The South China Sea by Bill Hayton

Author:Bill Hayton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300186833
Publisher: Yale University Press

CHAPTER 7

Ants and Elephants

Diplomacy

DUSK IN PHNOM PENH, Friday, 18 December 2009. Twenty members of China's Uyghur minority are resting in an apartment provided by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). They fled the eastern province of Xinjiang following clashes between Muslim Uyghurs and Han Chinese the previous July in which at least 200 people had been killed. After tense journeys through Vietnam and Laos the Uyghurs might have felt safe. The day before, Cambodia's Prime Minister, Hun Sen, had signed a sub-decree committing his country to international standards in dealing with refugees and asylum seekers. This was a surprise: the decree had been delayed for several years and diplomats didn't expect it to be signed for several more months. Why the urgency?

The Uyghurs’ presence in the city had become common knowledge two weeks earlier after the World Uyghur Congress had publicised their plight to the Washington Post. Unusually, the Chinese government made little public comment about the issue – despite regarding Uyghur activists as ‘splitists’ and religious extremists. When asked about the group on 8 December, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman noted China's friendly relationship with Cambodia and called for ‘enhanced cooperation to fight terrorism’ – but her comments were omitted from the official transcript.1 On 15 December she said only that members of the group ‘were involved in crimes’ and were being investigated by Chinese authorities. She warned that ‘the international refugee protection system should not be a haven for criminals to evade legal sanctions’, but said little else.2

In private, Beijing was more voluble. On 14 December, Cambodia's Foreign Ministry acknowledged receiving a diplomatic note about the Uyghurs from the Chinese embassy. But the same day, according to US cables released via Wikileaks, UNHCR's Cambodia director told the American ambassador that discussions with the Cambodian government about the Uyghurs were positive and the cases would be resolved within a few weeks.3 Over the following three days everything changed. The sub-decree the Prime Minister signed also ended an agreement with UNHCR under which the two shared responsibility for refugees and asylum seekers. Immediately the ink had dried, Cambodia's Acting Interior Minister, Em Sam An, ordered the Uyghurs to be deported, claiming they had violated the country's Immigration Law.

In the evening of 18 December, police raided the UNHCR ‘safe house’ and took away the occupants, including a mother and two children, at gunpoint. The following evening they were put on board a private jet that had just arrived from China and flown off into the darkness.4 International protests – both to the Cambodian and Chinese governments and to the UNHCR – were swift and loud but useless. Later reports suggested that four of the group had been sentenced to life imprisonment, four to 20 years, four to 17 years and four to 16 years. The woman and her two children were released.5

The day after that plane took off from Cambodia, a different one arrived. This one bore the then Vice-President of China, Xi Jinping, ending a four-country tour of Asia.

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