Niluper
Niluper and her three children in Türkiye
Niluper says she is living in agony.
A Uyghur refugee, she spent the last decade hoping her husband would join her and their three sons in Türkiye, where they now live.
The family was arrested in Thailand in 2014 after fleeing growing repression in their hometown in China’s Xinjiang province. She and the children were allowed to leave Thailand a year later. But her husband remained in detention, along with 47 other Uyghur men.
Niluper – not his real name – now fears that she and her children will never see him again.
Ten days ago, she learned that Thai authorities had tried to persuade detainees to sign forms consenting to being sent back to China. When they realized the contents of the forms, they refused to sign them.
The Thai government has denied that it intends to return them immediately. But human rights groups say they could be deported at any time.
“I don’t know how to explain this to my sons,” Niluper told the BBC in a video call from Turkey. Her sons, she said, keep asking questions about their father. The youngest has never met him.
“I don’t know how to digest this. I live in constant pain, in constant fear of learning at any moment from Thailand that my husband has been deported.”
“Hell on Earth”
The last time Thailand deported Uighur asylum seekers was in July 2015. Without warning, it put 109 of them on a plane back to China, provoking a storm of protests from governments and human rights groups.
The few photos published show them hooded and handcuffed, guarded by numerous Chinese police officers. Little is known about what happened to them after their return. Other deported Uyghurs have been sentenced to long prison terms in secret trials.
The nominee for secretary of state in the new Trump administration, Marco Rubio, has promised to pressure Thailand not to send back the remaining Uyghurs.
Their living conditions were described by a human rights defender as “hell on earth”.
They are all being held at the Immigrant Detention Center (IDC) in central Bangkok, which houses most of those accused of violating Thailand’s immigration rules. Some stay there only briefly, waiting to be deported; others have been there much longer.
Driving along the narrow, congested road known as Suan Phlu, it’s easy not to notice the nondescript collection of cement buildings, and hard to believe that they house around 900 detainees – Thai authorities give no figures accurate.
The IDC is known for being hot, crowded and unsanitary. Journalists are not allowed to enter. Lawyers generally warn their clients to avoid being sent there if possible.
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Bangkok’s migrant detention center has been described by rights groups as “hell on earth”.
There are 43 Uyghurs there, plus five others detained in a Bangkok prison for trying to escape. They are the last of around 350 people to have fled China in 2013 and 2014.
They are isolated from other detainees and are rarely allowed visits from outsiders or lawyers. They have few opportunities to exercise or even see daylight. They have not been charged with any crime other than entering Thailand without a visa. Five Uyghurs died in custody.
“The conditions there are terrible,” says Chalida Tajaroensuk, director of the People’s Empowerment Foundation, an NGO that tries to help the Uyghurs.
“There’s not enough food – it’s mostly soup made from cucumbers and chicken bones. If someone gets sick, it takes a long time to get an appointment with the doctor. And because of dirty water, hot weather and poor ventilation, many Uyghurs get rashes or other skin problems. »
But the worst part of their detention, say those who have experienced it, is not knowing how long they will be imprisoned in Thailand, and constantly fearing being sent back to China.
Niluper says there were always rumors about the expulsion, but it was difficult to find out more. Escaping was difficult because they had children with them.
“It was horrible. We were so scared all the time,” Niluper recalls.
“When we thought we would be sent back to China, we would have preferred to die in Thailand.”
China’s crackdown on Muslim Uyghurs has been well documented by the UN and human rights groups. Up to a million Uighurs are estimated to have been detained in re-education camps, part of what human rights advocates say is a state campaign to eradicate identity and culture Uighurs. There are numerous allegations of torture and forced disappearances, which China denies. He claims to have run “professional centers” focused on deradicalizing Uyghurs.
Niluper says she and her husband faced hostility from Chinese state officials because of their religiosity — her husband was an avid reader of religious texts.
The couple made the decision to flee as people they knew were arrested or disappeared. The family was part of a group of 220 Uyghurs who were arrested by Thai police while trying to cross the border into Malaysia in March 2014.
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Members of the Uyghur Muslim minority show photos of their loved ones detained in China during a news conference in Istanbul in 2022.
Niluper was detained in an IDC near the border, then later in Bangkok, until she and 170 other women and children were allowed in June 2015 to travel to Turkey, which usually offers asylum to Uighurs.
But her husband remains at the IDC in Bangkok. They were separated during their detention and she has had no contact with him since a brief meeting they were allowed to meet in July 2014.
She said she was one of 18 pregnant women and 25 children crammed into a room just four by eight meters. The food was “bad and there was never enough for all of us.”
“I was the last to give birth, at midnight, in the toilet. The next day, the guards saw that my condition and that of my baby were not good, so they took us to the hospital.”
Niluper was also separated from her eldest son, who was then just two years old and detained with his father – an experience she says traumatized him, after experiencing “terrible conditions” and seeing a guard beat an inmate. When the guards brought him back to her, she said, he did not recognize her.
“He was so scared, he was screaming and crying. He didn’t understand what happened. He didn’t want to talk to anyone.”
It took him a long time to accept his mother, she said, and after that he never left her side for even a moment, even after they arrived in Turkey.
“It took him a very, very long time to realize that he was finally in a safe place.”
Pressure from Beijing
Thailand has never explained why it will not allow the remaining Uyghurs to join their families in Türkiye, but it is almost certainly because of pressure from China.
Unlike other IDC detainees, the fate of the Uyghurs is not managed by the Immigration Ministry but by Thailand’s National Security Council, a body chaired by the Prime Minister in which the military has significant influence .
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Foreign detainees at the IDC on January 21, 2019, during a rare visit organized by the authorities for journalists
As the influence of the United States, Thailand’s oldest military ally, declines, that of China continues to increase. The current Thai government wants to forge even closer ties with China, to help revive a faltering economy.
The UN Refugee Agency has been accused of doing little to help the Uyghurs, but says it has no access to them and therefore cannot do much. Thailand does not recognize refugee status.
Acceding to China’s wish to recover the Uighurs is not, however, without risk. Thailand has just won a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, for which it lobbied hard.
Deporting 48 men who have already endured more than a decade of incarceration would seriously tarnish the image the Thai government is trying to project.
Thailand will also be aware of what happened just a month after the last mass eviction in 2015.
On August 17 of the same year, a powerful bomb exploded at a Bangkok shrine popular with Chinese tourists. Twenty people were killed, in what was widely seen as retaliation by Uyghur militants, although Thai authorities tried to downplay the link.
Two Uyghur men have been charged over the bombing, but their trial has lasted nine years and there is no end in sight. One of them, his lawyers say, is almost certainly innocent. A veil of secrecy surrounds the trial; authorities appear reluctant to let anything come out, from hearings linking the bomb to deportation.
Hassan Imam
Hassan Imam arrived in Türkiye, but only after escaping from detention in Thailand
Even Uyghurs who managed to reach Turkey must then face their uncertain status there and the breakdown of all communication with their families in Xinjiang.
“I haven’t heard my mother’s voice for 10 years,” said Hasan Imam, a Uyghur refugee who now works as a truck driver in Turkey.
He was part of the same group as Niluper captured on the Malaysian border in 2014.
He remembers how, the following year, Thai authorities misled them about plans to deport some of them to China. He said they were told some men would be transferred to another facility because the one they were in was too crowded.
This was after women and children had been sent to Turkey and, unusually, the men in the camp were also allowed to speak on the telephone to their wives and children in Turkey.
“We were all happy and hopeful,” says Hassan. “They selected them one by one. At that time, they did not know that they would be sent back to China. It was only later, thanks to an illicit phone we had, that we learned since the Turkey that they had been expelled.”
This made the other detainees desperate, Hasan recalls, and two years later, when he was temporarily transferred to another detention camp, he and 19 others made a remarkable escape, using a nail to make a hole in a ruined wall.
Eleven were recaptured, but Hasan managed to cross the forest border into Malaysia and from there reached Turkey.
“I don’t know what condition my parents are in, but for those still detained in Thailand, it’s even worse,” he said.
They fear being sent back and imprisoned in China – and they also fear it will mean harsher punishments for their families, he explains.
“The mental strain for them is unbearable.”
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