By Alistair Dennis – To the casual observer of Thai politics, the police investigations behind the August 17 bombing of the famous Erawan shrine were expected to reveal, if not ISIS involvement, then the involvement of Muslim insurgents based in the south or of the junta’s political opposition, the so-called ‘Red Shirts’. That the capital’s police force eventually revealed the culprits to be Chinese Uighurs, came as nothing short of a surprise.
The Uighurs hail from Xinjiang province in the westernmost reaches of China, an area accounting for around a sixth of the nation’s entire land mass, and are a people of Turkish descent with close cultural ties to Ankara. Lying so far from Southeast Asia, they have no historical contention with Thailand, although relations with their masters in Beijing are decidedly frosty.With Beijing’s aggressive attempts to culturally absorb the Uighurs into the rest of the nation, attempts which bullishly ignore the very different socio-political and cultural contexts of the region, the native separatist movement has only gone from strength to strength. Local police have tried to forcefully integrate the Uighurs by pushing the sale of alcohol and cigarettes, while severely limiting their rights to practice the Muslim faith. Beijing has also been relocating thousands of Han Chinese to Xinjiang (the proportion rose from 5 percent in the 1940s to 40 percent in 2014), while at the same time phasing out the Uighur language in schools. In short, in Xinjiang, Beijing has been conducting for decades one of the most patient exercises in ethno-cultural cleansing ever witnessed.
As such, it’s no small wonder that Xinjiang has been the scene of several bloody events over the past few years. Anti-Han sentiment culminated with the 2009 Urumqi riots that led to the deaths of 197 people and the injury of almost 2000, after a series of protests turned bloody. Afterwards, the resistance movement changed tactics. In 2014, a deadly knife attack at a train station in Kunming orchestrated by a group of 10 Uighurs killed 29 and wounded 130. The attack was followed by a bomb explosion at a train station in Urumqi and a bomb attack in an outdoor market, claiming the lives of at least 34 and wounding scores more.
This very tense situation has given rise to a massive wave of Uighurs fleeing China’s borders. Evidently, China does not look kindly upon its neighbors harboring these ‘political criminals’, as it calls them, and firm requests are made to return Uighur migrants to China’s borders wherever they are discovered. And this is where Thailand stepped into the fray.
Earlier this summer, 109 illegal Uighur migrants who had been discovered living in squalid conditions in the south of Thailand were forcibly repatriated to China. And while the relevant NGOs raised their hands in protest at this breach of human rights, those more familiar with Thai politics raised only an eyebrow. In the case of the Uighurs, however, Thailand’s blasé and mercenary approach to human rights looks to have backfired spectacularly, and retaliation at the Erawan shrine came as an utterly brutal wake-up call.
The bombing, the kind of atrocity that the Thai authorities would typically leap upon as an opportunity to justify their stifling of civil society, has brought an unwelcome focus upon the Uighur question. The Chinese, on the other hand, have no such compunction upon them to manage international opinion. There are already indications that Beijing plans retaliation on the back of the Bangkok bombing, with further restrictions upon the freedom of the Uighur people justified by a faux commitment to protect the security of neighboring states. Not only do they have a domestic mandate to commit more crimes against the Uighur now, but one that ostensibly has international legitimacy as well.
There are historical precedents for Thailand’s behavior in its treatment of illegal immigrants and its almost desperate attempts to keep neighboring powers on its side. It is a proud boast in Thailand that, unlike other Southeast nations, it was never colonized at a time when Britain and France had forcibly laid claim to most of its neighbors. This was less due to a brave defense of the borders, than to playing off threatening nations against each other, giving rise to a system of tribute and changing allegiances as and when required. And much the same is happening right now. The West’s closest Southeast Asian ally during the latter half of the 20th century, Thailand is now desperately trying to balance that time-tested allegiance with a slow swing towards cooperation with China: Asia’s emergent superpower.
In its efforts to juggle the interests of the U.S. and China, Thailand has laid bare its political and ethical weaknesses. Is it a coincidence that Bangkok recently committed to purchasing $1 billion worth of military submarines from China, or that it U-turned on joining the US led Trans Pacific Partnership – an agreement that the junta leader, Prayuth Chan-ocha, has been so vocally opposed to.
Thailand’s duplicity has made possible the coming Chinese crackdown on Uighurs, adding one more count to an ever-growing list of abuses committed by the junta. Partnering the aforementioned violations regarding immigration, there have been serious restrictions on freedom of speech, censorship of the internet, prosecution of any one brave enough to publicly criticize the junta; all under the dubious auspices of the draconian Article 44, which gives the junta absolute power over all governance in response to supposed security threats.
Most telling though was the political theatre handed down on September 6th, after a military council gave the thumbs down to the draft constitution penned by the military. While that document had come under fire from international observers for its undemocratic nature, its rejection should not be celebrated. The junta outlined a 6-4-6-4 timeline to elections, extending its stay in power until 2017 in a move that speaks volumes about Prayuth’s intentions.
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