Mick Hartley

There's something extraordinary, and chilling, in the pursuit and persecution of expatriates simply on account of their ethnicity. That's what's happening to the Uighurs who've fled China. Harald Maass, in the Spectator – Is anywhere in the world still safe for China’s Uighurs?

For decades, Muslim countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had been safe havens for the Uighur diaspora. But as China’s economic might and global reach grow, governments around the world have started to push Uighurs out of their countries and assist China in its international manhunt.

Since 2017, several thousand Uighur students, workers and businessmen have fled Cairo after Egyptian authorities started a nationwide crackdown. ‘At Cairo airport they had lists with three colours. People with their name marked green could fly out, yellow names had to stay at the airport and red ones were arrested,’ says Abduweli Ayup, a Uighur activist based in Norway. In some cases, the Uighurs were questioned by Chinese police officers in their prison cells in Egypt before they were deported to China.

In the summer of 2017, 17-year-old Tahir Yusuf (his name has been changed for the protection of his family in China) and his younger brother, who had been sent to Egypt by their parents to study, managed to avoid capture and fled to Dubai. But a few months later, authorities in the UAE also cracked down on Uighurs. ‘At 4 a.m., police came to Tahir’s room and arrested him,’ says Ihsan Karkal, a friend who helped the brothers at the time. ‘Most probably, he is in China in a camp or in jail.’

A similar crackdown happened in Saudi Arabia, which provided asylum to Uighurs as early as the 1930s. During a state visit to Beijing in 2019, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman publicly supported China’s harsh policies in Xinjiang, despite the reports of mass internment camps there. At least four Uighurs have been arrested by Saudi police and deported to China while they were on pilgrimage to Mecca or living in the country. In the same year, more than a dozen Muslim-majority countries — including the UAE, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia — publicly endorsed China’s policies in Xinjiang, helping China to fend off criticism at the United Nations. ‘These countries pride themselves for being leaders of the Islamic world, but they don’t bat an eyelid when returning people for persecution for being Muslim,’ Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch told CNN.

Beijing defends its harsh treatments of the Uighurs as a necessary policy against terrorism. But in reality, hundreds of thousands of Uighurs have been sent to re-education camps and to prisons for no other reason than their ethnicity. The Chinese Communist party issues quotas to the local authorities in Xinjiang for the number of people to put into camps. I’ve interviewed dozens of Uighur and ethnic Kazakh families and I’ve heard of cases where men and women were being sent to camps just because they had family members abroad. Some disappeared after they received telephone calls from friends overseas or because they had long beards, which are banned under China’s ‘anti-extremism’ regulations. Other Uighurs in the camps had been model citizens and even members of the CCP. ‘Some of the arrested Uighurs in Egypt were students who had been officially sent there by the local Chinese government,’ says Ayup. ‘How can a government first send young people abroad and then treat them as criminals?’

The forced repatriations are a frightening sign of China’s growing influence over foreign governments. Beijing is increasingly putting economic and political pressure on countries to cooperate with its authoritarian police system. In 2015, Thailand sent 109 Uighurs back to China after they tried to escape from Xinjiang to Turkey via south-east Asia. The men and women were flown back in a special aeroplane with black hoods over their heads and guarded by policemen, according to Chinese TV reports. Cambodia, Malaysia and other Asian countries have carried out similar deportations.

The sordid spectacle of Muslim countries, so vociferous on the subject of the Palestinians but scarcely bothering with a shrug to the genocide of the Uighurs, is one of the more repellent aspects of this whole business. And Turkey?

Uighurs are Turkic people, and until recently one of the few remaining safe countries for them in the Islamic world was Turkey, which shares a similar language and culture. Today around 50,000 Uighurs live there. But the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which used to defend the rights of Uighurs, has recently softened its rhetoric towards Beijing. Since the pandemic, Turkey’s government depends on vaccinations and economic aid from China. In 2017, both countries signed an extradition treaty — a ‘counterterrorism partnership’ — which was ratified at the end of last year by China and which could lead to Uighur deportations in the future.

As we've seen already, Turkey is becoming less and less safe for Uighurs. Two years ago Erdogan was in Beijing, and said nothing. In fact he was full of praise for his hosts, according to Chinese media: “Turkey firmly supports the One China policy, and it’s a fact that residents of all ethnicities in China’s Xinjiang are living happily amid China’s development and prosperity”, he was reported as saying.