Europe’s
migrants, Turkey’s problem
As
migrant routes are blocked to the EU, tensions rise between Syrian
migrants and their Turkish hosts.
By ROY GUTMAN
4/4/16, 6:00 AM CET Updated 4/4/16, 8:11 AM CET
DIKILI, Turkey —
Closing the migrant escape valve provoked an unexpected event in this
beach resort, one of the closest points on the Turkish mainland to
the European Union. The asylum seekers, who were risking their lives
to get to Europe and got stopped when its shores appeared in plain
sight, became angry and turned on the local authorities.
The EU migrant
crisis is now Turkey’s problem, too.
Since the EU-Turkey
deal went into effect March 20, Turkish authorities have cracked down
on smugglers and migrants alike, on the sea and on the coast,
significantly lowering the numbers of those leaving for Europe.
Packed into
inflatable dinghies, thousands of refugees used to sail each day from
the area of Dikili to the Greek island of Lesbos that is just 24
kilometres away. Now it’s down to hundreds.
On March 18, as
Turkey and the EU were sealing the deal in Brussels, Turkish security
forces were setting up roadblocks and checkpoints along the road
leading to the resort town. They started patrolling the beaches and
bays around Dikili, and launched raids on hostels, suspected of
hosting migrants. On the sea, the Coast Guard began intercepting
boats crossing the Aegean strait. Bus companies, airlines and travel
agencies were told not to take Syrians on board unless they had
special travel permits.
That day alone,
authorities detained about 1,700 people, at least half of them
Syrians, and brought them to two sports halls in Dikili to be
registered and processed. They rebelled and demanded to be freed. And
when they were not, they rioted, setting fire to blankets and
mattresses, breaking windows and smashing toilets, according to city
officials.
“Usually it takes
two to three hours to be processed, but last weekend, thousands were
detained, and they had to stay one or two days. They rebelled because
of it,” said Mustafa Nazmi Sezgin, the district governor in Dikili,
in an interview.
“They were angry
with us,” said Cigden Elibol, the deputy mayor. “They told us
they just wanted to go to Greece.” Police and fire department
quickly quelled the disturbance in Dikili, and moved the detained
migrants to Izmir and other cities. But the unrest left a mark on the
town where Turkish authorities agreed to build a reception center for
migrants, who will be expelled from Greece in line with the
provisions of the EU-Turkey pact.
The first 400 to 500
to be sent back to Turkey from Greece are expected here on Monday and
local officials are not looking forward to receiving them. Neither
are townspeople, who’ve started a petition drive to stop the center
from opening.
“People will be so
angry,” said Elibol of the returnees. “They went to Europe and
now they’re being sent back. If someone loses all hope, if they
feel they have no choices left, they can do anything.”
For now, the
crackdown appears to be working. The number of refugees crossing
illegally from Turkey to Greece is down to 400 a day from its peak of
6,800 last October, deputy Foreign Minster Kaci Koru said a week
after the measures went into place.
The word is out on
the street and on the social media: Don’t go. Two smugglers, both
Syrians, told POLITICO they refuse to arrange any further trips.
No exit for Syrians
With policing firmly
in place on its shores, the question is how Turkey will deal with the
new reality, in which millions of Syrians are not allowed to leave
the country.
The numbers are
huge. Officially, there are 2.7 million Syrian refugees in Turkey.
Authorities estimate that another 300,000 Syrians are roaming the
country without ever registering. The real number of the undocumented
could be much higher, according to Esra Simsir, the Izmir
representative for the Association for Solidarity with Asylum Seekers
and Migrants, a Turkish NGO. “We think it’s double the registered
number,” she said.
For Recip Tayyip
Erdoğan, Turkey’s increasingly autocratic president, the deal with
Europe implicitly acknowledges Turkey’s role as a bridge between
Middle East and Europe. The fact that Syrians are welcome to stay
when Europe has all but shut its door in their faces plays into his
assertion that Turkey is a sanctuary for the refugees, not a
detention center.
But the claim has
come into question after Amnesty International’s report Friday
charged Turkey with “rounding up and expelling” thousands of
Syrians, fleeing violence there, back to Syria, a violation of
international refugee law. The Turkish Foreign Ministry denied
refugees were being sent back to Syria against their will.
It’s in Turkey’s
long-term interest to pull the EU from the brink by helping solve the
migration crisis. If the collaboration wins Turkey some understanding
in Brussels for its preferred course to ending the Syrian conflict —
to step up aid to moderate Syrian rebels, fighting the regime of
Bashar Assad rather than arm Syrian Kurds to fight ISIS — it will
ease Ankara’s growing sense of isolation, caused by a falling out
with Washington.
If Turkey’s
multi-layered security forces are indeed able to halt the migrant
outflow, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other EU leaders will be
in Erdoğan’s debt, one they might be asked to pay back as he
pushes for constitutional changes to turn his already powerful role
into a U.S.-style presidency with extensive executive powers.
If the EU fails to
deliver on its part of the bargain, Erdoğan is likely to play
hardball. His European affairs minister has publicly warned that if
the EU welshes on visa-free travel, the March 18 deal is off — and
Turkey will cease accepting back large numbers of illegal migrants
from Greece.
Under the agreement,
any illegal migrant arriving to the five Greek islands after March 20
will be returned to Turkey, except those who are granted asylum in
Greece. For every Syrian returned to Turkey, a Syrian refugee in
Turkey will be relocated to the EU, up to 72,000 in all. If illegal
crossings are halted, individual EU states will volunteer to take in
even more refuges. In exchange, the EU agreed to speed up visa
liberalization for Turks traveling to the EU.
Existential crisis
If a large number of
refugees are held in the camp still to be built on the outskirts of
Dikili, Elibol said he fears there will be street crime, competition
for scarce jobs in this town of 18,000 will turn ugly, and all sorts
of other problems will arise in summer, when its population swells to
more than 300,000.
Like many in Europe,
Elibol also said he fears that along with the refugees, some
terrorists will land in her town. As the incident in Dikili
illustrates, heads of government can carry out agreements that patch
over their own political problems, but they ignore the human factor
at their peril. For those fleeing barrel bombs or the tyranny of the
Islamic State extremists, the EU-Turkey deal has created an
existential crisis.
Jassem, 32, a math
teacher from eastern Syria, who’d been working for the U.N. in
Damascus, fled to Turkey in late December, primarily to avoid being
drafted into the Syrian army. A short time later and hoping to join
him, his girlfriend, Rahma, 19, left her home in a village under ISIL
control in the eastern Deir el-Zour province in hopes of joining him.
Turkey closed its
borders to Syrian refugees in April 2015, and she had to be smuggled
across. She finally managed to get in, on March 16. “She tried more
than 10 times in the past month alone,” Jassem said in an interview
in Izmir, the largest city on the Turkish Aegean coast. The price
went up — from $100 to $700 just to get into Turkey from Syria, he
said.
On one attempt to
cross, in the vicinity of the Kurdish-run town of Tel Abyad, Rahma
said she saw the bodies of two would-be émigrés who had been shot
by Turkish security forces. “You don’t have a choice. It was to
be or not to be,” Jassem said. “It was a miracle that she was
able to enter Turkey.”
Shortly after she
arrived, the couple married, but then got the news that Turkey would
block any departures — illegal or legal — to Greece. For Rahma,
who arrived with just the clothes she had been wearing and no
documents, and Jassem, who now has only his Syrian passport, after
his U.N. identification was stolen while he was sleeping in a
dormitory accommodation, it was a crushing disappointment.
“I don’t know
what I can do,” he said. “I gave up my job, my family, my car,
and my dreams. I can’t go back to my village, because Daesh took my
house,” Jassem, using an Arabic acronym for ISIL. “They want my
head. I worked for the U.N.”
And where should
Rahma, his wife return, he asked? Her village is under control of
ISIL and her father and four brothers are in Assad regime’s jails,
after Bashar Assad’s forces marked them as regime opponents, he
said.
Neither of them is
working and savings will soon evaporate because life in Turkey is
expensive. It’s no longer possible to stay in a cheap hotel,
because the Turkish authorities have ordered hotelkeepers to stop
admitting Syrians and other foreigners as guests.
Smugglers have
quickly adapted to the new situation. Instead of offering boat rides
to Greece they are now renting entire houses after they’ve been
converted into dormitory-like accommodation for stranded Syrians and
illegal migrants.
‘They are
detaining people’
Some boats still go
out, and the trip to Greece that has now become even more uncertain
is now half the price, from $1,400 per head at the height of the
crisis last summer to $700, with a life jacket free of charge.
Many smugglers
suspended their operations. Amal, a 28-year-old from Damascus, who
used to link refugees with smugglers, said she’d stopped working in
mid-March after police raided cafes where smugglers had set up shop.
Many were arrested, she said.
“I don’t want to
take their money and throw them into Greece, where their fate is
uncertain,” Amal said. “Most refugees come with their wives and
children. I don’t want to be responsible for more suffering.”
There is no mercy
from Turkish police for anyone who wants to go anywhere. “If the
police wanted, they could prevent an ant from leaving Turkey,” she
said.
On the Arabic
language Facebook page “Terminal of the Homeless,” which has some
195,000 members, all who ask about journeys to Greece are told to
stay put.
A Syrian living in
Izmir told the forum that he was planning to travel after several
days of storms last month, and he wondered what sort of reception
would he have in Greece.
“Brother! Haven’t
you read all the alarms that they are detaining people?” replied
another Syrian. “Haven’t you heard of the agony of refugees? How
can you talk about sailing to Greece in such circumstances? Take this
sincere advice: Keep your money in your pocket, and stay where you
are.”
Another smuggler,
who spoke to POLITICO, also said he’s now advising Syrians not to
take the chance with the trip. In the past 18 months, Ahmed, 26,
who’s from the Deir el-Zour region in eastern Syria, said he’d
sent some 1,500 Syrians to Greece.
“People are still
coming to me, but I warn them that the way is closed. There is no way
to go,” he said.
There will be a plan
With many Syrians
staying in Turkey, and many more coming back from Greece, assisting
them is “an increasingly big problem,” said Simser of the
Association for Solidarity with Asylum Seekers and Migrants.
“We don’t know
how we will deal with it,” Simser said. Her group, which has 52
branches around Turkey, is the principal local implementing partner
of the U.N. High Commission for Refugees. The group stays in close
touch with a Turkish government agency that runs a chain of widely
praised refugee camps around the country. Simser’s activists
provide advice, food and educational activities to refugees living
outside of those camps.
Averting another
violent incident that shook Dikili, is a top priority for Mustafa
Nazmi Sezgin, the district governor. The return process would be
organized and supervised by Turkish officials sent to Greece and
Greek officials sent here.
The returnees will
be brought to Dikili by ferry from Lesbos, and the town’s officials
will be notified of the number of those aboard in advance. “I am
not afraid of it,” he said. “We are all afraid of unexpected
events. But this is expected. I know what will be done. There will be
a plan.”
Duygu Guvenc in
Ankara and Mousab Alhamadee in Gaziantep contributed to this article.
Authors:
Roy Gutman
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