On February 27, I woke up from one nightmare to another. Messages had streamed into my phone. An unscheduled China Southern Airlines flight had left Bangkok at 4:48 a.m. and landed in Kashgar, a city in the south of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China. It’s where the Chinese government has been committing crimes against humanity against the Uyghurs for the past decade – and where I grew up.
On the flight were at least 40 Uyghur men who had fled China more than a decade ago. They were among hundreds of Uyghurs who tried to escape through a dangerous overland route through Southeast Asia in 2014. Some made it to the relative safety of Turkiye. Others were detained by Thai authorities and placed in immigration detention.
In July 2015, Thailand released about 170 Uyghur women and children to Turkiye. But they also handed over 109 Uyghur men – flown, hooded and in shackles – to China.
The remaining several dozen men were left in Thai immigration detention, held arbitrarily, indefinitely, and unlawfully. On the morning of February 27, after 10 terrifying years in detention – during which at least three had died in squalid conditions – Thailand forced the remaining group onto an early morning plane bound for China.
From the safety of London, I had fallen asleep after watching a Thai media video showing several trucks, with their windows covered, leaving the Bangkok immigration detention center where the men were held. I had hoped against hope that it was all a misunderstanding.
Over a decade ago, I saw firsthand what happens to my fellow Uyghurs forcibly sent back after leaving China without permission. I witnessed a crowd of hundreds in front of a court in my hometown when two Uyghur men were sentenced to long prison terms after being forcibly returned from Malaysia.
“They almost made it to freedom,” one person said.
“Why would they send them back? Don’t people know what would happen to them?” another person cried.
We waited – hopeless, powerless, deeply disappointed – outside the court. We were not allowed in what was supposedly a public hearing. Despite the presence of heavily armed police, we waited, just so we could see briefly the two men before they were taken to a dark cell.
This scene played in my head these past weeks since the rumors of Thailand preparing to send these men back began to circulate.
In a public letter from the men dated January 10, they wrote: “We could be imprisoned, and we might even lose our lives. We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from this tragic fate before it is too late.”
Fellow activists and I have tried to amplify the men’s desperate calls. We appealed to Thai officials, to the United Nations, and concerned governments.
But those in power failed them.
Thailand caved to China, instead of releasing the men and letting them travel to a safe, third country. Thai authorities repeatedly refused to allow the U.N. refugee agency access to the men, preventing them from being recognized as refugees and being resettled.
With this outrageous deportation, Thailand violated its own laws as well as its international obligations.
In 2023, the Thai government incorporated the international legal principle of “nonrefoulement” – which prohibits countries from returning anyone to a place where they face a real risk of persecution – into domestic law. Up to the very moment of deportation, Thai officials, including Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, had maintained a duplicitous facade of respecting international law and gave repeated reassurances that the men would not be deported.
Even more shamefully, Thai and Chinese officials are now collaborating to rewrite history and whitewash the atrocities against Uyghurs, depicting the men’s forced return as a generous act of family “reunion.”
The reality the men now face could not be more different. Since late 2016, the Chinese government has been carrying out a punitive “Strike Hard Campaign” in Xinjiang, arbitrarily detaining an estimated 1 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in political education camps, subjecting them to abuses including forced labor and family separation. An estimated half million remain in long-term imprisonment for nothing more than, for example, having a recitation of the Quran on their phones. Uyghurs now live under dystopian surveillance and repression that aim not only to subjugate them but also force them to express gratitude to the “great motherland.”
No one in Xinjiang dares to gather before a court anymore. I don’t even know if there will be a court hearing. I wonder if these men will end up in the same cell with my father – Memet Yaqup – who disappeared in 2018 and is now serving a 16-year sentence, having committed no crime.
In my nightmares, I cannot save my father just as I could do nothing for these Uyghur men.
How many more times will the world fail the Uyghurs?