BANGKOK —The irony of Bangkok’s Chinatown is that it’s hard to find a tea house that specializes in brewing fine tea. There’s virtually no competition on Yaowarat Road, with only one standalone shop house specializing in it – Double Dogs Tea Room.
Put it this way, there are more places to sit and feed on a controversial shark fin, or even good coffee, than places to sip fine oolong tea.
The unassuming place has an air of rustic beauty or wabi sabi, as it’s known in Japanese. Outfitted with some old tables revealing a raw wooden texture, Double Dogs is run by a 46-year-old Thai-Chinese more concerned about offering a refuge from the hustle and bustle of the neighborhood with a few cups of fine tea than maximizing profits.
“At least it’s self-sustaining,” said Jongrak Kittiworakarn, the heavily-built man who co-owns the place of its financial viability. Jongrak said capitalism places profits at the center at the expense of identity for those who focus on doing whatever it takes in the name of revenue.
Jongrak is knowledgeable about tea and this comes from over two decades of passion for fine Chinese and even Japanese tea. The place opened five years ago but only became a proper tea house after the first two years, when Double Dogs phased out cocktails. It is now a place for fine tea and quiet contemplation set to meditative background music.
Seventy percent of customers are not Thai, said the co-owner. They are mostly Westerners, and some Japanese, Singaporeans and Malaysians, Jongrak said. Thai customers are mostly not from Chinatown.
“I set up this shop for those who are seriously into tea drinking,” he stressed, pouring floral Tie Guan Yin tea from Fujian province from a tiny earthenware pot, designed to maximize the pleasure of drinking. “It’s a pastime and aesthetic, like being a wine connoisseur.”
Double Dogs’ range of tea starts at 150 baht per serving for one person and comes in a tiny Iching teapot with a stainless steel electric kettle of water. Uninitiated customers will be guided on how many seconds they should leave the hot water on the pot before pouring it to their tiny porcelain cup to sniff and savour.
Such methods of tea preparation and drinking, called called Gong Fu Cha, originated from southern China, particularly Guangdong and Hainan provinces. Chinese traditional cakes, Japanese rice cakes as well as Japanese green tea are also available. Selections range from Ripe Pu-erh tea from Yunnan province, which is an aged brick tea (earthy and strong, with an aroma reminiscent of earth after rain) to highly drinkable Shui Hsien from Fujian province, which is light in structure and floral in fragrance.
Jongrak, a bio-chemist by training who lectured at Mahidol University for 10 years before quitting, isn’t hoping to make fine tea the next big thing. He believes fine Chinese tea will remain a niche market in the country. His shop has just half a dozen tables and can accommodate no more than 20 tea drinkers at a time. The quality of tea also means the price cannot be cheap, and that will itself act as a barrier to some consumers.
“It’s like wine drinking. Do you drink for the pleasure of it, to get drunk, or because of the logos?,” he said. “If you drink for pleasure, it will always be a niche market as opposed to mass consumption that needs to be popularized.”
Commonly consumed tea, insisted Jongrak, is “low quality tea.”
“It’s almost impossible to discern any quality by drinking it,” he noted.
Double Dogs Tea Room is open 1pm to 9pm from Monday through Thursday and 1pm to 10pm on weekends.
BANGKOK — They know the stereotypes all too well. The Russian jet ski scammer on Phuket, the mafiya foot soldiers in Pattaya or vodka-marinated voin just about anywhere.
The cliches are even worse in Thai-language media, where coverage is rife with loutish behavior and presumptions of criminality. “With Russians, if it’s not fun-drunk, it’s angry-drunk,” a police officer recently offered of a Russian woman caught abusing vehicles with a piece of masonry.
But open up the outer matryoshka doll of cliches and find inside Russian expats, particularly among our comrades in the capital, who are online innovators behind startups that have become household names to Thais.
We sat down to learn the surprising stories of three Russian entrepreneurs behind these companies: a suave Chula graduate, a soulful family man and tech-savvy adventurer – who defy the stereotypes to bring the striving Russian soul to the heart of Bangkok through hard work.
Alexander Kerbo – WorkVenture (Formerly JobNisit.com)
Hazel-eyed and 27, Alexander Kerbo cuts a charming figure at a cozy cafe in Thonglor. Kerbo, Moscow-born, Phuket-schooled and Chula-educated, founded the popular job-matching website JobNisit, now known as WorkVenture.
“The perception is certainly skewed, isn’t it?” he said without accent of the representations of rowdy Russians in Thai news. “I get a lot of friendly jokes from my Thai friends. I have to try to explain to them that there is, in any nation, including the biggest country on Earth, there’s a staggering range of people. And if you look for bad news, you will find it.”
He lugs out two gilded frames of him receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from Princess Sirindhorn – double relics prized among Thais that few can attain.
“Going to Chula helped to understand Thai culture from the core,” he said.
It also taught him the needs of fresh graduates, particularly after an unsuccessful trip to a 2014 career fair.
“There was a clear information and presence gap. You can’t just find a job by going to an event with a pretty with a bunch of balloons shouting into a microphone,” Kerbo said.
Indeed, there is little meaningful career counseling at universities, and many students end up using their parents or upperclassmen for connections to find their first job.
Soon thereafter, with a couple of his classmates from Chulalongkorn University, Kerbo founded JobNisit, which uses qualification-based algorithms to match users with job offers.
“When applying for a job, I want bundits [graduates] and nisits [undergrads] to talk to the companies, understand company culture and make informed career decisions,” Kerbo said.
Twelve years ago, Muscovite businessman Denis Grigorevich Nemtsev decided to see the world – and ended up working in real estate in Thailand.
Like Kerbo, Nemtsev found an underserved market.
“I saw that there was no one place, one website that would list all properties. There was also no way to see if the price of the property was a good or bad one, or see the history of the price listings,” he said. So in 2013, he launched Hipflat.com.
Hipflat claims to list all buyable and rentable properties in Thailand, and shows its sales history and pricing relative to the area. The inspiration, Nemtsev said, came from the falling value of a condo he purchased. “If I had known, I wouldn’t have bought it.”
The pink-cheeked gentle giant married Mayuree Nemtsev, 33, in 2009. They partnered together to make Hipflat, with Mayuree doing all of the translation.
“I thought that I would not date or even marry a foreigner, because I wanted someone who would understand my culture and give the same importance to family that I do,” she said. “But Denis turned out to understand Thai culture. Everything turned out amazingly perfect, and I am so lucky to have married him.”
Nemtsev seems to love living in Thailand, even if there have been some misunderstandings from others. “I have been asked if I was in the mafia,” said the soft-spoken programmer, looking downward. “I just say ‘no.’”
Learning Thai work culture, for him, has been a warm surprise. “Here, the boss is a father. Back in Russia, it’s purely business,” he said with a detectable blush.
Maxim Titov, a 40-year-old brunette, found another e-commerce gap to fill: bus ticketing. After settling in Bangkok in 2011, Titov adjusted foreign business models to Thailand in order to build Tickets.co.th, a service where users can buy bus tickets online.
“It’s like a time machine has been invented. Generally, in Southeast Asia, business models are lagging behind those of overseas, so you can apply businesses that are already in use overseas here,” Titov said of how he took models from India to build his service owing to the countries’ similar GDP and population behavior.
“Traveling by bus in Southeast Asia won’t change. You can’t fly to your amphur. What will change is how you buy tickets: online instead of at the ticket station,” he said.
As a Russian, he says, Thailand is a sort of paradise, with tropical weather in contrast to his cold motherland. Of the numerous countrymen who come here to vacation, there are bound to be some boisterous ones who should not represent the whole nation.
Like Kerbo and Nemtsev, Titov said he plans to continue developing his business here in Bangkok: “Something keeps me here.”
Vietnamese blogger Dinh Cong Le sits next to a laptop with his Facebook profile, displaying a cover image advocating for the dissolution of Article 88, Nov. 12 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
HO CHI MINH CITY — It was mid-morning the day 20 police officers from the Vietnam People’s Public Security barged into a downtown Saigon kindergarten and laid their gazes on Pham Chi Dung. Before the startled looks of parents, teachers and children, he was taken away. Among those staring was his three-year-old son, who he had just dropped off moments earlier.
This was one of three times in 2015 during which Dung, 50, was arbitrarily arrested by police in the streets of Ho Chi Minh City and taken into custody, before being subjected to hours of interrogation and psychological coercion. Hopes lay in him confessing or producing self-incriminating evidence to having committed a crime which in most countries is a human right.
“They made me look like a terrorist,” he said.
Dung is one of Vietnam’s active dissident bloggers who dares to challenge the state’s control on media and defy its draconian laws on criticizing the government. He and another activist blogger sat for interviews earlier this month following a string of recent crackdowns on Vietnamese bloggers to explain their struggles, compare Vietnam’s censorship to that of Thailand and explain the international community’s role in their quest for a free press.
A former 30-year card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Vietnam, Dung, like others, fell out of favor and was imprisoned for being outspoken. It didn’t silence him. Upon his release, he continued exposing many government irregularities. He helped found and is also president of the Independent Journalist Association of Vietnam, which aims to bring to light cases of human rights abuses committed by the Communist Party.
To date, his agency has reported on notable intraparty scandals involving nepotism, land encroachment and corruption. Though its website, the Vietnam Times, is inaccessible in Vietnam without help of a proxy server, it most recently condemned the detention of two iconic activist blogger dissidents: Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh aka “Me Nam,” and Ho Van Hai. They were arrested in October and charged Nov. 2 with propagandizing against the state under Article 88 of the Penal Code. They face up to 20 years in prison.
Two months ago, appeals began in the cases of Nguyen Huu Vinh aka “Ba Sam” and his colleague Nguyen Thi Minh Thuy, who were sentenced in March to five years in prison for “abusing democratic freedoms” and plotting to overthrow the government.
“It’s normal,” Dung said, saying there tended to be many arrests toward the end of the year. “The police want to finish their year having ‘achieved’ something, so they target arrests.”
Dung feels there is a wind of change blowing through the country, something which has led authorities to enact tougher measures on critics for fear of revolt. Cracking down on dissidents, he said, merely instigates more efforts to promote free speech.
“It encourages further acts of expression,” Dung said. “The demand for democracy is very high, the economy is suffering, the corruption is terrible and the people have lived under dictatorship for a long time.”
“The top 5 percent controls the economy and people hate the government, but they are silent,” he added. “They cannot express themselves for fear of persecution.”
The persecution he speaks of is one Dung contends with on a daily basis. While Dung and his compatriots are freedom fighters to their supporters, the government sees them as threats to the nation’s stability through their alternative views on governance, civil society and freedom.
“To this date there are three policemen who sit by the coffee shop next to my house monitoring my moves and following me around,” Dung said, sounding almost accepting of life under constant surveillance.
“They want to reduce the influence of the [association] because they don’t want people to be informed about what really happens in the country,” Dung said.
A Growing Movement
Among those standing with Dung to promote press freedom is Dinh Cong Le.
Vietnamese blogger Pham Chi Dung pictured here in a coffee shop Nov. 11 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Le, 48, is a former lawyer who first raised questions about human rights abuses in 2003. He was arrested, and in 2009 had his license to practice law revoked after he and four activists were accused of conducting propaganda against the state. One of them is still in jail serving a 16-year term.
“I was given a five-year sentence, but thanks to pressure from the international community I was released a year early. Instead I was put under house arrest for another three years,” Le said.
Le is also a leading blogger advocating for press freedom. Followed widely by internet users in and out of Vietnam, his critical Facebook posts gather thousands of likes within hours.
Such fame comes at a price. Le’s problems are similar to those endured by Dung.
“We face a lot of difficulties. I am followed around. When I travel to other regions such as the north of Saigon, I am followed,” Le said. “Today I am here, but tomorrow I could be in jail again.”
Early last month he was on his way to Vung Tau, a port town at the mouth of the delta, for a conference.
“Suddenly more than 100 policemen came to arrest our group of 30 people,” he said.
Le and his party were repeatedly beaten, taken in and kept in police custody for 10 hours. After being subjected to a grueling interrogation, he was the last one to be released. It was after midnight.
“They released us in the middle of a dark highway at 1am. I didn’t know how to get back to Vung Tau because they took my phone and my luggage. I had to walk for half an hour on the dark freeway until I found a taxi,” he said.
Article 88 vs. Article 112
A woman cycles past one of the many banners depicting the Vietnamese flag, Nov. 12 in the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Asked to put censorship in Thailand in the context of Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, Dung said Article 88 is less abstract than Thailand’s Article 112, which punishes insults to the royal family by up to 15 years in prison per offense.
Where Thailand’s lese majeste law has grown to be more broadly applied, Vietnam’s encompasses all of the state.
“It is more detailed than Article 112, but this only applies to the monarchy, while Article 88 applies to all of the government. The police can relate anything to criticism against the government,” he said.
Le found the problem to be less severe in Thailand because venerating the King is a deep and ingrained tradition.
“We understand if there is a law to protect the King,” he said. “It’s understandable because there is a long history of respecting him. In Vietnam we cannot compare.”
“Thailand at least has a history of multi-party democracy. Here they don’t want us to criticize the Communist Party. In Vietnam, criticizing the Communist Party is like criticizing the King in Thailand,” Le said, adding that the fundamental difference was that while one controls the entire political system, the other is apolitical.
International Support
Le and his colleagues are limited to making their case from home, as the government finds them enough of a threat to prevent them from traveling.
“Last August I was invited to a conference on civil society in East Timor. I was about to board the plane when they told me I wasn’t allowed to leave,” Le said.
Backing their efforts are significant international actors such as the European Union and the United States, whose ambassador to Vietnam Ted Osius called for the release of Me Nam in October. U.S. Political Chief Charles Sellers praised the Independent Journalist Association’s work in July during U.S. Independence Day celebrations:
“I want to thank all of you for your dedication to work peacefully and patriotically to ensure Vietnam’s citizens enjoy the benefits of independent journalism,” Sellers said.
Dung, who spoke proudly of this moment, went on to add that the United States consulate hoped they would lead the way to Vietnamese press freedom.
Going forward, he is concerned about the regression on conditions Vietnam agreed to under President Barack Obama to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership after President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to kill the deal.
Le believes progress has been made to the point the government is being pressured to listen to opinions other than their own. Citing the suppressed anger of the Vietnamese for the impunity shown in various scandals such as one of the nation’s worst cases of toxic waste dumping, he sees a weak political system on the brink of collapse.
“The government is scared that we will continue to raise our voices. On Oct. 22 there were protests against Formosa Plastics Group, which the government was unable to contain,” Le said. “They don’t want this to escalate even further. We are liabilities to them because we keep raising the issue. They don’t want the phenomenon to spread to other regions or cities,” Le said.
Fearless about being arrested again for his blogging, Le claims not to be scared, having already served a jail term and having nothing to lose.
“Nobody wants to be arrested. But if I am arrested again for raising my ideas, it will prove once again that the government does not want to change,” he said. “I fear for people who have never been to jail because they are scared. They always look around when they try to say things.”
A large portrait of Ho Chi Minh hangs in display Nov. 11 in front of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union headquarters in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Glimmers of Hope
Despite the current climate, both bloggers see reasons to be hopeful. Dung thinks his organization will eventually be recognized by the government and allowed to operate openly.
“Perhaps by 2017,” Dung said with hopeful eyes. “We want to be a hub for open expression, as a precondition of civil society for Vietnam’s future.”
Le, exultant about the importance of his free press movement, remarked upon the expanding blogging community, comparing what he is doing to the germination of a seed – which he hopes will bloom one day.
“The day our ideas flourish, Vietnamese society will change,” he said. “For bloggers and activists like myself, our futures are uncertain. We never know when we may be arrested. But our ideas are certain. One day, they will become true.”
A freighter traveling downstream on the Saigon river in 2007, in Vietnam. Photo: Tore Saetre / Wikimedia Commons
JAKARTA — A collision between a Vietnamese freighter and an Indonesian sailboat has left 15 people missing off Indonesia’s East Java province.
Head of the local Disaster Mitigation Agency Joko Loediyono says the collision involved the cargo ship MV Thaison 4 and KM Mulya Sejati, which was carrying 27 people. It happened early Saturday off Tuban district.
The freighter was reportedly heading to Tanjung Perak seaport in East Java’s capital of Surabaya.
Loediyono says a search has been underway involving disaster response agencies and the navy, which deployed two warships.
Philippines' President Rodrigo Duterte attends a meeting between business leaders and heads of states of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, APEC in 2016 during their annual forum in Lima, Peru. Photo: Martin Mejia / Associated Press
LIMA, Peru — Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has lambasted the United States and other Western nations as bullies and hypocrites, while he praised Russia as a “great country” in his first meeting with his acknowledged idol, Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Talking on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum in Peru, Duterte also gave Putin a scathing review of America’s military endeavors in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Korean peninsula. He said the United States has given unequal treatment of the Philippines as a treaty ally and added that his country wants to engage more with Europe.
Duterte told Putin that he previously has been identified with the Western world. But, he added: “Of late, I see a lot of these Western nations bullying small nations. And not only that, they are into so much hypocrisy.”
An obviously elated Putin congratulated Duterte. He called the May 9 election that Duterte won “indeed a very bright day,” noting it came on the Russian holiday marking victory over Nazi Germany.
Putin said the Philippine leader has done much quickly in “developing the all-round partnership between our countries and with respect to promoting greater trust and confidence between us.”
A train passes by a road intersection in 2013 in Lucknow, India, where at least 45 people were killed Sunday morning following a derailment. Photo: BOMBMAN / Flickr
LUCKNOW, India — Fourteen coaches of a passenger train rolled off the track early Sunday, killing at least 45 people and injuring more than 120 in northern India, officials said.
Volunteers and railway police pulled out the bodies from the mangled coaches and were working to rescue passengers who were trapped in other cars that fell on the side, said Daljeet Chaudhary, a director general of police, at the site of the accident.
The derailment occurred around 3:10 a.m. near Purwa, a village near the industrial city of Kanpur, when the 14 coaches jumped the track. Some coaches crumpled as they crashed into others, trapping hundreds of people inside.
Medical teams were providing first aid near the site while the more seriously injured have been moved to hospitals in Kanpur, Chaudhary said.
It was not immediately clear was caused the coaches to derail.
The toll was likely to go up as two air-conditioned coaches were severely damaged and people were still trapped inside, said Rajesh Modak of the Railway Protection Force.
Kanpur is a major railway junction and hundreds of trains pass through it every day. Several trains using the line have been diverted to other routes, Anil Saxena, spokesman for Indian Railways, said in New Delhi.
Train accidents are common in India, with most accidents occurring due to human error or aging equipment. Trains are the popular mode of transport for millions of Indians and around 23 million passengers use India’s vast railway network every day.
Dhammachayo gives sermon to his disciples on Oct. 30, 2012. Image: DMC_USA / YouTube
BANGKOK — A court on Friday issued an arrest warrant on charge of land encroachment against the leader of an influential Buddhist sect, who’s also accused of embezzling millions of baht.
Abbot Dhammachayo violated forest laws by building one of his religious facilities without a proper permit in Korat’s Khao Yai National Park, said deputy police commissioner Srivara Ransibrahmanakul. The offense is punishable by up to five years in jail.
However, Gen. Srivara declined to say when police will mount another attempt to apprehend the monk, who’s thought to be residing at the headquarters of his Dhammakaya sect, protected by thousands of his acolytes. The police general told reporters on Friday that officers do not wish to ignite any confrontation.
“This is a sensitive matter, because the officers do not want to take any action that may cause more problem to the country,” Srivara said. “Furthermore, the charge is offense about land encroachment. It’s not an offense against life or one’s body that requires immediate arrest.”
The leadership of Dhammakaya has not made any public comment about the latest charge laid against Dhammachayo, 72.
Police and the abbot’s religious movement have been entangled in a standoff since June, when the Department of Special Investigation, or DSI, vowed to prosecute Dhammachayo for the checks he received as donations from Supachai Srisupa-suksorn, who is now jailed for embezzling 11 billion baht from the credit union he once headed.
For receiving the 1.2 billion baht checks, DSI charged Dhammachayo with being party to embezzlement and money laundering, but the abbot’s aides insist he was not aware the donations were tainted. The temple also said Dhammachayo could not surrender to police because he was ill.
When officers attempted on June 16 to search the headquarters of the Dhammakaya sect in Pathum Thani province and look for Dhammachayo, his supporters blocked the way. Police eventually called off the effort, citing fear of bloodshed.
Myanmar police officers sit in a truck in October as they provide security in Maungdaw, Rakhine State, Myanmar, a border town with Bangladesh. Photo: Thein Zaw / Associated Press
GAUHATI, India — Rebels ambushed two Indian army vehicles early Saturday and killed at least three soldiers and critically wounded four others in the country’s remote northeast, police said.
The attack took place in a forest area near Pengeri, a town 600 kilometers (400 miles) east of Gauhati, the Assam state capital, said police officer Mukesh Aggarwal.
The rebels used homemade bombs to stop an army jeep and a truck and attacked the soldiers with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 assault rifles, he said. A helicopter evacuated the four wounded soldiers to a nearby army hospital.
The area is home to a big army deployment and troops began hunting for the attackers with the help of local police and paramilitary forces.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, but police suspect the rebels of the United Liberation Front of Assam (Independent) .
They have been fighting for decades for independence from India. The group, led by Paresh Baruah, operates from hideouts along India’s border with Myanmar and China.
This was the second attack by insurgents this week in the region. On Wednesday, they looted a cash delivery van belonging to a tea company after killing one person and wounding two others in the vehicle.
Dozens of rebel groups have been fighting the government and sometimes each other for years in seven states in northeast India. They demand greater regional autonomy or independent homelands for the indigenous groups they represent.
BANGKOK — A spokesman of the ruling junta said Friday that a drill sergeant seen caning his recruit in a now-viral video will face severe punishment.
In response to the outrage on social media against yet another instance of brutality in the armed forces, Col. Winthai Suvaree said the punishment was not sanctioned by the army, and promised a swift investigation.
“It was a clear violation of regulations and orders from commanding officers,” the spokesman said at Friday’s news conference. “Once the investigation is concluded, the said member of the armed force will definitely be handed a severe punishment.”
In the video, which surfaced on social media on Thursday, a soldier repeatedly cans a recruit while he cows on the ground. No context was given as to why the soldier was punished in such manner. Winthai said the incident took place during the training of new soldiers at a cavalry base in Saraburi province.
Many comments on social media in response to the video say the beating highlights a lack of respect for low-ranking soldiers in the army, especially those who are forced into uniforms by the annual mandatory draft.
“He shouldn’t be called soldier,” user Prae Naratip wrote in a thread, referring to the drill sergeant. “What a waste that his salary comes from taxpayers. It does not benefit the country at all. Well, this is what it’s like to be a draftee, a life that no one wants to be.”
In the aftermath of the video, the commander of the Royal Thai Army had subsequently instructed all of its units not to repeat the action seen in the video, Winthai said.
Protesters occupy a street during a rally Saturday in downtown Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Photo: Vincent Thian / Associated Press
KUALA LUMPUR — Thousands of yellow-shirt protesters rallied Saturday in downtown Kuala Lumpur seeking Prime Minister Najib Razak’s resignation over a financial scandal, undeterred by a police ban and the arrest of 15 activists.
Police barricaded key roads in downtown Kuala Lumpur and put water-cannon trucks on standby, but it did not stop protesters. Some were chanting “Save Democracy” and “Bersih, Bersih”— the name of the electoral reform group that organized the rally. The name means “clean” in the Malay language.
The protesters gathered around the Independent Square, the main venue that was locked down by police. A smaller group of red-shirt pro-government supporters held a counter-rally.
Najib, who is attending an Asia-Pacific summit in Lima, Peru, has kept an iron grip since graft allegations emerged two years ago involving the indebted 1MDB state fund that he founded. 1MDB is at the center of investigations in the U.S. and several other countries.
Najib, who has denied any wrongdoing, has said he won’t be cowed by the rallies.
In a statement on his blog, Najib called Bersih “deceitful” and said the group has become a tool for opposition parties to unseat a democratically elected government.
“We want to see Malaysia more developed and not robbed of billions of ringgit,” said Wan Aisyah Wan Ariffin, an opposition supporter.
Police said in a statement they raided the Bersih office on Friday and detained its chairwoman Maria Chin for investigation into “activities detrimental to parliamentary democracy.”
Another Bersih official, Mandeep Singh, and 12 others including several politicians were also detained, mostly in connection with the rally and to prevent rioting, the police said.
Those detained include ruling party politician Jamal Mohamad Yunos, whose supporters trooped to downtown Kuala Lumpur to counter the Bersih rally. Police have banned both events by Bersih’s yellow-shirt supporters and Jamal’s red-shirt group.
Bersih said on Twitter that another of its official, Hishamuddin Rais, was nabbed Saturday after giving a speech to supporters at a commuter station.
A rally that Bersih organized in August 2015 also demanding Najib’s resignation brought together 50,000 people, according to police estimates. Bersih said the number was much higher.
Human rights group Amnesty International slammed the crackdown and called for the immediate release of the Bersih activists, describing them as prisoners of conscience.
“These arrests are the latest in a series of crude and heavy-handed attempts to intimidate Malaysian civil society activists and other human rights defenders,” Amnesty said in a statement.
The investigations into 1MDB fund are centered on allegations of a global embezzlement and money-laundering scheme. Najib started the fund shortly after taking office in 2009 to promote economic development projects, but the fund accumulated billions in debt over the years.
The U.S. Justice Department said that at least $3.5 billion had been stolen from 1MDB by people close to Najib and initiated action in July to seize $1.3 billion it said was taken from the fund to buy assets in the U.S.
The U.S. government complaints also said that more than $700 million had landed in the accounts of “Malaysian Official 1.” They did not name the official, but appear to be referring to Najib.
