Yesterday I speculated
that the plethora of fraudulent Turkish passports showing up in the hands of
Uyghur refugees could be attributed to the connivance of Turkish government
elements. The passports, after all, are smart-chipped
biometric documents (in order to satisfy EU requirements as part of the Turkish
admission campaign), and seem virtually impossible to forge without the
participation of some quasi-official actor.
I should also add that Malaysia, the primary channel for
Uyghur refugees traveling to Turkey on faked documents, is also the world’s
pioneer in biometric passports, having instituted the system in 1998. It is also a primary channel for Uyghurs
seeking refuge in Turkey. It would seem
unlikely that human trafficking of Uyghurs would rely on trying to sneak a
non-biometric Turkish passport past Malaysian immigration and emigration (although,
it must be admitted that Malaysia, with two million illegal immigrants, is
suspected of having a few holes in its border security game. Notoriously, one of the passengers on the
vanished flight MH 370 turned out to be an identity thief traveling on a stolen
Austrian biometric passport).
In any case, the record appears mixed. Some Uyghurs who purchased their passports in
SE Asia, got to Malaysia, and then tried to fly out to Turkey reported that
their passports were identified as forged.
It is unclear whether this was a problem with the biometrics
or lack thereof, some other forensic clue such as a suspicious or incomplete travel
record, or simply the travelers’ inability to speak English, Turkish, or for
that matter any other language intelligible to the Malay border authorities. These refugees were detained inside Malaysia but
ultimately allowed to proceed to Turkey through the intercession of the Turkish
embassy. Other Uyghurs, as we shall see,
acquired passports that, indisputably, appear totally genuine.
As the reported number of Uyghurs fleeing the PRC and seeking
to exploit Turkish passports and good offices swelled into the high hundreds,
the PRC mounted a counter-offensive. It
exposed a scheme to sell Turkish passports to Uyghurs inside the PRC. In a telling detail, post sale and
pre-delivery the passports had to be mailed to Turkey, presumably to create the
biometric record on the smart chip to match the customer.
Turkey’s police chief visited the PRC in early February to
smooth things over and promise closer cooperation on the “human trafficking”
front. Subsequently, Turkey backed away
from an official call to Thailand to send on 154 stranded Uyghurs to Turkey;
the Uyghurs are currently on hunger strike protesting their treatment and
imploring Turkish assistance.
I saw an unconfirmed report on Twitter today that Indonesia
had repatriated two Uyghurs to the PRC, joining Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand,
Vietnam, and Afghanistan on the list of countries that have apparently obliged
the PRC on this issue.
Certainly, there’s the possibility that the Turkish
authorities have knowledge, and maybe guilty foreknowledge, of what’s being
done with what are supposed to be highly secure and closely controlled
documents. I would not be surprised if,
behind the scenes, there is not a depressing and degrading ritual going on,
where contrite Turkish intelligence is handing over a list of faked passports
to Asian security departments, and asking that the
investigation/apprehension/disposition of the document holders be conducted
with a minimum of publicity.
Unlike what’s happening, for instance, in Indonesia at this
time concerning the Sulawesi Four.
Last September, Indonesia detained four men who had Turkish
passports and claimed to be Turks but, it transpired, were unable to speak
Turkish. The four are still insisting on
their Turkish nationality, but are suspected of being Uyghurs. They will go on trial in a month or so on the
charge of attempting to join Muslim insurrectionist and Indonesia’s most-wanted,
Santoso, and his Mujahidin Indonesia Timur (which, according to its media wing,
“MIT Press” declared allegiance to ISIS on July 1, 2014). During the trial, presumably, their
nationality will get sorted out to Indonesia’s satisfaction.
In February 2015, the head of Indonesia’s National
Counterterrorism Agency, Saut Usman, visited Beijing and stated that it was “likely”
that the suspects would be extradited to the PRC.
The PRC has publicly linked the detainees to the Kunming
railway station massacre. It is possible
that this is simply PRC propaganda meant to demonize all Uyghur refugees in the
service of the PRC’s campaign to browbeat its neighbors into returning detained
Uyghurs.
It’s also possible that it is true (some attributed the
Kunming massacre to a group of would-be emigres who were frustrated by their
inability to cross the border into Vietnam and mounted a suicidal attack instead)
and this particular bunch was able to escape and followed its genuine militant
inclinations to extremist camps in Indonesia instead of the path to cultural
and religious self-expression and fulfillment in Turkey.
It should be said that Central Sulawesi, where the suspects
were apprehended, is a remote corner of the Indonesian archipelago (it’s the
island that looks like a starfish running into Borneo), apparently with little
that that might attract the interest of a Xinjiang-born and oasis-raised Uyghur
refugee save Santoso’s terrorist group.
In any case, something of a black mark and embarrassment for
Turkey if its passports implicated in a terrorist narrative involving both
Indonesia and the PRC.
So let’s look at what’s been reported about those Turkish
passports.
On September 22, shortly after the four suspects were
apprehended (apparently for the crime of looking suspicious driving around in a
car, trying to run away when stopped, and then having absolutely no good story
about who they were and what they were doing), Indonesian
National Police (Polri) spokesman Brigadier General Boy Rafli Amar told reporters:
[P]olice are waiting for information from the Turkish embassy
regarding the originality of the passports that police confiscated from the
foreign nationals. If the passports are false, Amar said, this would strengthen
Polri suspicions of Indonesian terrorism receiving international support.
"It's impossible for a passport to be falsified like that. We will coordinate with Thai and Malaysian police if that proves to be the case. There are certainly [foreign] players involved," Amar said.
"We want to confirm whether the passports were registered or not. We are waiting for a written response from the Turkish embassy," Amar explained.
He noted that this was important in order to determine whether there was an international false passport syndicate that was making it easy for foreigners to travel between countries.
"This is to confirm whether the passports used to enter Indonesia were false, and [if so] who the syndicate for making these false passports is. We don't want lots of people coming here in this way. This is troubling, so we must cooperate to stop the production of false passports," he said.
Alert readers will note that the likelihood that these are forged passports i.e. created by some private sector criminal goombah is vanishingly small. These are genuine documents put in the hands of people who are apparently not supposed to have them.
"It's impossible for a passport to be falsified like that. We will coordinate with Thai and Malaysian police if that proves to be the case. There are certainly [foreign] players involved," Amar said.
"We want to confirm whether the passports were registered or not. We are waiting for a written response from the Turkish embassy," Amar explained.
He noted that this was important in order to determine whether there was an international false passport syndicate that was making it easy for foreigners to travel between countries.
"This is to confirm whether the passports used to enter Indonesia were false, and [if so] who the syndicate for making these false passports is. We don't want lots of people coming here in this way. This is troubling, so we must cooperate to stop the production of false passports," he said.
Alert readers will note that the likelihood that these are forged passports i.e. created by some private sector criminal goombah is vanishingly small. These are genuine documents put in the hands of people who are apparently not supposed to have them.
AFP reported that the passports had been acquired at a cost of US$1000 per in Bangkok.
The passports are indistinguishable from the real thing, so
the only way to get to the bottom is to get Turkey to ‘fess up, as the National
Police Command’s spokesperson indicated:
Riyanto said based on the initial results of investigation it was found
that information they gave was different from data in the documents they
carried.
“So, we are still interrogating them further. As an example one of the
suspects said he is 19 years old but according to his passport he is 27 years
old,” he said.
“We are still studying whether the information that they gave is true
or not. And if they are really Turkish their departure from that country was
not registered,” he said.
In view of that he said the police would coordinate with the
immigration office and Turkish embassy to confirm the validity of their
passports.
…
“We suspect that they have used fake passports. They had claimed to
have come from Turkey, but no record exists of their departure from that
country,” said Agus Riyanto.
Turkish embassy to
investigate their background," national police spokesman Ronny Sompie told
AFP.
In other words, not only are the passports authentic; the
information they contain--presumably the biometrics--are apparently close enough that it can’t be proved that the
document holders are in fact not the people their documents say they are.
Puzzling problem. Who’s
got an answer?
It’s interesting to speculate what nervous finger drumming, thoughtful
tea sipping, and/or defensive desk pounding this state of affairs may elicit in
the concerned Turkish departments. But apparently
at this point Turkey is still letting the defendants stew in their own juice,
neither confirming nor denying that they are aliens improperly holding Turkish
passports.
As to “passport-gate”, it appears unlikely that third party
actors would possess the wherewithal to encode and properly encrypt the
biometric chips. If the passport-faking goes down to the chip (which, in the scheme uncovered by the PRC, it apparently did), it would seem to me the
only question is whether the suppliers are merely a venal ring of greedy
bureaucrats; Turkish intelligence; or some weird, ad hoc combination of the
two, some deniable operation to serve up passports to Uyghurs in the service of
Turkish ambitions to act as mother and father to the Turkic peoples of the
world.
And it would also seem to me that this has the makings of a scandal
and embarrassment for the Erdogan government.
It’s bad enough if Turkish official document controls are so
lax that freebooters can encode and sell high-tech biometric passports by the
dozens if not hundreds or thousands.
That’s not going to please the EU which, after all, mandates the biometric
passport system in order to achieve a certain level of security, control, and
accountability.
If, on the other hand, it is suspected that some
quasi-official Turkish operation is issuing authentic documents to facilitate
the cross-border travel of individuals who might be persecuted refugees but
also embittered exiles looking for extremist havens, training, and support,
well that’s not going to please anyone.
Not the PRC, not the EU, and not the US.