Uighurs deported to China and death

How do you deal with refugees and other "illegal immigrants"? If you're the government of Cambodia, you send them back to their country of origin, even if it means almost certain death.

That's how China will likely deal with 20 ethnic Uighurs who were returned from Cambodia over the weekend. In a terse statement, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said "Cambodia deported 20 Chinese citizens in accordance with immigration laws for illegal entry into Cambodia. China received these people in accordance with usual practices."

Chinese "usual practices" for "criminals" (including people who might have wanted to separate their region from greater China) included execution by firing squad. And it was the practice to make the victim's families pay for the bullet. (Scots, you could learn something from the Chinese!) Agent 78 told me this practice had stopped but I wasn't clear on whether she mean the shooting or making the victims pay.

The Chinese comments came, by the merest coincidence, as a top Chinese official began a visit to Phnom Penh to boost commercial ties. China is Cambodia's biggest investor, having put more than $14 billion into that country in foreign direct investment, including buying up huge tracts of farmland the produce of which will be shipped to China...or possibly to the west.

And where do the Uighurs fit in? They are an ethnically Turkic Muslim people who used to be the majority population in large parts of northwestern China. Lately they have become a minority as the majority Han Chinese have colonized ["developed"? ed.] Xinjiang and neighbouring provinces.

The Uighurs don't much like being colonized and reduced to second-class status in their own land, so have been agitating for the Chinese to go away and leave them alone. In July, ethnic rioting (Uighurs vs Chinese) claimed the lives of nearly 200 people. The Uighurs lost.

Some of them fled into neighbouring Cambodia (the land of Pol Pot and the Killing Fields) and applied for asylum at the United Nations refugee agency office there. The UNHCR has condemned the deportations, but has failed to stop them. Another triumph for international law, human rights and the United Nations.