Niluper says she lived in agony.
A Uighur refugee, she spent the last decade hoping her husband would join her and their three sons in Turkey, where they now live.
The family was arrested in Thailand in 2014 after fleeing increasing 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 Uighur men.
Niluper – not her real name – now fears she and her children will never see him again.
Ten days ago, she learned that Thai officials tried to convince the prisoners to sign forms agreeing to return to China. When they realized what was in 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, constantly ask about their father. The youngest never met him.
“I don’t know how to digest this. I live in constant pain, constant fear that at any moment I could get news from Thailand that my husband has been deported.”
“Hell on Earth”
The the last time Thailand deported Uyghur asylum seekers it was in July 2015. Without warning, 109 were put on a plane bound for China, sparking a storm of protest from governments and human rights groups.
Several photos that have been released show them hooded and handcuffed, guarded by a large number of Chinese police. Little is known about what happened to them after their return. Other deported Uighurs received long prison sentences in secret trials.
The nominee for secretary of state in the new Trump administration, Marco Rubio, has vowed to pressure Thailand not to send the remaining Uyghurs back.
One human rights defender described their living conditions as “hell on earth”.
All are being held at the Immigration Detention Center (IDC) in central Bangkok, which houses most of those accused of violating immigration rules in Thailand. Some are only there for a short time, while they wait 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 concrete buildings and it’s hard to believe they house around 900 prisoners – Thai authorities don’t give exact numbers.
IDC is known to be hot, crowded and unsanitary. Journalists are not allowed to enter. Lawyers usually warn their clients to avoid sending them there if at all possible.
There are 43 Uighurs there, plus another five who are 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 kept in isolation from other prisoners and are rarely allowed visits from outsiders or lawyers. They have few opportunities to exercise, or even to see the light of day. They were charged with no crime, except for entering Thailand without a visa. Five Uighurs 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 isn’t enough food – it’s mostly just soup made of cucumbers and chicken bones. It’s overcrowded. The water they get, both for drinking and for washing, is dirty. They only have basic medicines, and they’re inadequate. If someone gets sick, it’s necessary It takes a long time to make an appointment with a doctor, and due to dirty water, hot weather and poor ventilation, many Uyghurs get rashes or other skin problems.”
But the worst part of their imprisonment, say those who experienced it, is not knowing how long they will be imprisoned in Thailand and the constant fear that they will be sent back to China.
Niluper says there were always rumors of deportation, but it was difficult to find out more. The escape was difficult because there were children with them.
“It was terrible. We were so scared the whole time,” Niluper recalls.
“When we thought about being sent back to China, we would rather die in Thailand.”
China’s repression of Muslim Uighurs 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 camps in what human rights advocates say is a state campaign to eradicate Uyghur identity and culture. There are many allegations of torture and enforced disappearances, which China denies. He says he runs “expert centers” aimed at deradicalizing 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 caught by Thai police trying to cross the border into Malaysia in March 2014.
Niluper was held in an IDC near the border, then later in Bangkok, until she and 170 other women and children were allowed in June 2015 to go to Turkey, which usually offers asylum to Uyghurs.
But her husband remains at the Bangkok IDC. They were separated when they were detained, and she has had no contact with him since the brief meeting they were allowed in July 2014.
She says she was one of 18 pregnant women and 25 children crammed into a room measuring only four by eight meters. The food was “bad and there was never enough for all of us”.
“I gave birth last, at midnight, in the bathroom. The next day, the guard 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 was with his father – an experience she says traumatized him, after experiencing “horrible conditions” and witnessing a guard beating a prisoner. When the guards brought him back to her, he says, he did not recognize her.
“He was so scared, he was screaming and crying. He couldn’t understand what had happened. He didn’t want to talk to anyone.”
It took a long time before he accepted his mother, he says, and after that he never left her for 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 Uighurs to join their families in Turkey, but it is almost certainly due to pressure from China.
Unlike the other prisoners in the IDC, the fate of the Uighurs is not dealt with by the Immigration Department, but by Thailand’s National Security Council, a body chaired by the prime minister and in which the military has significant influence.
As the influence of the US, Thailand’s oldest military ally, declines, China’s influence continues to grow. The current Thai government wants to build even closer ties with China to help revive its struggling economy.
The United Nations 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 the status of refugees.
However, complying with China’s desire to return the Uyghurs is not without risks. Thailand has just taken a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, for which it lobbied hard.
Deporting the 48 men who have already served more than a decade in prison would seriously damage the image the Thai government is trying to project.
Thailand will also be aware of what happened just a month after the last mass deportation in 2015.
On August 17 of that year a powerful bomb exploded in a shrine in Bangkok which was popular among Chinese tourists. Twenty people were killed in what was widely believed to be retaliation by Uighur militants, although Thai authorities have tried to play down the link.
Two Uighurs were accused of the bombing, but their trial has been going on for 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 seem reluctant to let anything come out of hearings linking the bomb to the deportation.
Even those Uyghurs who managed to reach Turkey then have to deal with their uncertain status there and the severance of all communications with their families in Xinjiang.
“I haven’t heard my mother’s voice for 10 years,” says Hasan Imam, a Uighur refugee who now works as a truck driver in Turkey.
He was in the same group as Niluper who was caught at the Malaysian border in 2014.
He recalls how the following year the Thai authorities tricked them into planning to deport some of them to China. He says they were told that some of the men would be transferred to another facility because the one they were in was too cramped.
This was 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,” says Hassan. “They picked them off, one by one. At this point, they had no idea that they would be sent back to China. Only later, through the illegal phone we had, did we find out from Turkey that they had been deported.”
This filled the remaining detainees with despair, Hasan recalls, and two years later, when he was temporarily moved to another camp, he and 19 other people made an extraordinary escapeusing a nail to make a hole in a crumbling wall.
Eleven of them were recaptured, but Hasan managed to cross the wooded border into Malaysia, and from there arrived in 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 that they will be returned and imprisoned in China – and they also fear that this would mean a harsher punishment for their families, he explains.
Mental effort is unbearable for them.
