Turkey imposes new sanctions on refugees

Ankara: As a sign of growing social discontent, Ankara has taken new measures to restrict the movement of Syrians within the country’s regions, banning them from visiting their homeland during the Eid al-Adha holiday has gone.

Turkey’s Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu announced new precautions on migration controls during a news conference in the capital Ankara on Saturday.

The percentage of foreigners allowed to live in each neighborhood will be reduced from 25 percent to 20 percent, with 1,200 districts to be closed from July 1.

Metin Korabatir, president of the Research Center on Asylum and Migration in Ankara, said Syrians prefer to live in districts near the industrial areas where they worked, mostly illegally, to make a living on low wages.

“If the authorities bring quotas at their disposal, it will violate human rights and affect the industrial centers where they currently serve as a vital workforce,” he told Arab News.

Turkey hosts over 4 million refugees, of whom 3.7 million are Syrians.

Begum Basdas, a researcher at the Center for Fundamental Rights at the Herty School in Berlin, believes none of these measures can be recognized as migration management.

“The new sanctions brought by the authorities are ad hoc responses to mislead the public that they are in control of the situation,” he told Arab News.

“If the government and the opposition want Syrians to return to Syria someday, they should promote cross-border relations rather than impose sanctions. Half of the Syrian youth in Turkey are, many of them born in Turkey. They have someone from Syria. There is no real connection or memory because they grew up in Turkey,” Basdas said.

“If the authorities will be honest in the ‘voluntary return’ they will ensure a route for people to go to their homes and return to their lives in Turkey until it is safe to return to Syria. Most Syrians in Turkey repeatedly say they have nowhere to return, and the restrictions further limit this possibility.”

With growing economic problems in the country and elections on the horizon, incidents of violence against Syrian refugees are on the rise. A 70-year-old Syrian woman was recently kicked in the face by a Turkish man over a local rumor that a refugee had kidnapped a child.

Having become the scapegoat of the country’s heated domestic politics, refugees mostly maintain a low profile in public to avoid trouble.

Although governments have exclusive powers to manage irregular migration, Korabatir said new asylum seekers are facing problems getting registered by Turkish authorities, which allows them to send their children to school or access health services. prevents doing.

“They are trying to remain invisible. Reducing quotas in some localities will transfer integration problems from one district to another if refugees are treated like goods. It looks like a forced migration within the country,” he said.

Some far-right politicians have also capitalized on the outrage with provocative anti-refugee rhetoric for political gains ahead of the elections, as some Turks blame Syrians for stealing their jobs and increasing rental prices.

The number of refugees deported by Turkey increased by 70 percent this year. According to the latest figures, around 30,000 irregular migrants were deported. However, the government opposes a softer approach on refugees, laying the groundwork for the voluntary return of 1 million Syrians.

So far, 503,150 Syrians in Turkey have voluntarily returned to safer areas in their country. Turkey is building homes in Syria’s Idlib province – the number has reached 59,000 – with the aim of creating conditions for a return.

Frederik Putman, a researcher at the Istanbul Policy Center, believes there is nothing wrong with distributing refugees in different areas.

“Indeed, it lets you tailor the respective burden on social services to the abilities of local authorities and can facilitate social and economic integration. In Germany, for example, there is an official scheme by the government that covers asylum seekers. distributes people on their first arrival across the country according to the population size and tax revenue of each region,” he told Arab News.

“In Turkey, by contrast, Syrian refugees have moved to areas where they already knew someone or where they could find job opportunities and affordable housing. This has led to clustering and in fact often local Turkish citizens. who feel lonely by the state,” Putman said.

However, he also agrees that it is not fair to undo this development after 10 years of refugees living in Turkey forcing people to leave their homes, jobs and social environments, neither morally nor ethically. Nor in practice.

“You tell people to go, but you don’t give them a choice of where to go instead. Since many Syrian refugees live in dilapidated buildings that the Turks no longer want to live in, Syrians will have nowhere to go by then. and will not be able to buy housing unless they receive additional aid from the state. Syrians will have to leave their current workplaces and look for new jobs in new areas, which will improve the living conditions of the Syrian people as well as the local economies concerned. and as a result, social tensions with Turkish citizens will increase rather than reduce.

Putman also underlines that under these new measures, refugees will lose important social ties with local Turkish citizens that they may have built over time, especially for children in school who have been at the forefront of integration.

“Ultimately, this will completely disregard the rights of refugees themselves. In short, the social problem Soylu is trying to solve is real; However, their proposed solutions are likely to hinder rather than promote social integration and would infringe on the rights of refugees,” he said.

Basdas thinks that these latest measures create a false sense of migration management to ease public tension and intimidate refugees and migrants to better exploit their vulnerabilities.

“But they should also be aware that too many people have returned to their home countries, returned to Turkey by irregular routes and without access to registration they further deepen the exploitation of the informal economy,” she said.

Under the new measures, taxi drivers are allowed to ask customers for their official documents when they travel in different cities. Recently, videos of illegal migrants jumping off trucks and mingling with locals in different cities have stirred people.

“The right of taxi drivers to act as security forces to check documents is unacceptable. While we wish for freedom of mobility, the authorities cannot transfer the right to ensure ‘safety’ to ordinary citizens. This will potentially have disastrous consequences not only for the refugees but for all citizens of Turkey,” Basdas said.

The ban on family visits on Eid in Syria has also been criticized by experts.

“The fact that Syrians may be able to go there safely for a few days doesn’t mean they will be able to stay there safely, which most of them still won’t because of the Assad regime.” Instead of travel restrictions and demographic engineering, it would be wise to think about practically viable policies that promote the integration of Syria into the places where they are now by strengthening social ties with Turkish citizens and creating jobs for all are creating,” Putman said.