'Hell on earth': China deportation looms for Uyghurs held in Thailand

Nirupa says she has been living in pain. As a Uyghur refugee, she has spent the last decade hoping her husband could join her and their three sons in Turkey, where they currently reside. In 2014, the family was detained in Thailand after fleeing growing oppression in their home region of Xinjiang, China. A year later, she and her children were allowed to leave Thailand, but her husband and 47 other Uyghur men remained in detention.

Nirupa (not her real name) now fears that she and her children may never see her husband again. Ten days ago, she learned that Thai officials had tried to persuade the detainees to sign forms agreeing to be sent back to China. When they realized what the forms said, they refused to sign. The Thai government denies any immediate plans to send them back, but human rights groups believe they could be deported at any time.

"I don't know how to explain this to my sons," Nirupa told the BBC via video call from Turkey. She says her sons have been asking about their father. The youngest has never met him. "I don't know how to digest this. I live in constant pain, constant fear, afraid that at any moment I will receive news from Thailand that my husband has been deported."

The last time Thailand deported Uyghur asylum seekers was in July 2015. Without any warning, Thailand put 109 people on a plane back to China, sparking outrage from governments and human rights groups. A small number of released photos showed them hooded and handcuffed, guarded by a large contingent of Chinese police. Little is known about what happened to them after their return. Other deported Uyghurs have received long prison sentences in secret trials. Marco Rubio, the incoming Secretary of State nominee for the Trump administration, promised to urge Thailand not to send the remaining Uyghurs back to China.

A human rights defender described their living conditions as "hell on earth." They are all being held in the Immigration Detention Centre (IDC) in central Bangkok, which houses most of those accused of immigration violations in Thailand. Some are there briefly, awaiting deportation; others stay much longer. The IDC is known to be hot, overcrowded, and unhygienic. Journalists are not allowed inside. Lawyers often warn their clients to avoid being sent there if at all possible. There are 43 Uyghurs there, with another five in a Bangkok prison for trying to escape. They are the last of about 350 people who fled China in 2013 and 2014.

They are isolated from other prisoners and are rarely allowed visits from outsiders or lawyers. They have little opportunity to exercise or even see the sun. They have not been charged with any crimes, other than entering Thailand without visas. Five Uyghurs have already died in detention. "The conditions there are appalling," says Chalida Tajaroensuk, director of the People's Empowerment Foundation, an NGO trying to help the Uyghurs. "The food is insufficient - mostly just soup made with cucumber and chicken bones. It is overcrowded. The water they get, for both drinking and washing, is dirty. Only basic medication is provided, and not enough of it. If someone gets sick, it takes a long time to get an appointment with a doctor. Many Uyghurs develop rashes or other skin problems because of the dirty water, the heat, and the poor ventilation."

But those who have experienced detention say the worst part of their confinement is not knowing how long they will be imprisoned in Thailand, and the constant fear of being sent back to China. Nirupa says there are always rumors of deportations, but it is difficult to learn more. Escape is difficult because they have children with them. "It was terrible. We were always afraid," Nirupa recalls. "When we thought about being sent back to China, we would rather die in Thailand."

The UN and human rights groups have thoroughly documented China's oppression of Muslim Uyghurs. It is believed that up to a million Uyghurs are being held in re-education camps, which human rights advocates call a state campaign aimed at eradicating Uyghur identity and culture. There are many allegations of torture and forced disappearances, which China denies. China says it has been operating "vocational centers" focused on de-radicalizing Uyghurs. Nirupa says she and her husband faced hostility from Chinese officials because of their religious beliefs - her husband was an avid reader of religious texts.

The couple decided to flee when people they knew were arrested or disappeared. The family was among 220 Uyghurs apprehended by Thai police in March 2014 as they tried to cross the border into Malaysia. Nirupa was held in an IDC near the border, and later in Bangkok, until June 2015, when she and 170 other women and children were allowed to go to Turkey, a common place of asylum for Uyghurs. But her husband remained in the IDC in Bangkok. They were separated when they were detained, and she has not had contact with him since they were allowed a brief meeting in July 2014.

She says she was one of 18 pregnant women and 25 children crammed into a room measuring just four meters by eight meters. The food was "poor and never enough for all of us." "I was the last to give birth in the bathroom at midnight. The next day, the guards saw that my child and I were not doing well, and they sent us to the hospital." Nirupa was also separated from her eldest son, who was just two years old at the time, and was held with his father - she says the experience traumatized him as he experienced "terrible conditions" and witnessed a guard beating a prisoner. When the guards brought him back to her, she says, he did not recognize her. "He was scared and screaming and crying. He didn't understand what was happening. He didn't want to talk to anyone."

She says it took a long time for him to accept his mother, and even after they arrived in Turkey, he would not leave her side for a moment. "It really took him a long time to understand that he had finally arrived in a safe place." Thailand has never explained why the remaining Uyghurs have not been allowed to join their families in Turkey, but it is almost certainly due to pressure from China. Unlike other prisoners in the IDC, the fate of the Uyghurs is not handled by the immigration bureau, but by Thailand's National Security Council, which is chaired by the prime minister and where the military has a major influence. As the influence of the US, Thailand's oldest military ally, wanes, China's influence is steadily growing. The current Thai government is eager to forge closer ties with China to help revive its struggling economy.

The UN Refugee Agency has been criticized for doing little to help the Uyghurs, but says it has no access to them and is therefore powerless. Thailand does not recognize refugee status. However, satisfying China's desire to have the Uyghurs returned is not without risk. Thailand has just won a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, for which it actively lobbied. Deporting 48 men who have already suffered more than a decade of imprisonment would severely damage the image the Thai government is trying to project. Thailand will also be aware of what happened just a month after the last mass deportation in 2015.

On August 17 of that year, a powerful bomb exploded at a shrine in Bangkok popular with Chinese tourists. Twenty people were killed, and it was widely seen as retaliation by Uyghur militants, although Thai authorities have tried to downplay the connection. Two Uyghur men were charged in connection with the bombing, but their trial has dragged on for nine years with no end in sight. Their lawyers say one of them is almost certainly innocent. The trial is shrouded in secrecy; authorities seem unwilling to let any information about the hearings related to the deportations leak out. Even those Uyghurs who manage to reach Turkey must cope with their precarious status there, and the loss of all contact with their families in Xinjiang.

"I haven't heard my mother's voice in ten years," says Hasan Imam, a Uyghur refugee now working as a truck driver in Turkey. He was among the same group caught at the Malaysian border with Nirupa in 2014. He remembers how the Thai authorities tricked them the following year into believing they were planning to deport some of them to China. He says they were told that some people would be moved to a different facility because the one they were in was too crowded. This was after some women and children had been sent to Turkey, and unusually, the men in the camp were also allowed to speak to their wives and children in Turkey on the phone.

"We were all happy and full of hope," Hasan says. "They picked them out one by one. At that point, they didn't know they were going to be sent back to China. It was only later, through an illegal phone we had, that we learned from Turkey that they had been deported." Hasan recalls that this left the rest of the detainees in despair, and two years later, when he was temporarily moved to another detention camp, he and 19 others managed to escape using nails to make a hole in a crumbling wall. Eleven were recaptured, but Hasan managed to cross the heavily forested border into Malaysia and from there, to Turkey.

"I don't know how my parents are, but it's worse for those who are still detained in Thailand," he says. They fear being sent back to China and imprisoned - and they also fear that this will mean harsher punishment for their families, he explains. "The mental pressure they are under is unbearable."