Thailand Deports Dozens of Uyghurs to China Despite Pleas

Rights groups criticized the Thai government for sending the Uyghurs, a persecuted Muslim minority, back to China, where they face the risk of torture and imprisonment.

Thailand on Thursday deported 40 Uyghur asylum seekers back to China, drawing a sharp rebuke from U.N. officials and activists who had long warned that the men would possibly face torture and long-term imprisonment upon their return.

The deportations, which Thai officials said were carried out at Beijing’s request, are a major victory for China, showcasing its growing clout in the region in contrast to the United States, which has alienated allies and partners under the new Trump administration. Just three weeks earlier, Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra of Thailand had met with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in Beijing to discuss a railway project and ways to increase Chinese tourism.

The United Nations’ refugee agency and Volker Türk, the U.N. human rights chief, called the deportations a clear violation of international law. Uyghur activists abroad deplored the decision.

“I’m deeply saddened, worried and terrified about what’s going to happen to them next,” said Tahir Imin, a U.S.-based Uyghur activist who was previously imprisoned in China. “They will get unimaginable punishment. Torture, death and long-term imprisonment is guaranteed.”

China has used its power and influence to silence its critics abroad and pressure governments to repatriate citizens fleeing persecution. The Uyghurs will have likely been returned to the region of Xinjiang, where the authorities maintain a tight grip. In recent years the government has detained as many as one million Uyghurs and others in internment camps and prisons, stepped up birth control measures for Muslim women and placed Muslim children in boarding schools.

The Uyghurs, who had been detained in Bangkok for over a decade, were part of a wave of more than 300 people who fled China in 2014, hoping to use Thailand as a transit point to get to Turkey, which is home to a sizable Uyghur community. Last month, some of the detainees, who are all men, went on a hunger strike amid fears of being returned to China.

Mr. Türk said the asylum seekers had been held in poor conditions in Thailand, with five dying in custody and eight believed to remain in detention.

The plight of the detainees had drawn scrutiny from governments, including the United States, Canada and Japan. During his confirmation hearing for secretary of state last month, Marco Rubio said he would lobby Thailand not to send the Uyghurs back to China.

The concern initially prompted the Thai authorities to pledge that they would not send the Uyghurs back. Yet rights activists who had been monitoring the situation began reporting in the early hours of Thursday that there were signs the Uyghurs were being prepared for deportation.

In downtown Bangkok around 2 a.m., a reporter witnessed six trucks that had their windows covered with black cloth leaving an immigrant detention center where the detained Uyghurs had been held. Several police cars accompanied the trucks, cordoning off traffic around them.

A few hours later, an unscheduled China Southern Airlines flight took off from Bangkok to Kashgar in Xinjiang, the native homeland of Uyghurs, according to FlightRadar24, which tracks flights around the world. It landed just after noon local time.

The decision to suddenly deport the Uyghurs was a stark reminder of the strengths of China’s diplomatic clout. It comes as Beijing has sought the repatriation of Chinese nationals from scam centers in Myanmar by taking them across the border to Thailand and putting them on planes back to China. Some analysts saw it as a direct exertion of China’s security policy in Thailand.

“This recent pattern of Thailand catering to the Chinese government without due process will stand Thailand in bad stead with the United States when Washington is very aggressive,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political science professor at Chulalongkorn University. “It doesn’t generate good-will in the Muslim world, and worst of all, the Uyghurs will suffer.”

Relations between the United States and Thailand, one of two U.S. allies in Southeast Asia, have been strained after a near-decade-long military rule. Part of Thailand’s apparent caving to Beijing could also reflect the shifting balance of power in Asia where the United States under President Trump, unlike the Biden administration, has shown less interest in highlighting human rights and democracy.

“It seems to be that under the Biden administration, Bangkok came under U.S. pressure or influence not to yield, but this is no longer the case under the Trump Administration,” said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London.

“It is a significant setback for human rights,” Mr. Tsang added. “It also goes further to show that the old image of the U.S. being the shining house on the hill is being changed to something else, something increasingly indistinguishable from what China under Xi represents.”

Julie Millsap of No Business With Genocide, a Washington-based group that has been lobbying governments to free the Uyghurs, said she was told by U.S. officials that the State Department and the National Security Council had tried to pressure the Thai government to release the Uyghurs. However, those efforts were undermined by the withdrawal of U.S.A.I.D. funding to Thailand, she said.

“The Thais kind of weighed the potential backlash and decided that they would rather deal with the United States than Chinese pressure,” Ms. Millsap said.

There was no immediate comment from the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok.

For hours on Thursday, Thai officials refused to confirm that they had sent the Uyghurs back. Ms. Paetongtarn told reporters that she had yet to discuss the issue with officials, even as opposition lawmakers and reporters pressed her government for answers.

After they finally acknowledged the deportations, officials scrambled into damage-control mode. They held news briefings to defend the move, reflecting a concern about the blow this might be to Thailand’s global image.

The officials cast the Uyghurs not as asylum seekers but as undocumented immigrants. They cited assurances from the Chinese government — including the Chinese premier, Li Qiang — that the men would be treated well, without addressing the well-documented threat of retaliation that the Uyghurs would face. They said that Thai officials would be allowed to visit the Uyghurs. They displayed pictures purportedly showing the Uyghurs reunited with their families.

When asked why the Uyghurs had to be smuggled out in the dead of the night, Thailand’s police chief, Kittirat Panpetch, told reporters that it was for their safety. He added that it was normal for the government to send illegal immigrants back.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman did not directly answer a question about whether the Uyghurs had been deported, saying that 40 Chinese nationals who had illegally entered Thailand had been repatriated on Thursday. Statements carried by official Chinese news agencies depicted the return of the citizens as a rescue effort, saying that they had been deceived by criminal groups and been stranded in Thailand.

In 2015, when Thailand deported 109 Uyghurs to China, the Thai government said that the Chinese government “had guaranteed their safety.” But rights activists said later that a few of the deportees had received long prison sentences, and they were never able to track the whereabouts of the rest.

Muktita Suhartono contributed reporting from Singapore and Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva.

Around the World With The Times

Our reporters across the globe take you into the field.

• A New Chinese Embassy: Britain appears ready to approve what would be the largest diplomatic outpost in Europe, but neighbors and activists in London fear tapped phone lines and suppressed protests.
• Greenland’s Big Moment: Ignored for most of its existence, the huge ice-bound island has been thrust into a geopolitical maelstrom. It’s trying to make the most of it.
• Cambodia’s Art Come Home: Foreign institutions and collectors are returning artifacts with deep spiritual meaning. But where and how to display them remain open questions.
• One Lake, Two Worlds: The Rwandan shore of Lake Kivu offers leisure. Across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the lake was recently the site of devastation after a rebel offensive.
• Okinawa, Caught Between Two Powers: Residents of the Japanese island see U.S. bases as a legacy of war, but younger generations also worry about a threat from China.