Tension over Turkey’s 4mn refugees nears boiling point
With troubled economy and elections ahead, incomers are an easy target for politicians
As Turkey enjoyed a national holiday last week, a video swept the country’s social media. The fictional narrative presented a dystopian vision of Istanbul in 2043, the city dilapidated and dangerous. A young Turkish man, an aspiring doctor relegated to the role of hospital cleaner owing to competition from migrants, complained to his parents that speaking Turkish was forbidden at work because the staff and patients only spoke Arabic.
The film, entitled Silent Invasion and commissioned and funded by far-right politician Ümit Özdağ, attracted 2mn views on YouTube within a day of its release.
While Europe’s attention has been on the millions of refugees forced from their homes by Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine, tension is intensifying in Turkey over those fleeing a longer-running conflict: the war in Syria, now in its 12th year.
Turkey, a nation of 84mn, hosts the world’s largest refugee population — with 3.7mn Syrians and several hundred thousand people from Afghanistan. Their presence has long been a source of simmering tension. But with deep problems in the Turkish economy and parliamentary and presidential elections due before June 2023, some experts worry the situation is approaching boiling point.
“It could lead to violence between host communities and Syrians,” said Omar Kadkoy, a migration policy analyst at the Ankara-based think-tank Tepav, who is himself originally from Syria. He describes the current atmosphere for refugees in Turkey as “hostile” and “stressful”.
It is no coincidence that the fears over refugees are mounting against the backdrop of a troubled economy. Inflation in Turkey reached an official rate of 70 per cent in April. The forthcoming elections have added to the charged atmosphere — and refugees have presented an easy target for politicians jostling for votes.
Among them is Özdağ, a former member of several rightwing parties who has attracted attention with his harsh language towards migrants and social media posts targeting individual refugees. Last year Özdağ founded his own party and has put a promise to send back all refugees — by force if necessary — at the heart of its pitch.
Although his Victory Party is unlikely to win many votes, such anti-migrant rhetoric appears to be influencing the political mainstream. Turkey’s big parties have all made some form of pledge to send Syrians back to their country. But all their proposals are considered by experts to be not only unethical but unrealistic.
Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, leader of the largest opposition party, claims all of Turkey’s Syrian refugees will “voluntarily” return if his Republican People’s party (CHP) comes to power. He says he will secure guarantees from Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad, the dictator from whom the refugees fled, to ensure the returnees’ safety — an idea many analysts see as a dangerous fantasy.
Meanwhile, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who as recently as March was defending his policy of hosting “our Syrian brothers and sisters”, last week announced a plan to build 100,000 homes in northern Syria that he said would convince 1mn people to go back.
However, Nigar Göksel, Turkey project director at conflict prevention organisation International Crisis Group, points out that there are dim prospects for those returning to Syria. She draws a contrast with the employment opportunities, free healthcare and schooling available in Turkey, adding: “Who voluntarily leaves a place where they have basic needs met to a place where they would likely not?”
Pledging to send Syrians back is “really not a solution,” Göksel says, adding: “It just raises hopes among the populace that are not likely to be met.”
Where does all this leave the EU, which many in Turkey accuse of treating their country as a “depot” for refugees after signing a €6bn deal to halt the flow of migrants to Europe with Erdoğan’s government in 2016?
Kadkoy argues the bloc needs to pay more attention to what is happening in the country — and urgently speed up the dispersal of a fresh €3bn funding round announced last year.
Though the EU has strengthened its borders in recent years, Kadkoy believes some people could still risk using smugglers to help them make the dangerous journey across the Aegean Sea, as hundreds of thousands did in 2015.
“The conditions are placing Syrians between a rock and a hard place,” he says. “The majority don’t want to return to Syria. The feeling of them being rejected in Turkey is growing. So they might try and find a safe destination — and for most Syrians that’s going to be Europe.”