Why Thailand Repatriated Its Uighurs to China

Last week, Thailand forcibly repatriated over 100 Uighur people to China, where the ethnic minority group is likely to face punishment and retaliation. The decision elicited a backlash from the United States government, the United Nations, and international advocacy organizations who claimed that the Uighurs would be tortured—or worse—after their return. But Thailand insisted that it simply lacked the means to let them stay.

“Do you want us to keep them for ages until they have children for three generations?” asked Prayuth Chan-ocha, Thailand’s military-backed Prime Minister.

Prayuth’s question, however, elided a key consideration: Thailand needs China’s support, and China wanted the Uighurs back.

China’s Persecuted Minority

A Muslim population native to Xinjiang, China’s vast westernmost region, the Uighurs have lived uneasily under Beijing rule since soon after the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. Like the Tibetans, Uighurs claim to be victims of economic discrimination and religious and cultural repression. In recent years, Chinese authorities in Xinjiang have established laws that prohibit Uighur women from wearing veils on their faces, and have discouraged fasting during Ramadan.

Relations between the Uighur and Han Chinese, who now compose nearly half of Xinjiang’s population, are characterized by mistrust and mutual suspicion. In Urumqi and other major cities, Han and Uighur populations live apart in separate communities, and Han officials still command most of the political and economic power in the region.

Conflict between the two has occasionally turned violent. In 2009, ethnic riots in Urumqi claimed nearly 200 lives, and in retaliation the Chinese government shut off Internet access in Xinjiang for months. Since then, the region has endured a cycle of Uighur violence followed by heavy-handed government reaction.

The Horror of Repatriation

As a result, Uighurs often attempt to flee China through one of the many countries located nearby. Those who are lucky make it to Turkey, where they’re granted protection. But those detained in Asia—where many countries enjoy close economic ties with China—often meet a different fate. In 2009, Cambodia agreed to repatriate 20 Uighurs who had applied for asylum despite the objection of international organizations. Two days later, the country signed economic cooperation deals with China worth a combined $1.2 billion.

According to Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch, it is very difficult to determine the whereabouts of repatriated refugees within China, which tends to obscure their status. “The Chinese government’s attitude is basically that the Uighurs are citizens, they’re home, and it’s nobody’s business but theirs,” she told me. But those whom outside organizations manage to track down face imprisonment—or worse. According to Human Rights Watch, an Uighur repatriated from Pakistan in 2007 was executed following his return to China.

“The Chinese government has enormous difficulty accepting the idea that people could want to flee it and that they would have legitimate claims for doing so,” said Richardson.

Criticized for condemning Uighurs to an uncertain fate on Wednesday, the Thai government defended itself by saying, effectively, that they could have done much worse. According to Prime Minister Prayuth, China had requested the return of all Uighur refugees—but Bangkok arranged for the majority of them to travel to Turkey.

“This decision was difficult to make,” he said. “It is not like all of a sudden China asks for Uighurs and we just give them back.”

The deportation has strained Thailand’s relationship with Turkey. On Friday, protesters demonstrated at the Thai embassy in Ankara and at a consulate in Istanbul, leading Prayunth to strike a conciliatory note. “Thailand and Turkey are not rivals and we do not want to destroy trade and commerce with Turkey.”

However, Prayunth added, “at the same time, we do not want to destroy the relationship between China and Thailand.”

About the Author

Matt Schiavenza is the senior content manager at the Asia Society and a former contributing writer for The Atlantic.

Twitter

The former Breitbart editor’s attempt to schedule a provocative event on the liberal campus featuring high-profile conservative speakers didn’t work out as planned.

At first, conservative agitator Milo Yiannopoulos’s Free Speech Week in Berkeley, California, seemed like it might be a major event. Four straight days of provocative events on campus featuring right-wing luminaries, culminating with appearances by conservative writer Ann Coulter and former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and all in the heart of one of the most symbolically resonant places Yiannopoulos could have chosen: the campus of University of California, Berkeley, a campus with a longstanding image as a hotbed of left-wing activism where protests shut down an event of his last year.

But things didn’t go according to plan.

Speakers whose names appeared on initial schedules have either pulled out or said they were never planning to go; the campus publication Yiannopoulos is working with, The Berkeley Patriot, never reserved indoor school venues and appeared to pull out Friday afternoon; and Yiannopoulos announced on his Instagram a planned march through campus on Sunday in protest of Berkeley’s supposed clamp-down on free speech. “It’s time to reclaim free speech at UC Berkeley and send shockwaves through the American education system to every other college under liberal tyranny,” Yiannopoulos wrote in his post. The event would have been an important step in reviving Yiannopoulos’s wounded image on the right after a clip of him appearing to defend pedophilia caused him to be barred from CPAC and lose his job as a Breitbart editor in February. Earlier this week, Yiannopoulos told me in a text message that “We will fight until the last man is ejected from the last step on Sproul Plaza.”