Erawan Shrine Bombing: Uyghurs, Turkey, & Passports…or Thailand, Human Trafficking, and Corruption...and Uyghur Patsies?

I’m still an agnostic on the Uyghurs dunnit theory, at least as far as the “aggrieved Uyghurs bombed the Erawan shrine to kill Chinese tourists in revenge for repatriation of Uyghurs to PRC” way.

The only things we know for sure right now is that a) the Thai government is anxious to manage & control this story b) the Thai police leaks like a sieve and c) one has to wonder if the government’s main priority is to put a pretty frame on this story and hang it up as soon as possible.

There appears to be a definite Uyghur element in the case, judging by the detentions of one suspect with a Uyghur name holding a PRC passport (that looks genuine) and another guy with a clumsily forged Turkish passport who, it is suspected, is probably a Uyghur.  Add to that a big stack of bogus Turkish passports--an inescapable element in the conveyor belt of PRC Uyghurs to havens in Turkey--and there's the makings of a plausible Uyghur angle.

Under pressure from the PRC, the Thai government had indeed decided to crack down on human trafficking of Uyghurs through Thailand facilitated by bogus Turkish travel documents.

To reduce the attractiveness of Thailand as a refugee highway, the Thai government decided to repatriate 109 Uyghurs, mainly men but also including 24 women, to the PRC in July 2015.

In order to defuse the outrage of Uyghurs and their sympathizers, the Thai government made a deal with the Turkish government at the same time to send 170 Uyghurs, mainly women and children, to go on to Turkey.  

The latter development went virtually unreported in the Turkish press, which is usually eager to trumpet the Turkish role as protector of the Uyghurs, which leads me to believe the release was soft-pedaled by prior agreement to avoid annoying the PRC.  Given this Turkish government involvement, I tend to discount theories attributing the attack to incensed Turkish hypernationalists a.k.a. The Grey Wolves.

Maybe the Thai government effort to take Thailand out of the Uyghur trafficking picture did not sit well with the Uyghur trafficking networks inside Thailand.  Judging from the people caught in the police dragnet, the traffickers seem to be staffed by Uyghur and Thai Muslims working out of some combination of profit and principle, and maybe they embarked upon a campaign of revenge.

But it seems to me more likely that the attack was linked to an overall crackdown on human trafficking, a business that implicates quite a few people in the Thai government and army.  Uyghurs, in my view, may have executed the bombings...and fulfilled an important role as convenient patsies.

For those of you who, like me, dwell in connect-the-dots-istan, here’s an interesting item from the Guardian from June 2015, in other words in the midst of the Uyghur repatriation effort and two months before the bombing:

Thailand’s state prosecutors are pressing charges against more than 100 people, including an army general, in a multinational human trafficking scandal that came to light after dozens of bodies were discovered in the south of the country earlier this year.

…

“The investigation showed it is a big syndicate. There were networks that brought them [the migrants] from overseas into the country systematically … The office of the attorney general, therefore, treats it as a very important case,” office spokesman Wanchai Roujanavong said.

The discovery has intensified international pressure on Thailand to crack down on smugglers. More than 50 people were arrested in a month, including local politicians, government officials, police, and a senior-ranking army officer who once oversaw human trafficking issues in the south.

Human rights groups have long accused Thai authorities of collusion in the trafficking industry, but officials have routinely denied the claims.

Apparently, “Thai authorities” included an army lieutenant general, Manas Kongpan, who was a kingpin in the south of Thailand, where most of the traffic (mainly of Bengalis and Rohingya to Malaysia) takes place.

The investigation was in the hands of the Thai police, which turned over its report to the Attorney General at the end of June.

Maybe the traffickers and their allies initiated a domestic terror campaign to punish and warn off the Thai government from prosecuting the case too aggressively.

This, to me, is a more convincing explanation of why the Erawan shrine was bombed than the “revenge on Chinese” angle.

If the intent was to kill Chinese tourists, why not bomb…Chinatown?  Why not a vicious attack on “the pilgrim filled Wat Mangkon Kamalawat, Bangkok's most important Chinese temple” as USA Today describes it? Or the Wat Traimit, “Chinatown’s number one attraction”?  For that matter, why not take a swing at the Chinese embassy?

Why set off a bomb near a Hindu shrine next to the Grand Hyatt?

After the bombing, there were several reports of unexploded devices at the scene.  If these reports are true (I haven't seen any followup), it looks like the makings of a “double tap” attack: an initial device goes off, drawing in first responders including police, who are the targets of the secondary devices.

But even if the target of the attack wasn’t the Thai police, I think the target was still Thai, not Chinese: specifically, Thai tourism.  Counting indirect effects, tourism might make up as much of 20% of Thai GDP; a chunk of GDP that is extremely vulnerable to terrorism.

Understandable, then, that the Thai police would be most uninterested in publicly exploring this motive, and encouraging the narrative of an attack on Chinese by aggrieved Uyghurs instead.

The other troublesome issue for the official story, of course, is that nobody has taken credit for the bombing.  No aggrieved Uyghur groups, no ETIM, no ISIS, nobody.  So I draw the inference that whatever beef the bombers had, it’s playing out in private fora, perhaps related to Thai government/security/police policy.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Uyghur-linked human traffickers actually committed the bombing; but maybe there was someone else behind them, assisting them in the construction of these relatively sophisticated devices, setting up escape routes, using them as cats’ paws and fall guys…and in the process publicly rolling up a Uyghur trafficking operation facilitated by Turkey and detested by the PRC that the Thai government had decided could no longer be tolerated.

And I would be inclined to think, given the vulnerability of the Thai tourist sector and the possibility that elements of the Thai security forces might be compromised, that the government might even be working toward some sort of secret accommodation with whoever’s actually behind the bombings. 

And I suspect the avalanche of leaks about this case are designed to roadtest, perfect, and promote a neat narrative that the Thai government hopes will put this ugly incident to bed.

And as for Turkey, preoccupied with its moves against the Kurds, the complex and deadly endgame in Syria, and stagemanaging/bumrushing an extremely dicy election, the AKP's youth wing busy attacking HDP and newspaper offices instead of harassing Chinese, real and perceived, for their offenses against the Uyghurs and Islam, maybe it will also be ready to close the books on its calamitous Uyghur refuge program.

Another Shoe Drops in the Turkish “Passports for Uyghurs” Case

Evidence keeps accummulating that a clandestine Turkish government program to enable Uyghur emigration from the PRC--for motives either noble, sinister, or both--has turned into a major security cock-up, embarrassment for Turkey, and a serious issue in PRC-Turkish relations.

I wrote this on July 11 on the occasion of the forcible repatriation of over one hundred Uyghur men from Thailand to the PRC amid PRC allegations that the Turkish government, in addition to providing diplomatic and consular support to the Uyghurs, had crossed a line by providing fake travel documents:

Please note that the PRC Foreign Ministry, as well as Global Times, were already raising the passport issue at the beginning of 2015.  First the PRC employed the polite fiction that some profit-minded freelancers were selling Turkish passports to Uyghurs; then it was “consulates and embassies of unnamed countries” were dishing out documents; now, unambiguously, the PRC is pointed the finger at the Turkish government.

…

The only remaining grey area is whether all the Uyghur men who end up in Syria are simply hapless “cannon fodder” recruited by jihadis, or whether the Turkish security services identify some particularly capable Uyghur militants, provide documents, and enable travel, training, and battlefield experience in Syria in order to cultivate Turkey-friendly assets in Syria or potentially in AfPak/Central Asia.  Might never get to the bottom of that one, unless the PRC decides to crank up the evidentiary apparatus another notch in order to make sure Western journos finally get the point.

The PRC is busy fleshing out this story, and added the new wrinkle that the Turkish scheme had facilitated terrorist activities within the PRC.

The PRC has embarked on a major push to justify its insistence on what the West has condemned as the refoulement of Uyghur refugees, to allege that the Uyghurs who left the country were not political refugees protected by the principle of non-refoulement; instead, they were illegal emigrants, candidate militants seeking participation in jihad.

The implications for Turkey are embarrassing, since a central allegation of the PRC’s case is that the Uyghurs it wants back from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia etc. were militants recruited and exfiltrated from the PRC by jihadi networks with the collusion of…

...Turkey…

...with the assistance of Turkish embassies and consulates in South Asia…

…and the PRC alleges that some of the refugees were not recruited just to fight against the Assad regime in Syria; they were trained and facilitated to return to the PRC to conduct terror attacks inside China.

That’s a nasty, toxic brew.

The only shoe that hasn’t dropped yet is an open PRC accusation that the passport mischief was organized by the Turkish government in Istanbul, either by its security apparatus as part of its jihadi-related scheming or with knowledge of the government leadership, and not a spontaneous initiative simultaneously kicked off by several Turkish consular offices in South Asia and miraculously complemented by Turkish border police at the airport in Istanbul.

On July 18, Xinhua offered case studies of three Uyghur “illegal immigants” repatriated back to China.  Here are some excerpts:

Memetaili, 25, was the only son in his family. When he was a freshman in a medical school in Urumqi, Xinjiang's regional capital, some people approached him in the name of imparting "religious knowledge." The "textbooks" they used were audio and video materials made by overseas terrorist groups, according to the CCTV report.

After watching the material, Memetaili felt the urge to "sacrifice" for his religious beliefs. The group then introduced him to a "fellow countryman" abroad, who asked Memetaili to join him.

...

He was soon transferred to southwest China and was not allowed to take anything indicating his Chinese nationality with him during the trip.

"I was required to dispose of my clothes that had Chinese on them, my ID card, and even socks," he said.

"They told us if we were arrested in Thailand, we should say we were from Turkey," he said, adding local police could not repatriate them because they had no identification on them.

In Malaysia, Memetaili and other migrants were taken to the Turkish embassy.

"We told the people in the embassy that we were illegal migrants and could not go back, or we would be arrested. They agreed to help us, sent a letter to the Malaysian government and issued identifying papers based on our real names," he said.

With the identification from the Turkish embassy and counterfeit passports they made themselves, they were able to buy air tickets to go to Turkey.

"If we were arrested at the airport, officials from the Turkish embassy would admit that we were their nationals, even though the passports were crudely made," he said.

In Turkey, Memetaili found that several different groups, including the World Uygur Congress and the U.N.-listed terrorist group of Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), were competing to manipulate them.

"Some of us were sent to Syria. If you wanted to join ISIS, some other people would take you there," he said.

[It’s unclear what happened to Memetaili after he became disillusioned with IS in Syria.]

…

[Another case history]

Chinese police arrested several terrorists who sneaked into China and prepared to commit terror and violence in 2015.

Ekber is one of them. He received training from the ETIM in Syria and was sent back to China to conduct terrorist attacks.

…

Ekber first came to Turkey and then Syria, where he received military training for three months. During that period, he learned how to use guns and create explosives.
…
Instigated by "Aili," Ekber went back to China in early 2015 and planned to conduct a terrorist attack in Shijiazhuang, capital city of Hebei Province, which neighbors Beijing.

Ekber was arrested before carrying out the plan.

As a sidebar, I should point out that an important objective of these articles is for the PRC to assert that returned Uyghurs not regarded as guilty of crimes against the PRC are being generously reintegrated into local society, not imprisoned and mistreated, in order to blunt refoulement-related criticism.  Not an unexpected development, at least to China Matters readers, since I wrote this on July 11:

I would expect the central government would arrange for the ostentatious pampering of these refouled Uyghurs (rather than the standard brutal treatment at the hands of the local security outfits in Xinjiang) in order to reconcile neighboring nations to the PRC’s demands.

Alright, enough patting myself on the back.

Meanwhile, the most interesting Uyghur/Turkish passport case continues to provide entertainment and enlightenment in Indonesia.

This case involves four Uyghurs whose passports, unlike Memetaili’s, were so impeccable that the Indonesian police—apparently with no useful assistance from Turkey—have been unable to refute their authenticity.

Three of the Uyghurs were recently convicted in Indonesian court on terrorism charges.

They were suspected of journeying to a remote Indonesian island to attempt to hook up with a notorious Indonesian militant whose organization has reportedly declared fealty to ISIS; and the PRC claims they are implicated in the horrific attack at the Kunming railroad station that left over 30 dead and over 100 wounded.

It is safe to say that nobody is going to try to invoke the principle of refoulement for these guys.

However, possibly to protect the rather tattered secrecy of the passport scheme, the Turkish government is still loathe to withdraw its protection.

Here is the report from BenarNews which, in contrast to pretty much every major outlet, has assiduously followed and reported this most interesting case:

A lawyer for three Uyghur men found guilty of trying to join an Indonesian terrorist group is appealing the verdict, BenarNews has learned.

The appeal was filed Wednesday after consultations with Turkish officials in Jakarta, according to defense attorney Asludin Hatjani.

“The embassy of Turkey sent staff to talk with the four defendants at Brimob Headquarters a day after the verdict. They agreed to appeal and I lodged the appeal yesterday after the talks,” Asludin told BenarNews on Thursday, referring to the police’s Mobile Brigade unit (Brimob).

“Currently we are waiting for a memorandum of appeal from the High Court.”

Turkey’s involvement corroborates that his clients are Turkish, he said.

“I can confirm they are citizens of Turkey, because their documents themselves are still recognized by the embassy and the police. Even the court itself stated their nationality is Turkish,” Asludin said.

During their trial at North Jakarta District Court, the men last month could not sing the Turkish national anthem or name its title when prosecutor Nana Riana challenged them to do so.

“How is it that a citizen doesn’t know the national anthem of his own country? I’m Indonesian. My national anthem is ‘Indonesia Raya,’” Nana said in court on June10.

The men’s citizenship could determine where they are sent once the trial is over, she later told BenarNews.

“Going forward, their citizenship status may influence the extradition agreement between Indonesian officials and the government of Turkey or China,” Nana said.

“If they are not Turkish citizens, possibly the court will destroy their passports.”

Earlier, the National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT) indicated that the four Uyghurs could be extradited to China after their trials.

…

The four are believed to have entered Indonesia using false Turkish passports via Malaysia. During an earlier court session they described taking a motorboat from Malaysia to Pekanbaru, Riau Province, on Sumatra island.

They flew to Jakarta, and visited Bogor and Bandung in Java before flying on to Makassar, in Sulawesi.

Shortly thereafter police arrested the four in Central Sulawesi province. Police said they were on their way to join the Eastern Indonesia Mujahideen (MIT), which is believed to be based in Poso regency in Central Sulawesi.

MIT is believed to have sworn allegiance to IS, and its leader Santoso – Indonesia’s most wanted terrorist – has welcomed foreign mujahideen to join the group, security officials say.

“We have no other intention but vacation,” Basit testified in court.

To sum up the overall “Passports for Uyghurs” affair, the preponderance of evidence indicates that Uyghurs going to Turkey with Turkish consular help is definitely a thing.  The PRC allegations that some of the Uyghurs were recruited and exfiltrated with the help of militants and some Turkish accommodation is, for me, persuasive.  

The possibility that the Turkish government is systematically playing the Uyghur militant card to increase its leverage in the Middle East and Central Asia as yet unproven.  But, motives aside,  it is difficult to entertain the idea that "passports for Uyghurs" was a local brainwave of Turkish consulates and not a decision taken somewhere high up in the Turkish government.

In any case, the Indonesian affairs indicates to me that blowback from the  reckless passport program—enabling pretty unequivocal terrorist activities--has already begun.

It is interesting to look back as recently as two years ago when Western outlets routinely downplayed evidence of Uyghur violence in order to undercut the PRC’s justification for its repressive Uyghur policies in Xinjiang.  In 2013, in covering the “SUV with Uyghur banners runs over tourists and catches fire in Tiananmen” incident, AFP ran: Uyghurs pour scorn on China Tiananmen ‘terrorist’ claim.

Think that ship has sailed.  Only question is if and how West will reconcile itself to heightened Uyghur militancy against the PRC.

Global Times, in its signature pugnacious style, pushed back against foreign criticism of a bloody security operation in Shenyang on July 13 that left three alleged Uyghur terrorists dead and sixteen detained:

The West never admits they support terrorist forces in Xinjiang. But through the mouth of the ETIM organizations, they clearly expressed their bias toward the terrorists. The terrorists in Xinjiang have been counting on Western support and believe their use of terrorism is justified.

Chinese people are clear that some Western forces are pushing the terrorist activities in Xinjiang.

"Some Western forces."  Hmmm.

Wonder if, for the purposes of PRC invective on Uyghur matters, we should take “West” as “Turkey”.  Or maybe it’s both?  This story isn’t over, so I think we’ll find out sooner or later.

Turkey's "Passports for Uyghurs" Scheme Continues Its Messy Public Unraveling

The year-long tug of war between Turkey and the PRC over several hundred Uyghur detainees in Thailand was finally resolved, Solomonic fashion, by Thailand sending 170+ women and children to Istanbul in early July in a little noticed event, and the deportation of 100+ Uyghur men to the PRC this week, which has occasioned much public ballyhoo, some nasty incidents inside Turkey, and toothless (and, I expect somewhat less than wholehearted) official execration by the US and the EU.

A most interesting sidebar to the Thailand story has been the wheels coming off the reckless Turkish passports-to-Uyghurs scheme.

To humblebrag here, I was one of the few to note and write about over the last few months, starting in February and here, and here in April, as well as my recent epic Turkey/Uyghur backgrounder.

 

To complement recent (well, as recent as a day or two before) public references to unnamed foreign countries providing documentation to Uyghurs, a Public Security Bureau official went on record to brief foreign journos that, yes, it is Turkey.

Hat tip to @akahnnyc for the link.  Thanks!

Please note that the PRC Foreign Ministry, as well as Global Times, were already raising the passport issue at the beginning of 2015.  First the PRC employed the polite fiction that some profit-minded freelancers were selling Turkish passports to Uyghurs; then it was “consulates and embassies of unnamed countries” were dishing out documents; now, unambiguously, the PRC is pointed the finger at the Turkish government.

In my opinion, the PRC is in a strong position.  I expect it hopes that by laying out its case it will gain the understanding of the Western media that Turkey really is doing something stupid and dangerous by enabling the flight of Uyghur malcontents who might end up fighting in Syria or worse.

Looks like Reuters might need a few repeat treatments to get the message.  It reports on the PSB backgrounder, throws in some persecuted Uyghur tropes, and completely misses the fact that the deportation of the 100 Uyghur men to the PRC by the Thai government was preceded by allowing 170 women and children among the detainees to fly to Istanbul the week before.

“Turkish embassies in Southeast Asia will give them proof of identity,” Tong Bishan, division chief of the Ministry of Public Security’s Criminal Investigation Department, told a small group of foreign reporters in Beijing on Saturday.

“They are obviously Chinese but they will give them identities as Turkish nationals.”

…
Tong said that hundreds of Uyghurs had been given documents by Turkish diplomats, especially in Kuala Lumpur, and then allowed into Turkey.

Neither the Turkish Foreign Ministry nor the Turkish embassy in Kuala Lumpur were able to immediately provide comment.

The accusation is likely to further anger Ankara, already alarmed by the return of more than 100 Uyghurs to China from Thailand this week.

…
But upon arriving, Uyghurs have no chance of finding legal work and some end up with extremist groups, Tong said, like the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which Beijing accuses of waging an insurrection campaign in Xinjiang to set up their own state.

“They are very easily controlled by certain local forces, especially the East Turkestan Islamic Movement and other terrorist groups. They organize the youths, they brainwash them, and get them to the front line to fight. They are cannon fodder,” Tong said.

“There is competition for them. Some are sent to Iraq, some to Syria. The terrorist groups there lack people. They will snatch people away. The terrorist groups will pay, at least $2,000 a person. It’s their way of recruiting soldiers.”

That Mr. Tong knows what he’s talking about, I think.  The outlines of this story have been clear for months.  

The only remaining grey area is whether all the Uyghur men who end up in Syria are simply hapless “cannon fodder” recruited by jihadis, or whether the Turkish security services identify some particularly capable Uyghur militants, provide documents, and enable travel, training, and battlefield experience in Syria in order to cultivate Turkey-friendly assets in Syria or potentially in AfPak/Central Asia.  Might never get to the bottom of that one, unless the PRC decides to crank up the evidentiary apparatus another notch in order to make sure Western journos finally get the point.

Clearly, the PRC does not intend to yield on the issue of “refoulement” (the forcible return to nasty home countries of refugees, a humanitarian no-no, and the default US/EU stance on the handling of Uyghur refugees*) and is doing its best to reduce the political heat for Thailand and other countries, such as Malaysia and Indonesia, that hold Uyghur refugees and might want to get rid of them.  Per the Reuters piece.

The Bangkok-based newspaper The Nation, quoting a Thai Foreign Ministry release, reported on Friday that the Chinese government has invited Thai government officials to visit China to observe its treatment of the Uyghur migrants sent back to the country in an attempt to quash rumours that they were severely punished or killed.

The National Security Council of Thailand would consider inviting representatives of international organisations such as International Committee of the Red Cross to travel to China with the government officials.

The Thai ministry’s statement said that the Chinese government had reassured the Thai government that it would treat those people with fairness and guarantee their safety.

Moreover, care would be taken of those found not guilty and they would be returned to society. They would also be provided with farmlands, the Chinese government said.

I’m sure there’s a lot of snickering about this, but the PRC wants Uyghurs back and without hope of overseas recourse, havens, or foreign humanitarian hand-wringing.  I would expect the central government would arrange for the ostentatious pampering of these refouled Uyghurs (rather than the standard brutal treatment at the hands of the local security outfits in Xinjiang) in order to reconcile neighboring nations to the PRC’s demands.

The facts that the AKP & MHP youth wings have been harassing the Thai embassy, and the PRC has now essentially gone public with its accusations against Turkey indicate that Turkey was not completely satisfied with the partial release and the PRC is not completely happy with Turkey’s attitude.

But the fact that nobody is talking about the obvious “women & children go/men go back” deal is an indication that the mutual rancor is still contained.  (Here, by the way, is a Daily Sabah story on the 173 women and children after they arrived in Turkey. Note the line: “The rising oppression by the Chinese government and the effects of famine on Uighurs has left nearly 35 million people dead.”  There are only 11 million Uyghurs in the PRC, and the 35 million death toll looks like the China-wide count from the Great Leap Forward/Great Famine of the 1950s; it’s a rather unsettling that such a shaky grasp of the Uyghur situation in the PRC is apparently received wisdom in the mainstream Turkish media.)

There are several other difficult Uyghur refugee cases pending.

There's one, in Indonesia, that looks like pure dynamite that might blow up in Turkey's face.

Judging by reports to date, Turkey allegedly provided passports to Uyghurs implicated in the notorious Kunming railway station outrage (33 dead, 100+ wounded).  Said Uyghurs, instead of docilely flying to Turkey, surrendering their beautiful Turkish passports, and proceeding to the slums of Kayseri (the town in Turkey designated as the haven for Uyghur refugees), appear to have snuck into Indonesia via Malaysia and attempted to hook up with a notorious Muslim militant on a remote island; a militant, by the way, whose organization reportedly declared its allegiance to ISIS.  

Yes, it’s that tasty.

Four men—holding impeccable Turkish passports and insisting they are those Turkish people even though they couldn’t remember the birthdates on the passports—are currently on trial in Indonesia under these charges.  And, no, the Indonesian government is not happy, and has publicly stated it expects to ship the four back to PRC after the trial.

The Turkish embassy is busy dodging the obvious question of whether it will affirm the four as Turkish citizens despite what I expect is compelling evidence provided by the PRC that they are Uyghur citizens of the PRC known to the Public Security Bureau, or whether it’s better to throw in the towel and acknowledge that, yes, they are Uyghur militants who got Turkish passports from some Turkish embassy and started running around Asia in search of mischief.

Fact is, I wouldn’t be surprised if the brouhaha surrounding the refoulement of the 100 Uyghur men back to PRC isn’t part of a Turkish government strategy to dodge the public relations fallout from the Indonesian case.  You know, “We need to shift the frame away from ‘Turkish government irresponsibly gives undetectable travel documents to Muslim terrorists.’  Instead, let’s push ‘China persecutes innocent Uyghur brothers.  And we’ll use the deal we just made with the Chinese…to dump on the Chinese!’”  This, to me, seems like an Erdogan-type brainwave.  And the PRC response is, “Hey, Turkey’s just another crappy authoritarian regime like us.  They can’t get away with that!  Get Tong out to background the Western journos on the passport thing.”

The Uyghur project is obviously important to Turkey politically and, potentially, as a geopolitical play in Central Asia.  Whether the Turkish government is going to suck it up, repudiate the passport program, and leave the Uyghurs to the untender mercies of the PRC government remains to be seen.

But Turkey is playing with fire here.  And I expect the PRC will be relentless in its pursuit of, at least, Uyghur men detained in Asian countries in order to forestall their passage to Turkey.

* In an interesting sidelight, does anybody remember the Uyghurs at Guantanamo?  It’s important because the United States committed itself to the principle of non-refoulement of Uyghur refugees even as the US tacitly green-lit harsh PRC measures in Xinjiang—with the implication that Uyghur dissent was terrorism--as GWOT-justified responses.

The Bush administration harbored sympathies for Uyghur aspirations even as it scooped up Uyghurs for detention and interrogation at Guantanmo.  The Uyghurs were quickly judged to be no threat to the United States even though some of them had received some training in AQ camps in Afghanistan, under the logic that, if they were terrorists, they were anti-PRC terrorists a.k.a. “non-enemy combatants”.  So it was decided they could not be sent back to the PRC because of the fear of torture.  

So the Uyghurs became “non-enemy combatants" and "refugees protected by the principle of non-refoulement".  Which apparently did not protect them from interrogation by PRC security officers after the Guantanamo administration had obligingly softened them up with some sleep deprivation (a technique apparently learned from the experience of US POWs interrogated by the PRC during the Korean War!).  

President Bush tried to release the Uyghur detainees to other countries, but ran into ferocious PRC pressure on any country that dared considered receiving them.  So the Uyghurs were assigned for indefinite detention in low-security facilities at Gitmo. President Obama considered the Uyghur detainees to be the low-hanging fruit of his close-Guantanamo campaign.  But, when he tried to release some of them into the United States (a prerequisite required by other countries to take some Uyghur detainees themselves), he ran into a carefully-constructed and extremely hypocritical and dishonest Republican buzzsaw.  Full facts--including the eruption of Newt Gingrich s the enthusiastic pointman for the sabotage operation-- only at China Matters, natch.   Most if not all of the Uyghur detainees have now been released, I believe.

The PRC has tacitly accepted the principle of non-refoulement as it pertains to Tibetan refugees, who get to continue on to Dharmsala if they "touch base" at a safe harbor in Katmandu, Nepal (This unpublicized deal is the key "canary in the coal mine" for US-PRC engagement on Tibet, especially as the PRC gets less cooperative with the US and more assertive with Nepal.)

But the PRC isn't going to accept a similar arrangement for Uyghur refugees as it, rather understandably, deems the security risks unacceptable.

Below the fold, an update I posted the day before, when the first shoe dropped on the passport issue, courtesy of Global Times.  And, hey, if you want to understand the role of the Uyghur issue in Turkish politics and regional strategy—and the Uyghur element in Erdogan’s gonzo medieval cosplay honor guard—I suggest, humblebragging again, that you read my long, in-depth piece from July 1.