While 48 refugees in Thailand are threated with forced repatriation, transnational repression invent new ways to reach the Chinese regime’s goals.
February 19, 2025
48 Uyghurs refugees are still held in captivity in Bangkok, Thailand, since March 2014, threatened to be sent back to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), from which they escaped. They can meet their fate every moment now, as the pressure exerted by Beijing is increasing rapidly.
Three of them were—reportedly—detained when they were minors. They were arrested by Thai authorities 11 years ago under the accusation of illegal immigration when they crossed the border to escape the dreadful situation in their homeland, officially named the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR) by the Communist regime and called East Turkestan by its non-Han inhabitants. There, Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities, most of them Muslim, live under constant threat of cultural genocide, internment in concentration camps, and Sinicization.
The 48 refugees in Bangkok are part of an original larger group of about 350 people that ten years ago escaped from the XUAR in an effort to ultimately reach Türkiye, facing untold hardships and harassments all the way. Many of them could not at the end escape the dragnet of Beijing and had to return to China to face detention and even death. In an article published in November 2024, “The New York Times Magazine” narrated their odyssey.
After more than one year in detention, of that group of 350 refugees Bangkok deported 109 in 2015 to China against their will, prompting an international outcry. Another group of 173 Uyghurs, mostly women and children, were finally sent to Türkiye. Those who have not been repatriated yet or couldn’t find their way to safer places have been detained in life-threatening conditions in Thai detention centres and prisons. Five of them died since, including a newborn baby and a 3-year-old child. Five are now serving sentences of up to 12 years in retribution to their attempt to escape the Thai facilities. The remaining 43 are held at the Immigration Detention Centre of the Office of the Immigration Bureau in Bangkok in dire and unhygienic conditions. This is the dreadful picture of the situation photographed almost one year ago, in February 2024, by a group of Special Rapporteurs of the UN.
Today a new public appeal by a group of UN experts launched to prevent the deportation of those Uyghurs has once again drawn the attention on those people, highlighting “that 23 of the 48 individuals suffer from serious health conditions, including diabetes, kidney dysfunction, paralysis of the lower body, skin diseases, gastrointestinal illnesses, and heart and lung conditions.”
Since the government of Thailand is threatening to repatriate them, the 48 Uyghurs fear for their lives: imprisonment in the PRC is sure, but they also face the possibility of death. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from this tragic fate before it is too late,” they declared to the Associated Press in early January.
Their situation is quite serious. In the PRC, they cannot show the mandatory documents for opening a bank account or getting a driving licence and thus they decide to leave. Why are they not able to display a birth certificate or a household registration? Because many times they were born “illegally”.
The new rules imposed by the Chinese Communist regime, after the abandonment of the staggering “one-child policy,” are in fact somewhat vague and strict at the same time. The vagueness is a consequence of the 2021 decision by the government to renounce to establish by law the official number of allowed children that a Chinese family can have, after having previously established the allowed number of 2 in 2015 and 3 in the same 2021. Now, from that moment the country had been declared fully open to childbirth, yet in practice the limit on the family size still imposed by the regime has de facto been two children in urban areas and three in rural areas such as XUAR (or Tibet). The strictness‒after‒the‒vagueness of the regime on the matter enters here, building on these fickle figures: punishment for violations of crossing limits in family size are severe. In face of this, to save the lives of the newborn, and for their own security, families who have children born in excess of the established state quotas do not register younger babies with the government and thus their children become illegal citizens within their own country. When they have a chance, they flee.
But this is only one side of the problem—the official one. Through its new birth policy functioning by new quotas, the Chinese Communist government has not renounced yet to control families, as it did more spectacularly when the “one-child policy” was in place. It has only decided that now the price of the toll imposed on its people has changed, due to the fluctuation of the market of human beings required by the dialectic between scarcity and abundance, need and labor force. But the unofficial side of the problem tells that fierce birth control, well beneath the limit of three children per family, is still a reality on people that the regime persecutes, like the Uyghurs. Uyghur women are still being threatened with internment for refusing to abort pregnancies or forcibly fitted with intrauterine devices and coerced into sterilization surgery.
The ultimate aim of the regime is to increase the proportion of Han population in the Uyghur country. In a report published in “Central Asian Survey” magazine in September 2021 (anticipated online in August and announced by Reuters in July that year), German researcher Adrian Zenz, now Director in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Washington, DC, stated that, according to official data, state birth control policies in XUAR caused a 48.7 percent drop in the birth rate between 2017 and 2019. He also estimated that the proportion of Han population in southern XUAR is set to increase from about 8.4 percent in 2021 to about 25 percent in 2040. While this policy reveals sentiment that amount to state racism, it is a form of diluted ethnic cleansing, part and instrument of a cold cultural genocide that aims at the complete Sinicization of the region, i.e., a surreptitious way to eliminate the “Uyghur problem.”
Upon becoming the president of the PRC in 2013, Xi Jinping threatened to build a “great wall of iron” around the XUAR. Billions have been invested in surveillance and facial recognition techniques, and the Uyghur people were booked en masse as terrorists. It was then that thousands of Uyghur people started escaping the PRC each month. Most Uyghur people were trying to reach Türkiye, a Muslim country where there was already a large Uyghur diaspora.
To begin with, the Uyghurs were escaping to Türkiye through Pakistan, an Islamic country which borders XUAR. Under pressure from the PRC, however, since 2015 Pakistan ceased to be a safe haven for the escaping Uyghurs. The Pakistani police have been apprehending Uyghur people seeking shelter, collecting their biometric data, and deporting them back to an uncertain future in the PRC. Having signed in 2013 a Memorandum of Understanding toward what is called the “China Pakistan Economic Corridor” (a 3,000 km Chinese infrastructure network project currently under construction in Pakistan as part of Beijing’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” BRI), Islamabad now has little option but to kowtow to the Chinese government.
Though created as a Muslim nation, for the lure of Chinese money Pakistan no longer cares for the oppression that hits fellow Muslim Uyghurs in XUAR. After Pakistan signed an extradition treaty with the PRC in 2003, which was then also furtherly implemented through other agreements, Islamabad arrests Uyghurs under the instruction of Beijing.
The route through Pakistan having become dangerous, the Uyghur escapees now use an alternative route through Southeast Asia to Malaysia where they are helped to obtain forged travel documents to Türkiye.
The escaping Uyghur people then manage to reach Thailand from the PRC via Vietnam and Cambodia, crossing the borders illegally as they do not have travel documents. But the Thai government is also under pressure from Beijing to deport the Uyghurs who take shelter in Bangkok and get them arrested. Being the largest trading partner of Thailand and the largest foreign investor in a close relationship that is continually growing, the PRC arm-twists Thailand which has also lately finalized a deal with Beijing to buy—a few technical problems notwithstanding—a submarine. Only a lucky few among the Uyghurs can finally reach Türkiye.
Unfortunately, however, Türkiye too is now letting down the Uyghur people who have taken shelter there and is secretly deporting them to the PRC. Being a Muslim country itself, Türkiye is now similarly betraying fellow Muslim Uyghurs.
“Bilateral relations between Ankara and Beijing were elevated to the level of ‘strategic cooperation’ in 2010,” says the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Türkiye. Ankara joined BRI in 2015 and in July 2024 BYD Auto, the Chinese manifacturer of electric vehicles, announced to invest $1 billion to set up a plant in Türkiye to produce 150,000 vehicles a year. In the process, Türkiye recorded a huge trade deficit with China of $42 billion in 2023.
Beijing is now putting pressure on Turkey to sign an extradition treaty with China. If ratified by the Turkish Parliament, this treaty will have a devastating effect on the 50,000-strong Uyghur diaspora in Tūrkiye.
The case of those 48 Uyghurs threatened with deportation while they live inhuman condition in Thai prisons is highly revealing. It is in fact a clear exposition of the way by which the PRC operates abroad through other countries. While the famed NGO Freedom House has identified China as the most prolific perpetrator of the practice of transnational repression, it appears that among the most evident PRC’s international allies there are countries identifying themselves as Muslim or where the majority of the population is Muslim. For people in XUAR, mostly Muslim, this is a second stab in their back.
Source: bitterwinter.org
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