An ethnic Uighur Muslim family’s struggle to stay in Sweden illustrates the risks for a people whose plight, until recently, had received little attention.
GAVLE, Sweden — Abdikadir Yasin and his wife waited for months, dreading a call telling them they would have to leave Sweden and return to western China, where the government has corralled hundreds of thousands of Muslim Uighurs like them into re-education camps.
The couple had joined an outflow of Uighurs from the western region of Xinjiang three years ago, when China’s clampdown on the minority group was intensifying. They ended up in Sweden, where their asylum request was rejected, leaving them in fear of being deported and ending up in the camps.
Fleeing Uighurs have struggled to win acceptance and asylum in a world where the restrictions on them in China — including omnipresent surveillance and arbitrary detention — have won little attention until recently.
They face an array of pressures from the Chinese authorities and from host countries, some of which, like Sweden, have already taken in many people fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“As long as you are a Uighur, it’s just a matter of time before you end up in a situation like this,” Mr. Yasin said in Gavle, a small city north of Stockholm that is the latest stop on their journey. “Today it was me.”
This sense of precarious invisibility is often felt among the million or more Uighurs living beyond China’s borders, especially those who left in recent years. Beijing’s rising influence has raised the risks of their being forced back to China.
China has called them illegal migrants and dangerous extremists, although very few have headed toward trouble spots in the Middle East. It has pressured and cajoled neighboring countries to return Uighurs who are caught without travel permits.
And increasingly since last year, the Chinese authorities have directly pressed Uighurs to return from abroad, contacting them over messaging apps or threatening their families in Xinjiang.
Since last year, the expansion of the indoctrination camps, which are designed to sever the attachment of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities to their religion and culture, has drawn an international chorus of criticism. The Chinese government recently tried to blunt that criticism by presenting the camps as comfortable job training centers.
Mr. Yasin and his lawyers said the Swedish officials who considered the family’s applications for refugee status seemed unsure about threats waiting for them in Xinjiang, which is the homeland of 11 million Uighurs. Despite statements from lawyers that Mr. Yasin was likely to be detained if sent to China, the Swedish Migration Agency ruled that he did not qualify for asylum, he said.
“They didn’t believe that in Xinjiang there were so many problems for Uighurs,” Mr. Yasin said. “The staff didn’t understand China.”
Tens of thousands of Uighurs left China over a period of years before a crackdown choked off the departures, leaders of the exile community say. Many settled in Central Asian countries and in Turkey, others in Arab countries. Some have tried to make it to the United States and other Western countries, which they hoped would offer more security.
But Uighur migrants often live in limbo, unsure of how long they can stay in their host country, fearful of returning to China and constantly worried about family members back home.
