Chinese Communist Party officials are applying “significant pressure” on Turkey to ratify a treaty that would allow the deportation of Uighur Muslims fleeing the systematic repression underway in Xinjiang, activists and supporters say, and are using a coronavirus vaccine to do so.
“The Chinese are really trying hard to get into the Turkish Uighur communities; they already have spies and everything,” said Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation senior fellow Adrian Zenz, an expert on China’s abuse of the Uighurs. “And they will [exert] significant backdoor pressure behind the scenes to have them ratify this agreement.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed to the extradition treaty in 2017, but the pact has not yet taken force. China’s nominal legislature ratified the treaty on Sunday, the same day that a delivery of Chinese-made coronavirus vaccines was delayed in Beijing, raising the suspicion that Chinese officials are threatening access to the vaccine in order to ensure the Turkish Parliament’s backing of the agreement.
“Beijing appears to be leveraging not only potential Chinese investment in Turkey but also the supply of Sinovac vaccines to influence Turkish foreign policy,” said former Turkish opposition lawmaker Aykan Erdemir, an Erdogan critic at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “There is overwhelming support for the Uighurs among the Turkish public, but Erdogan can still use his parliamentary majority to ensure the ratification of the Turkey-China extradition treaty as a favor to Beijing.”
Uighur activists nonetheless hope that the Turkish legislature will block the treaty. “The Turkish government should not be giving such kind of opportunity to the Chinese government to [inflict] such psychological and physical crackdown on the Uighur diaspora,” World Uighur Congress President Dolkun Isa told the Washington Examiner. “The Chinese government has committed genocide against the Uighur people, and the Turkish government should understand this.”
More than 35,000 Uighur Muslims are estimated to live in Turkey, which has a similar language and common religion, in an attempt to avoid mass “re-education” camps and enslavement as cotton pickers that Chinese Communist officials have imposed on the Uighurs in an attempt to “break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins,” as a Chinese Communist official put it in 2018.
That repression extends overseas. American lawmakers have faulted Chinese officials for harassing Uighur activists and other dissidents in the United States. The Uighur diaspora in Turkey is regarded as an especially consequential and vulnerable community.
“Many of the Uighurs in Turkey have given interviews, have shared information, have been quoted in the media, and they are organized,” Zenz said. “China wants to silence exiles … They really want their people to come back because that’s where they can control them.”
Turkish police officers have begun to arrest Uighurs and threaten their deportation even in the absence of an extradition treaty, according to firsthand reports. “Despite close ethnic and linguistic affinities between Turks and Uighurs, Ankara has been increasingly silent about Beijing’s appalling treatment of the Uighur minority,” said Erdemir, the former opposition lawmaker.
Turkey is a key NATO member, but Erdogan has led the government in an authoritarian direction and cultivated closer ties with both Russia and China — a trend that could continue, at least in the short term, as some of his policies have provoked U.S. sanctions.
“As Western investors continue their exodus from Turkish equities and bonds, the Erdogan government has turned to China as a potential source of capital,” Erdemir observed.
That drift has increased Turkey’s vulnerability to Chinese Communist Party pressure at the expense of the Uighurs, analysts agreed while considering the chances of the extradition treaty’s ratification.
“Maybe there is some economic interest,” Isa said, before recalling the delay of the vaccine delivery this week. “Maybe the Chinese government [is using] the COVID vaccine [as] some kind of carrot to the Turkish government.”
