There is the deportation of the Uighurs celebrated in Thailand

Niluper says he has lived in agony.

A Uyghur refugee, she has spent the last decade hoping that her husband would join her and their three sons in Turkey, where they now live.

The family was arrested in Thailand in 2014 after fleeing an escalating crackdown in their homeland in China’s Xinjiang province. She and the child were allowed to leave Thailand a year later. But her husband remained detained, along with 47 other Uighur men.

Niluper – not her real name – now fears she and her children will never see each other again.

Ten days ago, Thai officials learned that they had tried to sign forms authorizing the return of detainees to China. When they realized what was on the forms, they refused to sign.

The Thai government has denied having any immediate plans to repatriate them. But human rights groups believe they could be deported at any time.

“I don’t know how to explain this to my sons,” Niluper told the BBC in a video call from Turkey. His sons, he says, keep asking about their father. The youngest has never met.

“I don’t know how to digest this. I live in constant pain, constant fear that at any moment I may receive the news that my husband has been deported from Thailand.”

The Thailand recently deported Uyghur asylum seekers It was in July 2015. Without warning, he put 109 of them on a plane back to China, sparking a storm of protest from governments and human rights groups.

The few pictures that were released show them hooded and handcuffed, guarded by a large number of Chinese police. Little is known about what happened after his return. Other deported Uyghurs have received long prison sentences in secret trials.

Marco Rubio, the incoming Trump administration’s Secretary of State nominee, has vowed to pressure Thailand not to deport the rest of the Uyghurs.

A human rights defender described their living conditions as “hell on earth”.

All are being held at the Immigration Detention Center (IDC) in central Bangkok, which houses most of those accused of committing immigration violations in Thailand. Some are there briefly, while waiting to be deported; others are much more.

Driving along the narrow, narrow road known as Suan Phlu, it’s easy to miss the cluster of nondescript cement buildings, and it’s hard to believe they house around 900 detainees. Thai authorities do not provide an exact number.

IDC is notoriously hot, crowded and unhealthy. Journalists are not allowed in. Lawyers usually warn clients to avoid sending there if possible.

There are 43 Uyghurs there, and another five are in a Bangkok prison for trying to escape. They are the last of the 350 who fled China in 2013 and 2014.

They are kept in isolation from other prisoners and are rarely allowed outside visits or visits from lawyers. They have little opportunity to exercise, not even to see the light of day. They have been charged with no crime, apart from entering Thailand without a visa. Five Uighurs have died in custody.

“The conditions there are terrible,” says Chalida Tajaroensu, director of the People’s Empowerment Foundation, an NGO that tries to help the Uyghurs.

“There’s not enough food; mostly it’s just soup made of cucumbers and chicken bones. It’s piled up there. The water they get, both for drinking and for washing, is dirty. Only basic medicines are given and these are not adequate. someone gets sick, time It takes a long time to get an appointment with a doctor. And because of dirty water, hot weather and poor ventilation, many Uyghurs get rashes or other skin problems.”

But the worst part of their detention, those who have experienced it, is not knowing how long they will be imprisoned in Thailand and the constant fear of being sent back to China.

Niluper says there were always rumors about deportation but it was difficult to find out more. It was hard to escape because they had children with them.

“It was terrible. We were very scared all the time,” Niluper remembers.

“When we thought of returning to China, we would have preferred to die in Thailand.”

China’s crackdown on Muslim Uighurs has been well documented by the UN and human rights groups. Up to a million Uyghurs have been detained in re-education camps in what human rights advocates say is a state campaign to eradicate Uyghur identity and culture. There are many allegations of torture and enforced disappearances, which China denies. He says he has launched “vocational centers” aimed at deradicalizing the Uyghurs.

Niluper says she and her husband faced hostility from Chinese state officials because of their religiosity – her husband was an avid reader of religious texts.

The couple decided to run away when people they knew were being arrested or disappearing. The family was part of a group of 220 Uighurs who were caught by Thai police trying to cross the border into Malaysia in March 2014.

Niluper was held in an IDC near the border, then in Bangkok, along with 170 other women and children, until she was allowed to travel to Turkey in June 2015, which normally offers asylum to Uighurs.

But her husband is still at the Bangkok IDC. They separated when they were arrested, and since their brief meeting in July 2014, he has not been in contact with her.

She says she was one of 18 pregnant women and 25 children crammed into a room that was only four meters by eight meters. The food was “bad and there was never enough for everyone.”

“I was the last one to give birth, at midnight, in the bathroom. The next day the guard saw that my condition and that of my baby was not good, they took us to the hospital.”

Niluper was also separated from her older son, who was just two years old at the time and was attached to his father, an experience she says has left her traumatised, after experiencing “horrendous conditions” and witnessing a guard beating a prisoner. When the guards brought him back, he says, he didn’t recognize him.

“She was so scared, screaming and crying. She couldn’t understand what happened. She didn’t want to talk to anyone.”

It took a long time for her mother to accept her, she says, and after that she would not leave her for a moment, even after she arrived in Turkey.

“It really took him a very long time to finally understand that he was in a safe place.”

Thailand has never explained why it will not allow the remaining Uyghurs to join their families in Turkey, but it is almost certainly due to pressure from China.

Unlike other IDC prisoners, the fate of the Uyghurs is not handled by the Immigration Department, but by Thailand’s National Security Council, a body headed by the prime minister and heavily influenced by the military.

As the influence of the US, Thailand’s oldest military ally, has waned, China’s has steadily increased. The current Thai government is keen to build even closer ties with China to help revive the gallant economy.

The United Nations refugee agency has been accused of doing little to help the Uyghurs, but says they are not given access, so it can’t do much. Thailand does not accept refugee status.

Accommodating China’s desire to repatriate the Uyghurs is not without risk. Thailand has just taken a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, and lobbied hard.

Deporting the 48 men who have already been imprisoned for more than a decade would tarnish the image the Thai government is trying to project.

Thailand will also remember the last mass deportation in 2015, which happened just a month after.

On August 17 of that year A powerful bomb exploded in a Bangkok shrine which was popular among Chinese tourists. Twenty people were killed in what was believed to be retaliation by Uighur militants, although Thai authorities tried to play down the link.

Two Uighurs were accused of the bombing, but their trial has lasted nine years, without an end. One of them, his lawyers say, is almost certainly innocent. A veil of secrecy surrounds the trial; Authorities seem reluctant to draw anything from the hearings linking the bomb to deportation.

Even the Uyghurs who have managed to reach Turkey have to face their uncertain situation there, and the interruption of all communication with their families in Xinjiang.

“I haven’t heard my mother’s voice for 10 years,” says Hasan Imam, a Uighur refugee who currently works as a truck driver in Turkey.

He was in the same group as Niluper who was caught at the Malaysian border in 2014.

He remembers how the following year the Thai authorities tricked some of them into deporting them to China. He says some of the men were told they would be moved to another facility because the one they were in was overcrowded.

This was after some women and children were sent to Turkey and, unusually, the men in the camp were also allowed to speak to their wives and children on the phone in Turkey.

“We were all happy and full of hope,” says Hassan. “They were selected one by one. At this moment they did not know that they would return to China. Later, through an illegal phone we had, we found out from Turkey that they had been deported.”

This filled the other detainees with despair, Hasan recalled, and two years later, when they were moved to another temporary detention camp, he and 19 others joined him. remarkable escapeusing a nail to make a hole in a shrinking wall.

Eleven were recaptured, but Hasan managed to cross the forested border into Malaysia, and from there into Turkey.

“I don’t know what situation my parents are in, but it’s even worse for those in detention in Thailand,” he says.

They are afraid of being sent back to China and imprisoned, and they also fear that it would mean a harsher punishment for their families, he explained.

“For them the mental tension is unbearable.”