Deportation of Uighurs detained in Thailand looms

Niluper says she lived in agony.

A Uyghur refugee, she 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 a growing crackdown in their hometown in China's Xinjiang province. A year later, she and the children were allowed to leave Thailand. But her husband remains in custody, along with 47 other Uighur men.

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

Ten days ago, she learned that Thai officials had tried to persuade the detainees to sign consent forms to be sent back to China. When they found out what was on the forms, they refused to sign them.

The Thai government has denied 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 in a video call from Turkey. Her sons, she says, keep asking about their father. The youngest has never met him.

“I don't know how to judge that. I live in constant pain, constant fear that at any moment I may receive the news from Thailand that my husband has been deported.”

The Thailand recently 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.

The few photos released show them hooded and handcuffed, guarded by a large number of Chinese police. Little is known of what happened to them after their return. Other deported Uyghurs have received long prison sentences in secret trials.

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

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

They are all being held at the Immigrant Detention Center (IDC) in central Bangkok, where most of those accused of immigration violations in Thailand are housed. Some are only there for a short time while waiting to be deported; 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 hard to believe they house an estimated 900 detainees — Thai authorities don't give exact numbers.

IDC is known to be hot, crowded and unsanitary. Journalists are not allowed inside. Lawyers usually warn their clients to avoid being sent there if at all possible.

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

They are isolated from other prisoners and are rarely allowed visits from outsiders or lawyers. They get few opportunities to exercise or even see daylight. They have not been charged with a crime other than entering Thailand without a visa. Five Uighurs died in custody.

“The conditions there are horrendous,” said Chalida Tajaroensuk, director of the People's Empowerment Foundation, an NGO trying to help the Uyghurs.

“There's not enough food – it's mostly cucumber soup and chicken bones. It's packed. The water they get, both for drinking and washing, is dirty. Only basic medicines are provided and these are insufficient. someone gets sick, it takes a long time to get a doctor's appointment. 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 detained in Thailand and the constant fear of being sent back to China.

Niluper says there were always rumors of deportation, but it was difficult to find out more. Escape was difficult because they had children with them.

“It was terrible. We were so scared the whole time,” Niluper recalls.

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

China's crackdown on Muslim Uyghurs has been well documented by the UN and human rights groups. Up to one million Uyghurs are believed to have been held in re-education camps in what rights activists say is a state campaign to eradicate Uyghur identity and culture. There are many allegations of torture and enforced disappearances, which China denies. It says it runs “professional centers” focused on the deradicalization of 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 made the decision to run away when people they knew were arrested or disappeared. The family was among a group of 220 Uyghurs who were caught by Thai police trying to cross the border into Malaysia in March 2014.

Niluper was held in an IDC near the border, and later in Bangkok, until, along with 170 other women and children, in June 2015. she was allowed to go to Turkey, which normally offers asylum to Uyghurs.

But her husband remains at the IDC in Bangkok. They were separated when they were detained and she has had no contact with him since a 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 “bad and never enough for us all.”

“I gave birth last, at midnight, in the bathroom. The next day the security saw my condition and my baby's condition was not good, so they took us to the hospital.''

Niluper was also separated from her eldest son, who was just two years old at the time, and kept with his father, an experience she says traumatized him after he lived through “terrible conditions” and witnessed a warden beating a prisoner When security brought him back to her, she says, he didn't recognize her.

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

It took a long time for her to accept her mother, she says, and then she never left her for a moment, even after they arrived in Turkey.

“It took him a long, 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 prisoners in the IDC, the fate of the Uyghurs is not managed by the Immigration Department, but instead 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, declines, that of China steadily increases. The current Thai government is keen to forge even closer ties with China to help revive the stalled economy.

The UN refugee agency has been 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.

Accepting China's desire to reclaim the Uyghurs is not without risk, however. Thailand just won a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, for which it lobbied hard.

Deporting 48 men who have already served more than a decade in prison would severely tarnish 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.

On August 17 of the same year a powerful bomb exploded in a temple in Bangkok which was popular with Chinese tourists. Twenty people were killed in what was believed to be retaliation by Uyghur fighters, although Thai authorities tried to play down the link.

Two Uyghurs were accused of the bombing, but their trial has been going on for nine years now, with no end in sight. One of them, his lawyers say, is almost certainly innocent. A shroud of secrecy surrounds the process; authorities seem reluctant to let anything from the hearings linking the bomb to the deportation come to light.

Even those Uyghurs who have managed to reach Turkey must then deal with their precarious status there and the severance of all communications with their families in Xinjiang.

“I haven't heard my mother's voice in 10 years,” said Hasan Imam, a Uyghur refugee who now works as a truck driver in Turkey.

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

He recalls 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 another facility because the one they were in was too crowded.

This happened after some women and children were sent to Turkey and, unusually, the men in the camp were also allowed to talk 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 an illegal phone we had, that we found out from Turkey that they had been deported.”

This filled the other detainees with despair, Hassan recalled, and two years later, when he was moved temporarily to another camp, he and 19 others did remarkable escapeusing a nail to make a hole in a crumbling wall.

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

“I don't know the condition of my parents, but for those who are 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 will mean more severe punishment for their families, he explains.

“The mental load for them is unbearable.