Syrians in Turkey at risk of forced return – New Lines Institute
QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – The West needs to take concrete steps to prevent Turkey’s government from forcefully returning millions of Syrians living in Turkey, a report by the New Lines Institute, an American think tank, said on Wednesday.
Syrian refugees began arriving in 2011, mere months after the Syrian civil war began. The largest wave crossed into Turkey in 2016, when the Syrian government began to push into opposition areas.
Most Syrians never received refugee status or asylum, but were instead awarded Temporary Protection Card, “Kimlik” in Turkish. This gives Syrians “access to basic services, including health care and education, but requires them to live in the province where they are registered,” the report explains.
The roughly four million Syrians in Turkey have never been popular, the authors write. In 2012, two-thirds of polled Turkish citizens said Syrians should be turned away at the border. In 2017, around half of all Turks thought so.
Yet by 2021, as Turkey found itself in the midst of an economic crisis, 82 percent of respondents thought Syrians had to go.
The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once a champion of Syrians fleeing from state violence, has increasingly tried to rid itself of Syrians in the months before the election held last week.
“Indirectly, Turkey has begun restricting how many Syrians can live in specific neighborhoods, forcing Syrians to leave provinces with better employment opportunities, and limiting Syrians from accessing the formal labor market,” the report goes on to say. “Taken together, these policies serve to degrade the quality of life for refugees in Turkey and make life in Syria – no matter how challenging and dangerous – more appealing by comparison.”
Additionally, Turkey has demonstrably deported Syrians by force, though exactly how many is not known. This, the authors write, is “in violation of international law and Turkey’s own obligations as a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention.”
“Syrian refugees report being arbitrarily arrested and detained, subjected to inhumane conditions, and pressured to return to Syria, and Human Rights Watch has documented hundreds of cases of Syrian refugees being forcibly returned to Syria regardless of their status as refugees,” they add.
Both main political coalitions in Turkey’s elections have promised to return Syrians. Sinan Ogan, the third-party contender in the presidential elections and largely believed to be the kingmaker of the May 28 presidential run-off, has made his endorsement dependent on parties “sending Syrians back”.
The authors argue that the European Union and US should signal to Ankara that it is at risk of losing millions of dollars in funding should it continue down this path. Moreover, they call for an independent monitoring system to determine whether Syrians are returning voluntarily.
Lebanon, another neighbor state to Syria, which hosts around 2 million Syrians, recently began to carry out forced deportations. Dozens of Syrians handed to their country’s authorities have already been arrested or have been disappeared.
Reporting by Sasha Hoffman