Ethnic Uighur women grab at a riot policeman as they protest in Urumqi in July 2009. Rights activists expressed outrage Sunday at Cambodia's decision to deport to China a group of 20 Muslim Uighurs who had sought refuge after unrest in the Chinese region of Xinjiang.
(AFP/File/Peter Parks)By Chris Dade
Dec 20, 2009
Digital Journal
Protests from both the U.S. and the United Nations have failed to stop the authorities in Cambodia from returning 20 Uighurs, who had sought asylum in the Southeast Asian country, to China.
In July as many as 200 people, if not more, were killed when some 1,000 Uighurs, Turkic-speaking Muslims who live mainly in Western China, attacked or clashed with, accounts appear to vary on how the violence began, the majority Han Chinese population in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
Digital Journal reported on the riots at the time but the estimated death toll has risen since that report.
Following the violence, and with two children amongst them, 20 Uighurs made their way to Cambodia, where they applied for asylum at the UN refugee office.
According to UPI the Uighurs arrived in Cambodia with the assistance of a Christian group that is usually concerned with helping North Koreans.
But now, despite protests from the U.S. and UN, the Times of India says that the UN actually sent people to Phnom Penh International Airport to try and physically prevent the deportations, and a warning from Amnesty International that the Uighurs may be tortured once they return to China, the Cambodian authorities on Saturday put the 20 asylum seekers on a plane headed for the country from which they had escaped.
The part the deportees played in July's violence, if they played any part at all, has not been made clear, but several other Uighurs implicated in the rioting by the Chinese authorities have received death sentences.
A spokesman for the Cambodian Interior Ministry confirmed that two other Uighurs who had disappeared whilst in the country would also be returned to China if or when they are found.
Al Jazeera quotes a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Cambodia as saying of the deportations:
The Cambodian government is implementing its immigration law. They came to Cambodia illegally without any passports or visas, so we consider them illegal immigrants
Koy Kuong, the spokesman in question, referred to the Uighurs as having links with "international terrorist organization".
Fears for the Uighurs had grown in recent days as they were kept in a compound that had a round-the-clock guard, although their applications for asylum had not been fully assessed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The Commission has called the actions of the government in Cambodia, a country that was caught up in the Vietnam War and saw many of its own citizens seeking asylum during the 1970s as they escaped the murderous regime of Pol Pot, a "grave breach of international refugee law''.
U.S. State Department officials were said to have spoken with the Cambodian government urging it not to carry out the deportations yet it seems that pressure from Beijing to return 20 people China has described as "criminals" was just too great to resist.
The Times of India explains that China is Cambodia's largest foreign investor and the expulsion of the Uighurs virtually coincided with a four-day visit to Cambodia by Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping.
China's Uighur population has long complained of a lack of rights, particularly in respect of their ability to practice their Islamic religion.
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