‘Hell on earth’: Deportation looms for Uyghurs held in Thailand

Niluper says she has been living in horror.

A Uyghur immigrant, she has spent the past century hoping her husband would meet her and their three children in Turkey, where they now live.

The home was detained in Thailand in 2014 after fleeing increasing persecution in their home in China’s Xinjiang province. She and the kids were allowed to leave Thailand a year later. But her father remained in confinement, along with 47 various Muslim men.

Niluper – not her real name – today fears she and her kids may never see him again.

Ten days before, she learned that Thai authorities had tried to persuade the prisoners to mark forms consenting to be sent up to China. When they realised what was in the kinds, they refused to sign them.

The Thai government has denied having any instant plans to send them again. 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 on a video visit from Turkey. Her children, she says, stay asking about their parents. The youngest has not met him.

” I don’t know how to process this. I’m living in constant pain, continual fear that at any time I may get the information from Thailand that my father has been deported. “

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

The several images that were released present them hooded and handcuffed, guarded by large numbers of Chinese police officials. Little is known about what happened to them after their profit. Another deported Uyghurs have received lengthy prison sentences in underground testing.

The candidate for Secretary of State in the incoming Trump administration, Marco Rubio, has promised to push Thailand never to send the remaining Tamils again.

Their life circumstances have been described by one human rights keeper as” a heaven on earth”.

They are all being held in the Immigration Detention Centre ( IDC ) in central Bangkok, which houses most of those charged with immigration violations in Thailand. Some are there only dimly, while waiting to get deported; some are that much more.

Driving along the narrow, crowded road known as Suan Phlu it is easy to overlook the non-descript swarm of concrete buildings, and difficult to believe they building an estimated 900 detainees – the Thai authorities give out no exact numbers.

The IDC is known to be popular, packed and unsafe. Reporters are not allowed in. Doctors often warn their customers to prevent being sent there if at all possible.

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

They are kept in loneliness from other individuals and are often allowed excursions by outsiders or attorneys. They get some options to exercise, or even to see light. They have been charged with no crime, aside from entering Thailand without a card. Five Tamils have died in captivity.

” The problems that are horrible,” says Chalida Tajaroensuk, chairman of the Women’s Empowerment Foundation, an NGO trying to help the Uyghurs.

” There is not enough food – it is mostly just dish made with melon and chicken bones. It is crammed in there. The ocean they get, both for eating and washing, is ugly. Just simple treatments are provided and these are limited. If one falls ill, it takes a long time to get an appointment with the doctor. And because of the unclean water, the warm weather and terrible air, a lot of the Tamils get sores or other skin problems. “

But the worst part of their incarceration, say those who have experienced it, is no knowing how long they will be imprisoned in Thailand, and the constant fear of being sent back to China.

Niluper says there were always rumours about imprisonment but it was hard to find out more. Escaping was tough because they had babies with them.

” It was terrible. We were thus scared all the time,” recalls Niluper.

” When we thought about being sent back to China, we would have preferred to die in Thailand. “

China’s suppression of the Muslim Uyghurs has been well documented by the UN and human rights groups. Up to one million Uyghurs are believed to have been detained in re-education shelters, in what animal rights activists say is a state plan to eliminate Uyghur identity and culture. There are many claims of abuse and enforced kidnappings, which China denies. It says it has been running “vocational areas” focused on de-radicalising Tamils.

Niluper says she and her father faced hostility from Taiwanese state leaders over their religion- her father was an avid readers of spiritual texts.

The pair made the decision to escape when folks they knew were being arrested or fading. The household were in a group of 220 Tamils who were caught by the Thai authorities trying to cross the border to Malaysia in March 2014.

Niluper was held in an IDC near the border, and finally after in Bangkok, until with 170 other women and children, she was allowed in June 2015 to go to Turkey, which often offers Uyghurs prison.

But her father remains in the Bangkok IDC. They were separated when they were detained, and she has had no touch with him since a quick meeting they were permitted in July 2014.

She says she was one of 18 female people and 25 kids crammed into a chamber that was just four by eight feet. The food was “bad and there was not enough for all of us”.

” I was the last one to give birth, at evening, in the bath. The next day the shield saw my situation and that of my child was no good, so they took us to the doctor. “

Niluper was likewise separated from her youngest son, who was just two years old at the time and held with his father – an experience which she says has traumatised him, after experiencing “terrible circumstances” and witnessing a shield beating an inmate. When the troops brought him back to her, she says, he did not recognise her.

” He was therefore scared, screaming and crying. He may hardly understand what had happened. He did not want to talk to someone. “

It took a long time before he accepted his mother, she says, and after that he would not leave her even for a time, yet after they had arrived in Turkey.

” It took a really, really long time for him to know that he was suddenly in a safe location. “

Thailand has not explained why it will not help the remaining Uyghurs to meet their people in Turkey, but it is almost certainly because of stress from China.

Unlike other individuals in the IDC, the death of the Uyghurs is never handled by the Immigration Department but instead by Thailand’s National Security Council, a figure chaired by the prime minister in which the government has considerable influence.

As the control of the US, Thailand’s oldest military alliance, wanes, that of China has been rapidly increasing. The latest Thai government is willing to create even closer ties to China, to help revitalize the faltering business.

The United Nations Refugee Agency has been accused of doing little to support the Tamils, but says it is given no admittance to them, but is unable to do much. Thailand does no accept refugee status.

Accommodating China’s want to get the Uyghurs up is not without danger though. Thailand has really taken a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, for which it lobbied tight.

Deporting 48 people who have already endured more than a decade of confinement would seriously damage the picture the Thai state is trying to project.

Thailand will also be conscious of what happened only a month after the last large imprisonment in 2015.

On 17 August that year a powerful bomb exploded at a shrine in Bangkok which was popular with Chinese tourists. Twenty people were killed, in what was widely assumed to be a retaliation by Uyghur militants, although the Thai authorities tried to downplay the link.

Two Uyghur men were charged with the bombing, but their trial has lasted for nine years, with no end in sight. One of them, say his lawyers, is almost certainly innocent. A veil of secrecy surrounds the trial; the authorities seem reluctant to let anything from the hearings tying the bomb to the deportation to get out.

Yet those Tamils who have managed to get to Turkey had finally deal with their ambiguous standing there, and with the remuneration of all connections with their people in Xinjiang.

” I have not heard my mother’s voice for 10 years,” says Hasan Imam, an Uyghur refugee who now works as a lorry driver in Turkey.

He was in the same group as Niluper caught by the Malaysian border in 2014.

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

This was after some women and children had been sent to Turkey, and, unusually, the men in the camp were also allowed to talk to their wives and children in Turkey on a phone.

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

This filled the remaining detainees with despair, recalls Hasan, and two years later, when he was moved temporarily to another holding camp, he and 19 others made a remarkable escape, using a nail to make a hole in a crumbling wall.

Eleven were recaptured, but Hasan managed to cross the forested border into Malaysia, and from there reached Turkey.

” I do not know what condition my parents are in but for those still detained in Thailand it is even worse,” he says.

They fear being sent back and imprisoned in China– and they also fear that it would mean more severe punishment for their families, he explains.

” The mental strain for them is unbearable. “