The New York Review of Books - September 8, 2014
It’s a very long way from China’s arid Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous
Region in the country’s far northwest to its semi-tropical borders with
Vietnam, Laos, and Burma in the south, and then it’s another precarious
distance from there, down rivers and across fortified borders, all the
way to the seaside Thai town of Songkhla, about forty miles from the
Malaysian border. And it’s longer still from Songkhla to the
battlefields of Syria, thousands of miles away. But this town is where
more than two hundred members of the Uighur minority from Xinjiang—many
of them women and children—were arrested by Thai authorities in March
this year. They have been accused, apparently, of planning to wage jihad
in Syria.
Among the many recent stories concerning foreigners setting
out to fight in Syria, the allegations about the Uighurs arrested in
Songkhla stand out. In fact, these people, along with another couple
hundred recent Uighur escapees from China, most of them seized near the
Thai-Cambodia border, signal something new in the movement of refugees
around the world. China’s Uighurs, who now number some ten million and
are concentrated in western China, are a mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking
people that has been increasingly restive under Chinese rule, The signs
are that more and more of them, escorted by well-paid people smugglers,
are making the long, arduous journey south, escaping what they say is
harsh Chinese repression in Xinjiang. They are like other refugees in
this sense, but with one major difference. The Uighurs arriving in
southeast Asia have triggered a tense, mostly behind-the-scenes tug of
war between China, which is pressuring Thailand to send the Uighurs
back, and the West, including the United States, which has entreated the
Thais to reject China’s demand, arguing that giving in to it would
subject the Uighurs to savage mistreatment.
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