‘Passports for Uyghurs’ story shadows Turkey’s relations with PRC

[unhappycamper]

http://atimes.com/2015/07/passports-for-uyghurs-story-shadows-turkeys-relations-with-prc/

‘Passports for Uyghurs’ story shadows Turkey’s relations with PRC
Peter Lee on July 13, 2015

The year-long tug of war between Turkey and the PRC over several hundred Uyghur detainees in Thailand was finally resolved, Solomonic fashion, by Thailand sending 170+ women and children to Istanbul in early July in a little noticed event, and the deportation of 100+ Uyghur men to the PRC last week, which has occasioned much public ballyhoo, some ugly incidents inside Turkey, and toothless (and, I expect somewhat less than wholehearted) official execration by the US and the EU.

A most interesting sidebar to the Thailand story has been the wheels coming off the reckless Turkish passports-to-Uyghurs scheme.

To complement recent public references to unnamed foreign countries providing documentation to Uyghurs, a Public Security Bureau official went on record to brief foreign journos that, yes, it is Turkey.

The PRC Foreign Ministry, as well as Global Times, were already raising the passport issue at the beginning of 2015. First the PRC employed the polite fiction that some profit-minded freelancers were selling Turkish passports to Uyghurs; then it was “unnamed consulates and embassies” were dishing out documents; now, unambiguously, the PRC is pointed the finger at the Turkish government.