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GAVLE, Sweden – Abdikadir Yasin and his wife waited for months, where the government has corralled hundreds of thousands of Muslim Uighurs like them to re-education camps.
The couple had joined forces in the Uighurs of 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 danger of being deported and ending up in the camps.
Fleeing Uighurs have struggled to win acceptance and asylum in a world where the restrictions in China – including omnipresent surveillance and arbitrary detention – have won little attention until recently.
They face an array of pressures from the Chinese authorities, some of which, like Sweden, have already taken over many conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
"As long as you are in Uighur, it's just a matter of time before you go there," Mr. Yasin said in Gavle, a small city in Stockholm that is the latest stop on their journey. "Today it was me."
This sense of precariousness is often beyond the reach of the Uighurs living beyond China's borders. Beijing's rising influence has risen from the risks of being forced back to China.
China has called them dangerous extremists. Uighurs who are caught without travel permits.
And yet again, the Chinese authorities have contacted Uighurs to return from abroad, contacting them in their messaging apps or threatening their families in Xinjiang.
Since last year, the expansion of the indoctrination camps, which are designed to the attachment of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities to their religion and culture, has drawn international chorus of criticism. The Chinese government has recently opened its doors to the city of London.
Mr. Yasin and his lawyers said, "Who are we?", "Who are we?" In Xinjiang, which is the homeland of 11 million Uighurs. Despite the fact that Mr. Yasin was likely to be detained in China, the Swedish Migration Agency did not qualify for asylum, he said.
"They did not believe that in Xinjiang there were so many problems for Uighurs," Mr. Yasin said. "The staff did not 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 countries, which they would like to offer more security.
But Uighur migrants often live in limbo, where they stay in their home country, fearful of returning to China and constantly worried about family members back home. Many Uighurs must exploit loopholes and gray areas to get the passports and visas needed to go abroad.
"Diaspora leaders have been frustrated with the lack of interest in the Uighur issue in general, but are particularly sensitive about Western governments and their lack of interest," Işık Kuşçu-Bonnenfant, an associate professor at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey who studies Uighur migrants, said by email.
Only recently, she said, have diaspora leaders "been able to use the detention camp issue to raise awareness among Western governments."
Until a few years ago, Mr. Yasin and his wife had, like many urban, middle-class Uighurs, adapted to the ways of China and its vast Han ethnic majority. Most Uighurs are Sunni Muslim, and their language and culture are much more common with those of people of Central Asia and Turkey than with Han's.
Mr. Yasin, 36, has been educated in the capital of Xinjiang. His wife, 30, was a preschool teacher who also ran a textile shop.
In the 2000s, China suffered a string of attacks which the government said were perpetrated by Uighur separatists backed from abroad. In 2009, a spasm of deadly ethnic conflict rocked Urumqi. The police tried to snuff out protests by Uighurs; tensions boiled over against anti-Chinese killings and counterattacks on Uighurs.
Even relatively wealthy, middle-class Uighurs who have been kept away from political protests and causes intensified suspicion.
"Urbanized Uighurs," said Henryk Szadziewski, a researcher with the Uyghur Human Rights Project, based in Washington. (Uyghur is an alternate spelling.)
"This subpopulation of Uighurs in Xinjiang and obtaining the visas and paperwork required to make the move."
Mr. Yasin's troubles began in 2015, when they were recruited as leaders in a dispute over compensation for demolished homes, he said. As the argument heated up, the police detained Mr. Yasin. Officers with an electric prod and forced to admit to documents, he said.
He was detained again after he had been interviewed by the press. This time, he said, he was beaten and tortured, then sent to a hospital to recover. While he was there, relating to China along with his wife and infant daughter.
The family caught a plane to Kazakhstan in Central Asia, where they spent a month, then flew to Russia and finally to Stockholm, where they applied for asylum in May 2015.
After nearly two years and an appeal, the couple was formally denied the right to stay. The Swedish Migration Agency accepted that Mr. Yasin was Uighur, but it did not believe his account of his escape, said Fedja Ziga, a lawyer who represented the couple and found their explanations to be consistent and reasonable.
After being denied, Mr. Yasin and his family slipped into Germany to seek asylum there. But after a year of waiting, they were sent back to Sweden under a European Union rule that says they can apply in only one country. At the Stockholm airport, waiting for them to go to Gavle, two hours away. They spent a first night there huddled on a bench.
The grinding fear has taken its toll on Mr. Yasin and his family, especially his wife, who did not want her name reported. She had been pregnant with their third child but suffered a miscarriage in late September.
"This case must be seen in the context of the extremely overstrained Swedish Migration Agency, given the large influx of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East," said Jojje Olsson, a Swedish journalist based in Taiwan, who first reported on Mr. Yasin's case. "China is neither widely reported nor discussed in Sweden, which leads to a big information gap."
Sweden has deported Uighurs before. In 2012, they were sent to China after their applications were rejected, Radio Free Asia reported.
In other parts of the world, deportation is more common. The World Uyghur Congress, an exile organization, counted 317 cases of Uighurs being sent back to China in the 20 years up to 2017. Peter Erwin, a project manager for the congress, said there had been at least 23 deportations since then, including a man feels back by Germany as result of a bureaucratic foul-up.
But the pressures of the Chinese authorities are also increasing.
Many Uighurs are expiring in the coming years, forcing some people to choose from or to return to China or, in effect, living as stateless exiles.
"If we have a child, my child can not get Chinese citizenship," said Guli, a Uighur student living in Turkey. She asked that it be used, fearing that her family in Xinjiang could speak for her.
"Our next generation will have big problems if she or he can not get any citizenship from any country."
Last month, Mr. Yasin and his family won a reprieve from deportation. Amid rising attention on the crackdown in Xinjiang and on their case, the Swedish Migration Agency said it would stop repatriating Uighurs and other minorities from that region.
But the family still feels anxious. The couple and their two children are living in an emergency housing facility with a highway, with fast-food drive-ins and gas stations as their closest neighbors. Winning the right to stay in Sweden is still uncertain.
"We do not feel safe yet," Mr. Yasin's wife said. "I watch the news, so I feel very glad when I see that people are starting to understand what is happening there."
