Her granddaughter was born a few days after her husband Ahmad Talip was kidnapped from a Dubai police station, immediately followed by his transfer to Abu Dhabi and then his deportation to China. Since that fateful February 25, 2018, “I haven’t heard from him”, says Amannisa Abdullah, a Uighur in her thirties who now lives in Turkey.
“During his last call, he told me that they were forcing him to return. “You have to go home. You go.” That’s all he was told. I went to the police station where I was told again not to worry. At the UN office. To that of Interpol. There, I begged, I cried, shouting that they were going to kill him in China. The guards ordered me not to come back if I didn’t want to be deported too. »
China is accelerating the tracking of its nationals around the world. The only official data show 10,000 “fugitives” brought back from 120 countries since mid-2014. According to Safeguard Defenders, which publishes an investigation report Tuesday, January 18, this number is only “the tip of the iceberg”. Above all, “for a vast majority of targets, the returns come from coercive methods employing illegal means, underlines this Swedish NGO. The most surprising thing is that China no longer conceals this clandestine practice. It has officially made public the need to sometimes employ involuntary return practices. »
Operation “Fox Hunt”
It all started with Operation Fox Hunt, launched in 2014 to bring nationals accused of corruption back to China. Since 2015, it has been part of a much larger plan, “Sky Net”. The principals are the Ministry of Public Security, the Central Commission for Disciplinary Inspection (CCID) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the General Prosecutor’s Office. These actors now work under the authority of a non-judicial body, the “National Supervisory Commission”, created in 2018 by President Xi Jinping.
In the game bag of the “hunters” glorified in the state press are the usual clients of legal extradition, corrupt entrepreneurs, criminals and traffickers. But we must add disgraced officials, simple critics of the CCP, and activists – Hong Kong opponents, representatives of the Uighur and Tibetan minorities, faithful of the Falun Gong church. They are especially sought after in the United States, Australia, the United Arab Emirates and Southeast Asia.
Forced returns are sometimes spectacular. In 2017, billionaire Xiao Jianhua, a citizen of Canada, was taken out by six unidentified men from a luxury hotel in the country, in a wheelchair and with his head hidden under a blanket.
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