As the world's media descended on the Oval Office last week, a convoy of trucks was being driven to Bangkok’s Don Mueang airport. An unscheduled China Southern Airlines flight waited to transport dozens of Uyghur refugees back to China.
The Uyghurs are a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, primarily from China’s north-west region of Xinjiang. After a number of violent attacks in Xinjiang in the early 2010s, the Chinese authorities responded with an ongoing crackdown in what some governments have described as genocide, amid multiple allegations of torture, forced labour, sexual assault and forced sterilisation.
Thousands of Uyghurs have fled abroad to Turkey, Canada and the US, where large numbers now live in exile. But others have found their quest for safety prevented by arrest in transit countries such as Thailand.
The decade-long detention of one particular group of Uyghurs in Thailand had taken on global significance as the United Nations, US and other authorities pleaded for them to be granted asylum. Thailand appears to have sided with China with last week's early morning deportation.
News of the mass deportation sent Uyghur refugees around the world into panic. Was a loved one, relative or friend among those deported? Aside from an image of a handful being "happily" greeted by family members on their arrival in China, the others sent back have not yet been identified.
In a chilling message, China’s embassy in Thailand said those returned were "not refugees" but illegal border crossers and would be given "employment support and vocational training". Vocational training is a term that has been associated with Chinese detention camps and forced-labour transfer programmes.
We met the former wife of one of those feared to have been deported this week. With their two children, she had made it safely into exile and shared with us some of the final heartbreaking messages exchanged between her daughter and her children's father.
“It’s shameful for Thailand to send these people to China, even though the family and whole world knows it is an unsafe place for Uyghurs,” she told us. “Everything China has done has been staged. The world should be more careful because after they are deported there is no way back.” Tom Levitt, commissioning editor, Rights and freedom
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