The deportation of the Uyghurs held in Thailand is imminent

Niluper said she lived in pain.

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

The family was detained in Thailand in 2014 after fleeing growing repression in China’s Xinjiang province. She and the children were allowed to leave Thailand after a year. But her husband remained imprisoned along with 47 other Uighurs.

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

She heard that 10 days ago, Thai authorities tried to convince the prisoners to sign a consent form to return to China. When they realized what was in the forms, they canceled their signatures.

The Thai government has denied any immediate plans to repatriate them. But human rights groups believe they could be deported at any time.

“I don’t know how to explain this to my children,” Niluper told the BBC in a video call from Turkey. She says her children often ask about their father. The youngest had never met him.

“I don’t know how to digest this. I am living in constant agony, constantly afraid that at any moment I will receive news that my husband has been deported from Thailand.”

of Last time Thailand expelled Uighur asylum seekers. In the year It was in July 2015. They put the 109 on a plane back to China without warning, prompting protests from the government and human rights groups.

The few photos released show several hooded and handcuffed guards being guarded by Chinese police. Little is known of what happened to them after their return. Other deported Uighurs have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms in secret trials.

Marco Rubio, the incoming secretary of state in the Trump administration, has vowed to pressure Thailand not to send the remaining Uyghurs back.

Their living conditions were described by one human rights activist as “hell on earth”.

All of them are being held at the Immigration Detention Center (IDC) in central Bangkok, where they have been charged with immigration violations in Thailand. Some are only for a short time, waiting to be deported; Others are very long.

Driving through the narrow, crowded streets known as Suan Phlu, it’s hard to believe that a collection of nondescript concrete buildings and an estimated 900 prisoners live there – Thai authorities won’t give an exact number.

IDC is known to be hot, crowded and unsanitary. Journalists are not allowed inside. Lawyers warn their clients against being sent there whenever possible.

There are 43 Uyghurs there, and five others are being held in a Bangkok jail for trying to escape. They are the last of around 350 who fled China in 2013 and 2014.

They are housed separately from other prisoners and are rarely allowed visits by outsiders or lawyers. You get few opportunities to exercise or see the light of day. They were not charged with any crime other than entering Thailand without a visa. Five Uyghurs died in detention.

“The situation there is terrible,” said Chalida Tajaroensuk, director of the People’s Empowerment Foundation, a non-governmental organization that works to help the Uyghurs.

“There is not enough food – mostly soup made from chicken bones in the kitchen. It is squeezed in there. The water you get for drinking and washing is dirty. Only basic medicines are provided and these are not enough. Someone gets sick, it takes a long time to make an appointment with the doctor, and with the dirty water, hot Due to the weather and poor ventilation, many yogis have rashes or other skin problems.

But they say the worst thing about the detainees is that they don’t know how long they will be detained in Thailand and fear of being returned to China.

Niluper says there have always been rumors of layoffs, but it was difficult to find out more. There were children with them so it was difficult to escape.

“It was very scary. We were always very scared,” Niluper recalls.

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

China’s oppression of Muslim Uyghurs has been well documented by the United Nations and human rights organizations. Up to one million Uyghurs are believed to be held in re-education camps in what human rights activists say is a government campaign to destroy Uyghur identity and culture. There are many allegations of torture and enforced disappearances, which China denies. He said he had been running “professional centers” focused on de-radicalizing Uighurs.

Niluper said she and her husband faced hostility from the Chinese state authorities because of their religion – her husband was a voracious reader of religious texts.

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

Niluper was detained in an IDC near the border and later allowed to travel to Turkey in June 2015 along with 170 other women and children in Bangkok, where she is usually granted asylum to Uighurs.

But her husband lives in Bangkok IDC. They broke up when they were arrested, and she has not had any contact since their brief meeting in July 2014.

She says she was one of 18 pregnant women and 25 children crammed into a room that was only four by eight meters. The food was “bad and not enough for all of us”.

“I finally gave birth in the bathroom in the middle of the night. The next day, the guard said my condition and my baby’s condition was not good, so they took us to the hospital.”

Niluper was estranged from her eldest son, who was two years old at the time and was living with his father – a situation she says left her feeling “stressful” and saddened when she saw a guard being beaten by a prisoner. When the guards brought him back to her, she said she didn’t recognize her.

“He was very scared, screaming and crying. He couldn’t understand what happened, he didn’t want to talk to anyone.”

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

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

Thailand has never explained why it does not allow the Uyghurs left in Turkey to join their families, but it is definitely under pressure from China.

Unlike the detainees in the IDC, the fate of the Uyghurs is not determined by the Immigration Department, but instead by Thailand’s National Security Council, a body run by the prime minister over which the military has significant influence.

While the influence of the United States, Thailand’s oldest military ally, is waning, the influence of China is increasing. The current Thai government wants to build closer ties with China to revive its faltering economy.

The UN refugee agency has been accused of not doing much to help the Uyghurs, but I have not been given any access, so I have not been able to do much, he said. Thailand does not recognize refugee status.

Accommodating China’s desire to repatriate the Uyghurs, however, is not without risk. Thailand is a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council, for which it is very active.

Deporting the 48 people who have been in prison for more than a decade will seriously damage the image the Thai government is trying to project.

In the year She also remembers Thailand, which happened a month after the last mass deportation in 2015.

August 17 of the same year A powerful bomb exploded at a temple in Bangkok. It was popular among Chinese tourists. Thai authorities have tried to downplay the relationship, but 20 people have been killed in what is widely believed to be retaliation by Uyghur militants.

Two Uyghurs were accused of the bombings, but their skills went unchallenged for nine years. One of them, the lawyers say, is definitely innocent. A veil of secrecy surrounds the trial; The authorities did not seem to want to allow anything to come out of the trial in connection with the bombing.

Even those Uyghurs who have managed to reach Turkey have to cut off all contact with their families in Xinjiang because of their uncertain situation there.

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

In the year He was in the same team as Niluper, who was caught at the Malaysian border in 2014.

He recalls how the Thai authorities deceived them about plans to deport some of them to China the following year. He said some people were told they would be moved to another facility because the one they were in was overcrowded.

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

“We were all happy and full of hope,” Hasan said. “They picked them one by one. They had no idea that they would return to China this time. We found out that they were deported from Turkey through the illegal phone we had.”

This filled the remaining inmates with despair, Hassan recalled, and two years later he and 19 others were temporarily transferred to another detention camp. Amazing escapeUsing a nail to make a hole in a collapsible wall.

Eleven were recaptured, but Hassan crossed the jungle border into Malaysia and from there to Turkey.

“I don’t know what kind of situation my parents are in, but it’s worse for those who are still imprisoned in Thailand,” he said.

They fear being returned to China and being imprisoned — and that it will mean even more severe punishment for their families, he explained.

“The mental pressure on them is unbearable.”