Wall Street Journal, 02 February 2021

Below is an article published by the Wall Street Journal. Photo AFP.

Uighurs have traveled to Turkey for decades in search of refuge from political and religious repression, but recent arrests and a proposed extradition treaty with China are making many fear the country is no longer a haven.

While arrests of Uighurs, mostly on allegations related to terrorism, have been occurring in Turkey for several years, they have escalated in recent months, lawyers say. The most recent were Jan. 18, when police in Istanbul detained three Uighurs in a counterterrorism raid.

“We are all panicking now,” said Melike, whose husband was among those detained. “We cannot sleep at night.”

Local police accused her husband, Abdullah Metseydi, of engaging in terrorism, said Melike, who asked to withhold her surname, which is different from her husband’s. One officer said her husband had conducted “activities against China,” she said, before he was taken to a deportation center, where he remains.

Turkey’s Interior Ministry, which oversees the national police force, didn’t reply to a request for comment.

Many of the Uighurs living in Turkey have fled repression in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, where authorities have rolled out a network of internment camps and high-tech surveillance in recent years to control local Turkic Muslim minority groups.

The arrests are occurring as Turkey seeks to boost ties with China, a welcome investor and lender as Turkey’s economy strains under soaring inflation and foreign-currency debt. In 2018, when Turkey’s lira collapsed, partly because of U.S. sanctions, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China stepped in with a $3.6 billion loan.

Straddling Europe and Asia, Turkey is eager to leverage trade opportunities through Beijing’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road initiative, a sprawling infrastructure project that includes a transnational railway running from Istanbul to Xi’an in northwestern China.

As wealthier countries compete with one another for limited supplies of Western Covid-19 vaccines, Turkey is also relying on Chinese drugmaker Sinovac to supply 50 million doses of its coronavirus shot.

Uighurs in Turkey worry that as Beijing’s leverage over their host country grows, Turkey could be pushed into deporting them back to China, which has framed its policies in Xinjiang as necessary to combat terrorists and religious extremists. Their fears have only heightened as Turkey and China move closer to passing an extradition treaty, though the Turkish government has repeatedly denied it would be used to extradite innocent Uighurs.

“We do not use the Uighur Turks politically. We defend their human rights,” Turkey’s minister of foreign affairs said at a news conference in December in response to a question about the treaty.

Chinese lawmakers ratified the extradition agreement in December, following Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s signature on the treaty in 2019. But the agreement still needs approval from Turkish Parliament, which reconvened last week. That means the treaty could enter the legislative body’s agenda as early as this month.

Many in the country view Uighurs as part of a broad family of ethnic Turks, given their shared historical and cultural ties—a kinship that has made Turkey one of the most outspoken advocates for Uighurs among Muslim countries.

Still, increasing arrests have left Uighurs stuck in deportation centers in terrorism cases that lawyers have criticized as opaque, casting doubt on reassurances made by the Turkish government. Those suspected of terrorism are arrested without any information about the specific crimes they are accused of, said lawyers with Uighur clients. One said he had a client last year who was never formally charged with terrorism but was sent to a deportation center anyway.

Like many foreigners in Turkey accused of terrorism, Uighurs are first sent to deportation centers before allegations are thoroughly investigated, said Mehmet Okatan, a lawyer who had more than 20 Uighur clients last year with that experience. Many are eventually released because of a lack of evidence, but the accused, including children and elderly people, can languish in deportation centers for as long as a year, he said.

“They suffer in multiple ways,” said law professor Ilyas Doğan, who is advising Melike’s husband. Foreigners detained in deportation centers are stripped of their residency permit, which means they can’t work or apply for Turkish citizenship, even once they are released, lawyers said. It can take more than a year to obtain a new permit, Mr. Doğan said.

According to Mr. Doğan, the number of Uighurs arrested and sent to deportation centers has increased significantly during the past four months. Mr. Okatan estimates that more than a hundred Uighurs have been detained in the past half-year. The Wall Street Journal couldn’t independently verify the number of Uighurs detained.

While other foreigners are targeted by police in counterterrorism raids, especially after a deadly 2017 attack on an Istanbul nightclub later attributed to an Uzbek citizen, the number of Uighurs arrested is disproportionately high, said Halim Yilmaz, an Istanbul-based lawyer.

“If I have three Uighur clients in the detention centers, when they are released, I know I’ll have three more,” said Mr. Yilmaz, who has nearly 30 active Uighur clients detained on terrorism allegations.

“When we first came, Turkey embraced us,” said 24-year-old Melike, who moved to Turkey in 2014 to practice religion more freely. Now, she said, she worries her husband could be deported back to China.

Melike said she and her husband have attended a protest outside the Chinese consulate in Istanbul but that she doesn’t know why he has been accused of plotting against China. Her husband talked to his brother in Syria about three years ago, she said, which could also account for the terrorism allegations.

After initially denying that the Xinjiang internment camps existed, China’s government has come to describe them as “vocational training centers” aimed at poverty alleviation and deradicalization. Overseas Uighurs, including many of the estimated 30,000 to 50,000 in Turkey, have fought back fiercely against that assertion, relaying stories of relatives feared to have been abused or to have died inside the camps.

Uighur exiles have also protested in front of their local Chinese embassy or consulate. For more than two weeks in December and January, demonstrators gathered every day outside the consulate in Istanbul, according to one of the organizers.

If the extradition treaty is passed, China could silence Uighurs in Turkey by asking that its political opponents be extradited for whatever crime it wants, said Mr. Okatan, one of the lawyers who has represented Uighurs threatened with deportation.

For now, deportations are the exception, not the norm, he said, though as lawyers, “We always have to be on watch.”