Is anywhere in the world still safe for China’s Uighurs?

Amannisa Abdullah was in the last weeks of her pregnancy when her husband, Ahmad Talip, was arrested in Dubai. ‘He was on his way to buy a dress for our unborn girl,’ she says. Ahmad, who had lived and worked in Dubai for nearlyten years, never arrived at the shop and his family have not seen him since. He was held at a local police station for several days and then was deported to China in 2018, where he is reportedly in prison. ‘He just disappeared. We don’t know where he is or what he is accused of,’ says Amannisa, who fled to Istanbul.

Ahmad is a Uighur Muslim. His story is not exceptional. Hundreds if not thousands of Uighurs, a severely persecuted minority from western China, have been detained in recent years in the Middle East and in Asian countries. Many of them are secretly deported to China, where they are incarcerated. These forced repatriations are part of China’s campaign against Muslim minorities which, according to the US government and human rights groups, amounts to ethnic genocide. More than a million Uighurs have been held in a vast system of re-educationcamps and prisons in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang. In the camps, Uighurs and other Muslim minorities such as Kazakhs are -indoctrinated and, in some cases, tortured. There are also reports of slave labour and forced sterilisation of women.

For decades, Muslim countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had been safe havens for the Uighur diaspora. But as China’s economic might and global reach grow, governments around the world have started to push Uighurs out of their countries and assist China in its international manhunt.

Since 2017, several thousand Uighur students, workers and businessmen have fled Cairo after Egyptian authorities started a nationwide crackdown.