China says 109 ethnic Uighurs who were deported from Thailand last week were heading to Turkey, Syria or Iraq to join Islamic militants.
Advertisement
Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha also raised the possibility of shutting the Thai Embassy in Turkey after protesters attacked the honorary consulate in Istanbul, smashing windows and ransacking parts of the building, over the expulsion of the Uighurs back to China.
The United Nations says the deportation was a violation of worldwide law, referring to the principle of non-refoulement which prohibits the transfer of people to a place where they are at risk of rights abuses.
Four children and their mothers on Saturday became the latest Uighur migrants to be deported from Thailand, as the government battled to deflect continued global criticism over its handling of the situation. “The Chinese cruelty has spread to Thailand”, Seyit Tumturk, vice president of the World Uighur Congress, told Reuters outside the Thai Embassy.
“Despite Turkey’s reported willingness to admit them to its territory, only 172 of the 350 were eventually allowed to go to Turkey in late June”, he said, adding that some 60 others remain in detention in Thailand.
The exodus of Uighurs from China to neighbouring countries peaked in 2013 and 2014.
A terrorist attack on a railway station in Kunming, the provincial capital of southwest China’s Yunnan Province, on March 1, 2014, was the work of terrorists who had failed to illegally leave China.
The accusation is likely to further anger Ankara, already alarmed by the return of more than 100 Uyghurs to China from Thailand this week. “Once Thai authorities caught them, they claimed Turkish citizenship, but China said that they are Chinese so there was something of a custody dispute”, Thomas Nelson, an independent researcher and author of Uyghur Update, told The Diplomat.
According to a statement from the Cansuyu Aid and Solidarity Association, four women and their babies are making their way to Turkey from Thailand.
The ministry also claimed a Chinese police investigation had uncovered several jihad recruitment gangs in Turkey, the Xinhua report said.
China’s treatment of its Turkic language-speaking Uighur minority is a sensitive issue in Turkey as well. “The Uighur could face harsh treatment and lack of due process in China”. But those detained in Asia-where many countries enjoy close economic ties with China-often meet a different fate.
According to Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch, it is very hard to determine the whereabouts of repatriated refugees within China, which tends to obscure their status.
Referring to the CCTV footage, Veerachon Sukhontapatipak, another deputy government spokesman, said it was important to understand that in such circumstances it was necessary to have strict control in order to ensure security on board the aircraft.
HRW’s representative for Thailand, Sunai Phasuk, criticized Bangkok’s duplicity in dealing with a group of Chinese Uighur refugees, saying the criteria used for the recent transfer of approximately 100 members of the community to China was not their alleged wrongdoing or nationality.
Advertisement
“We have issued warnings to Thai citizens living overseas and the police in each country [where protests have taken place] to increase the protection for our embassy staffs”, he said.
