UNHCR Pressures Thailand After Uyghur Asylum-Seekers Dies in Detention

Thailand’s Immigration Bureau confirmed the death of a 49-year-old Uyghur asylum seeker who had been detained in an Immigration Detention Center in Bangkok for nine years.

Activists in contact with other Uyghur inmates at the Immigration Detention Centre say he had been seriously ill for more than three weeks, but Thai authorities refused to admit him to hospital until he collapsed.

“Aziz Abdullah was coughing and vomiting blood; he couldn’t eat,” says Polat Sayim, the World Uyghur Congress’s Refugees Center’s director in Australia. “A doctor at the IDC examined Aziz and determined that he did not have a true illness and that his condition was normal.”

He was finally taken to the hospital after collapsing, but he died soon after. The hospital’s death certificate lists a lung infection as the cause of death.

Aziz Abdullah was one of more than 350 Uyghur asylum seekers detained in Thailand after fleeing Xinjiang in western China in 2013.

Aziz was a farmer in a remote area of south-western Xinjiang when he arrived in Thailand in late 2013 with his pregnant wife, brother, and seven children. He and his family were attempting to travel to Malaysia and then Turkey when they were intercepted in southern Thailand.

To avoid being repatriated back to China, Aziz and his fellow Uyghurs pretended to be Turkish at the time of their capture.

According to the Turkish Embassy in Bangkok, Turkey is granting citizenship to some Uyghur asylum seekers. Thai authorities allowed 173 of them, including Aziz Abdullah’s wife and children, to be flown to Turkey in early July 2015.

However, China objected strongly, accusing Turkey of interfering in a bilateral issue and of “conniving in illegal immigration activities”.

The Thai government then allowed Chinese embassy officials to visit and assess the asylum-seekers, and on 8 July 2015, defying pleas from the UNHCR and several governments, Thailand forcibly repatriated at least 109 Uyghur men, handcuffed and hooded, back to China.

The Junta leader Gen. Prayut Chan-o-cha defended his decision, claiming that China had asked for all Uyghurs to be repatriated, but he had only sent some.

Thailand Segregates Uyghur Detainees

Until last year, the remaining 50 or so Uyghur detainees were held in detention centers across Thailand, but after three of them escaped, they were all transferred to Bangkok’s notoriously overcrowded Immigration Detention Centre.

According to aid workers, conditions are deplorable, and Uyghur asylum seekers are kept apart from one another, with little contact with the outside world.

According to Chalida Tacharoensuk of the People’s Empowerment Foundation, the detention centre is overcrowded, there is a lack of food, and the food provided is unhealthy.

There is no halal food available to Muslim detainees. The drinks are also filthy; they must drink tap water. There is very little healthcare. If they become ill, they are only given pain relievers or similar medications.

“The death of Aziz is an entirely predictable outcome of the Prayut Government’s policy decision to lock away the Uyghur asylum seekers and, essentially, throw away the key,” said Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch.

According to the UNHCR, it has been denied access to the detainees. For several months, the Thai National Human Rights Commission has been requesting permission to visit the Uyghurs in the IDC.

This month, the UNHCR was finally given a date and will arrive later this week.

The People’s Empowerment Foundation believes that if Thailand was willing to release the Uyghur asylum seekers, they would be very likely to be resettled in a third country.

However, according to a reliable source, the Prayut government is concerned about upsetting China.

Aziz Abdullah’s body was returned to members of Thailand’s Muslim community and buried in a cemetery near the Chao Phraya River in central Bangkok.