Thailand repatriates about 100 Uygurs to China, ignoring calls from international community

Thailand sent more than 100 ethnic Uygurs back to China on Thursday, ignoring calls from the international community to protect the group and ensure they were not forced back to face possible persecution by the Chinese government.

Government spokesman Major General Verachon Sukhonthapatipak said Thailand had assurances from Chinese authorities that “their safety is guaranteed”.

He said the group of 109 Uygurs had been in Thailand for more a year, along with others who had arrived in waves claiming to be Turkish. Thai authorities sought to verify all of their nationalities before relocating them, he said.

“We found that about 170 of them were Turkish, so they were recently sent to Turkey,” he said. “And about 100 were Chinese, so they were sent to China as of this morning, under the agreement that their safety is guaranteed according to humanitarian principles.”

The Uygurs are a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority in China’s far west Xinjiang region. The group has complained of cultural and religious suppression as well as economic marginalisation under Beijing’s rule.

Xinjiang, a vast region that shares borders with Russia and seven Central and South Asian countries, is home to about a dozen the ethnic minorities. The largest is the Uygurs, who number about 10 million, while there about 8.5 million Han Chinese, many of them recent settlers.