of questioning top defense ministry and military officials.

If approved by the committee, the legislation will be debated and can change over two or three readings in parliament, whose approval is required. It then requires the signature of Zelenskyy to become law.
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OTTAWA — Canada, Britain, Sweden and Ukraine on Monday formally complained to the U.N. aviation council in their bid to hold Iran accountable for the downing of a Ukrainian passenger airliner in January 2020 that killed 176 people, they said on Monday.

Most of the dead were citizens from the four nations, which created a coordination group that seeks to hold Iran to account.

“Today we have jointly initiated dispute-settlement proceedings before the International Civil Aviation Organization against the Islamic Republic of Iran for using weapons against a civil aircraft in flight,” they said in a statement.

Last June the four nations said they would take their case to the International Court of Justice.

Iran says its Revolutionary Guards accidentally shot down the Boeing 737 jet and blamed a misaligned radar and an error by the air defense operator at a time when tensions were high between Tehran and Washington.
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Munich — Franz Beckenbauer, who won the World Cup both as player and coach and became one of Germany’s most beloved personalities with his easygoing charm, has died, news agency dpa reported Monday. He was 78.

“It is with deep sadness that we announce that my husband and our father, Franz Beckenbauer, passed away peacefully in his sleep yesterday, Sunday, surrounded by his family,” the family said in a statement to dpa, the German news agency. “We ask that we be allowed to grieve in peace and be spared any questions.”

The statement did not provide a cause of death. The former Bayern Munich great had struggled with health problems in recent years.

Beckenbauer was one of German soccer’s central figures. As a player, he reimagined the defender’s role in soccer and captained West Germany to the World Cup title in 1974 after it had lost to England in the 1966 final. He was the coach when West Germany won the tournament again in 1990, a symbolic moment for a country in the midst of reunification, months after the Berlin Wall fell.

Beckenbauer was also instrumental in bringing the highly successful 2006 World Cup to Germany, though his legacy was later tainted by charges that he only succeeded in winning the hosting rights with the help of bribery. He denied the allegations.

Beckenbauer and three other members of the committee were formally made criminal suspects that year by Swiss prosecutors who suspected fraud in the true purpose of multi-million euro (dollar) payments that connected the 2006 World Cup with FIFA. But he was eventually not indicted in 2019 for health reasons and the case ended without a judgment when the statute of limitations expired in 2020 amid delays to the court system caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The allegations damaged Beckenbauer’s standing in public perception for the first time. Until then, Beckenbauer had seemingly been unable to say or do anything wrong. Germans simply loved him.

The son of a post official from the working-class Munich district of Giesing, Beckenbauer became one of the greatest players to grace the game in a career that also included stints in the United States with the New York Cosmos in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Born on Sept. 11, 1945, months after Germany’s surrender in World War II, Beckenbauer studied to become an insurance salesman but he signed his first professional contract with Bayern when he was 18.

“You are not born to become a world star in Giesing. Football for me was a deliverance. Looking back, I can say: Everything went according to how I’d imagined my life. I had a perfect life,” Beckenbauer told the Sueddeutsche newspaper magazine in 2010.

Beckenbauer personalized the position of “libero,” the free-roaming nominal defender who often moved forward to threaten the opponent’s goal, a role now virtually disappeared from modern football and rarely seen before his days.

An elegant, cool player with vision, Beckenbauer defined as captain the Bayern Munich side that won three successive European Cup titles from 1974 to 1976.

In his first World Cup as player in 1966, West Germany lost the final to host England. Four years later, with his arm strapped to his body because of a shoulder injury, Germany lost a memorable semifinal to Italy.

Finally, in 1974 at home, Beckenbauer captained West Germany to the title.

Beckenbauer left Bayern for New York in 1977 to play for the Cosmos of the North American Soccer League. He missed the 1978 World Cup because the Germans decided not to invite players playing abroad. He returned to Germany in 1980, spent two seasons with Hamburger SV — and won another Bundesliga championship, his fifth — before returning for a final season with the Cosmos.

Although he had never coached before, Beckenbauer was hired to revive West Germany in 1984 after a flop at the European Championship.

West Germany made it to the final of the 1986 World Cup, losing to Diego Maradona’s Argentina in Mexico City. Although West Germany failed to win the 1988 Euros title at home, it went to the final of the 1990 World Cup and defeated Argentina in the final in Rome, another highlight in the year after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Later, at the news conference, he said he was “sorry for the rest of the world” because a united Germany would be unbeatable for years to come. But Germany had to wait 24 years before winning another World Cup title.

Beckenbauer retired from the West Germany job after coaching the team to the 1990 World Cup triumph. The final was the last tournament game played by a West Germany-only team.

He didn’t have much success at coaching Marseille but won the Bundesliga title with Bayern in 1994 and the UEFA Cup in 1996, both after taking over as coach late in the season. He later became Bayern’s president, until leaving most functions when he turned 65 in 2010.

Beckenbauer’s legal issues around the 2006 World Cup continued into his retirement, but he remained a much-loved figure in German soccer and society.
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LJUBLJANA, Slovenia — Slovenia’s rescuers successfully extracted five people Monday who have been trapped in a cave for more than two days because of high water levels, local media reported.

The rescue operation was possible Monday after water levels inside the cave receded, Walter Zakrajsek, the head of the Cave Rescue Service, told the STA news agency.

The operation was completed around midafternoon following an hours-long rescue operation by a six-member team of divers.

A family of three adults and their two guides got stuck in the Krizna Jama cave in southwestern Slovenia on Saturday because of heavy rainfall.

The eight-kilometer (five-mile) cave system with a string of emerald-colored underground lakes is accessible only in boats and rafts and with a guide.

The group entered it Saturday morning but got stranded as subterranean waters rose swiftly. The water levels dropped by Monday, raising hopes that they could be brought out.

A team of six divers headed earlier on Monday toward the trapped people, located in a dry area about two kilometers (more than a mile) inside the cave. The divers then brought the people out in a small boat.

The water temperature inside the cave was 6 C (42 F) with very low visibility.

Rescuers earlier said that all five people were doing well despite spending two nights inside the cave. A group of divers had brought in a heated tent, as well as food and clothes over the weekend.

Slovenia is known for its more than 14,000 caves. Krizna Jama is the fourth-biggest known underground ecosystem in the world.
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BEIJING — China says it has detained an individual accused of collecting state secrets on behalf of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency MI6.

The Ministry of State Security posted on social media Monday that Britain had been cooperating since 2015 with the person, who it said was a citizen of a third nation and had the surname Huang.

The ministry said Huang had received training in intelligence gathering, was provided with equipment and had collected numerous state secrets on repeated visits to China. No further information on the intelligence gathered was given, nor did the ministry say when he or she had been detained or where they were being held.

The definition of state secrets is not clearly defined under China’s opaque political and legal system, and many consulting and advisory firms have been investigated for obtaining data that would ordinarily be in the public record, particularly if they were shared with foreign entities.

The British government declined to comment, in keeping with its longstanding policy on intelligence matters.

China’s allegations follow a deterioration of relations between the sides sparked in part by British opposition to Chinese investments in the country, especially in the power and communications industries where the ruling Communist Party exercises strong influence.

In September, British police said two men were arrested earlier last year on suspicion of spying for Beijing. Police did not name the men, but British media reported that the younger man was a parliamentary researcher who worked with senior Conservative Party lawmakers focused on China. The U.K. condemned the interference in British parliamentary democracy, but China denied the spying allegations.

London has also been highly critical of China’s curtailment of political rights in Hong Kong, a former British colony where violent anti-government protests in 2019 were met with Beijing’s imposition of a sweeping national security law and electoral changes. Those have largely eliminated any political opposition to Beijing’s decrees and silenced freedom of speech in what had been one of Asia’s most dynamic societies and a major financial center.
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