In Thailand, the deportation of Uyghurs is threatened

Niluper says she lived in misery.

A Uyghur refugee, she has spent the past decade hoping her husband would join her and their three sons in Turkey, where they now live.

The family was detained in Thailand in 2014 after fleeing an intensifying crackdown in their hometown in China’s Xinjiang province. A year later, she and the children were allowed to leave Thailand. But her husband remained imprisoned along with 47 other Uighur men.

Nilooper – not her real name – now fears she and her children will never see him again.

Ten days ago, she learned that Thai officials were trying to get the detainees to sign consent forms to be sent to China. When they realized what was on the forms, they refused to sign them.

The Thai government denies any immediate plans to send them back. But human rights groups believe they could be deported at any time.

“I don’t know how to explain this to my sons,” Niluper told the BBC during a video call from Turkey. Sons, she says, always ask about their father. The youngest has never met him.

“I don’t know how to digest it. I live in constant pain, constant fear that at any moment I may receive word from Thailand that my husband has been deported.”

The The last time Thailand deported Uyghur asylum seekers it was in July 2015. Without warning, he put 109 of them on a plane back to China, sparking a storm of protest from governments and human rights groups.

In several published photos, they are seen hooded and handcuffed, guarded by a large number of Chinese police. Little is known about what happened to them after their return. Other deported Uighurs received long prison terms in secret courts.

Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has vowed to pressure Thailand not to deport the remaining Uyghurs.

One of the human rights defenders called their living conditions “hell on earth.”

All are being held at the Immigration Detention Center (IDC) in central Bangkok, where most of those charged with immigration violations in Thailand are held. Some are there for a short time while awaiting deportation; others are there much longer.

Driving down the narrow, congested road known as Suan Phlu, it’s easy to miss the nondescript cluster of cement buildings, and it’s hard to believe they’re estimated to house around 900 prisoners – Thai authorities don’t give exact numbers.

IDC is notoriously hot, crowded and unsanitary. Journalists are not allowed inside. Lawyers usually warn their clients to avoid going there if possible.

There are 43 Uyghurs there, plus another five are being held in a Bangkok prison for trying to escape. They are the last of about 350 people who fled China in 2013 and 2014.

They are held in isolation from other inmates and are rarely allowed visits by outsiders or lawyers. They have little opportunity to exercise or even see daylight. They are not charged with any crime other than entering Thailand without a visa. Five Uighurs died in prison.

“The conditions there are terrible,” said Chalida Tajaroensuk, director of the Human Empowerment Foundation, an NGO that tries to help the Uyghurs.

“There’s not enough food — it’s mostly cucumber soup and chicken bones. Stuffed. Water for drinking and washing is dirty. Medicines are given only elementary ones, and there are not enough of them. someone gets sick, it takes a long time to make an appointment with a doctor, and because of dirty water, hot weather and poor ventilation, many Uighurs get rashes or other skin problems.”

But the worst part of their detention, survivors say, is not knowing how long they will be imprisoned in Thailand and the constant fear of being sent back to China.

Neeluper says there were always rumors of deportation, but it was difficult to find out more. It was difficult to escape because there were children with them.

“It was terrible. We were so afraid all the time,” Niluper recalls.

“If we thought about being sent back to China, we would rather die in Thailand.”

China’s crackdown on Muslim Uighurs has been well documented by the UN and human rights groups. As many as one million Uyghurs are believed to have been imprisoned in re-education camps in what rights activists say is a government campaign to eradicate Uyghur identity and culture. There are many allegations of torture and enforced disappearances, which China denies. It says he runs “vocational and technical centers” aimed at deradicalizing Uyghurs.

Niluper says she and her husband faced hostility from Chinese government officials because of their religiosity — her husband was an avid reader of religious texts.

The couple decided to run away when people they knew were arrested or disappeared. The family was among a group of 220 Uyghurs who were apprehended by Thai police while trying to cross the border into Malaysia in March 2014.

Nilooper was held at an IDC near the border and then in Bangkok until she was allowed to travel to Turkey, which usually offers asylum to Uyghurs, in June 2015, along with 170 other women and children.

But her husband remains at the Bangkok IDC. They were separated when they were detained and she has had no contact with him since the brief meeting they were allowed in July 2014.

She says she was one of 18 pregnant women and 25 children crammed into a room just four by eight meters. The food was “poor, and there was never enough for all of us.”

“I gave birth last, at midnight in the toilet. The next day, the security guard saw that I and the child were not feeling well, and we were taken to the hospital.’

Niluper was also separated from her eldest son, who was just two at the time, and was with his father – which she said traumatized him after he endured “horrendous conditions” and witnessed being beaten by a guard the prisoner. When the guards brought him back to her, she says, he didn’t recognize her.

“He was so scared, screaming and crying. He could not understand what had happened. He didn’t want to talk to anyone.”

It took a long time before he accepted his mother, she says, and after that he never left her side, even when they arrived in Turkey.

“It took him a very, very long time to realize that he was finally in a safe place.”

Thailand has never explained why it will not allow the remaining Uyghurs to join their families in Turkey, but it is almost certainly due to pressure from China.

Unlike other detainees at the IDC, the fate of the Uyghurs is handled not by the Immigration Department, but by Thailand’s National Security Council, a body chaired by the prime minister in which the military wields considerable influence.

As the influence of the US, Thailand’s oldest military ally, is waning, that of China is steadily growing. The current Thai government is looking to forge even closer ties with China to help revive its faltering economy.

The United Nations refugee agency is accused of doing little to help the Uyghurs, but says it has no access to them, so it can’t do much. Thailand does not recognize refugee status.

However, satisfying China’s desire to return the Uyghurs is not without risk. Thailand has just won a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, which it has been actively lobbying for.

The deportation of the 48 men, who have already spent more than a decade in prison, will severely damage the image the Thai government is trying to project.

Thailand will also remember what happened just a month after the last mass deportation in 2015.

August 17 of the same year a powerful explosion exploded in a shrine in Bangkok which was popular with Chinese tourists. Twenty people were killed in what many believed was revenge by Uyghur militants, although Thai authorities tried to play down the link.

Two Uyghur men were charged with the bombing, but their trial has dragged on for nine years with no end in sight. One of them, his lawyers say, is almost certainly innocent. The court is shrouded in mystery; the authorities don’t seem to want anything to come out of the hearings linking the bomb to the deportation.

Even those Uyghurs who manage to reach Turkey must then deal with their uncertain status there and the loss of all contact with their families in Xinjiang.

“I haven’t heard my mother’s voice for 10 years,” says Hassan Imam, a Uyghur refugee who now works as a truck driver in Turkey.

He was in the same group as Nilooper, who was captured at the Malaysian border in 2014.

He remembers how the following year the Thai authorities deceived them about a plan to deport some of them to China. He says they were told some of the men would be moved to another facility because where they were was too crowded.

This came after some women and children were sent to Turkey and, unusually, the men in the camp were also allowed to speak to their wives and children in Turkey on the phone.

“We were all happy and full of hope,” Hassan says. “They picked them off, one by one. At that moment, they had no idea that they would be sent back to China. It was only later, through the illegal phone we had, that we found out from Turkey that they had been deported.”

This filled the other prisoners with despair, Hassan recalls, and two years later, when he was temporarily transferred to another camp, he and 19 others committed a great escapeusing a nail to make a hole in a ruined wall.

Eleven were recaptured, but Hassan managed to cross the wooded border into Malaysia and from there into Turkey.

“I don’t know the condition of my parents, but it’s even worse for those who are still in detention in Thailand,” he says.

They fear that they will be sent back and imprisoned in China – and they also fear that this will mean harsher punishment for their families, he explains.

“The mental strain is unbearable for them.”