Since falling on the construction site and injuring his back – he was fired for it – Muhammed spends his life within the four walls of his run-down grocery store, from six in the morning until ten at night, when he closes the blind man and goes home. “Believe me when I tell you I don’t really know what’s two streets down.” It’s not just the injury that drives him to live a life behind closed doors, it’s also the invisible borders; red lines marked by rising social tensions and increasingly by a government determined to turn the tide on the Syrian issue. Because Muhammed (who asked not to give his real name) is Syrian, he and his family fled Aleppo in 2015 – when Bashar al-Assad’s regime, rebels and jihadist groups were fighting for the city – and they live in one Neighborhood of Istanbul increasingly hostile to refugees. Amid rising tensions, the government is forcing the transfer of hosts, banning them from settling in part of the country and urging their return to Syria.
The neighborhood is nondescript in a row of similar ones, a sprawling cement forest of cheap buildings and worn-down living flowing into the nearby Ikitelli industrial area. The main street, animated by the hustle and bustle of returning home after a day’s work, is full of small shops whose lights indicate bakeries, butchers, shoe shops, shops in Turkish and for Turks. Two blocks down, where Muhammad rarely leaves, the street narrows and darkens after dark, the shops are mostly signposted in Arabic, and the clientele is almost exclusively Syrian.
Over the years and with no expectation of Syrians returning to their country, the Turks’ feeling towards the refugees (3.6 million people) has changed from the sympathy with which they were greeted at the beginning of the war: “You are not integrating”, “they have many children”, “they are dirty”, “they are taking our jobs”, “our soldiers are dying in Syria while they are enjoying state aid”, “they are violent”, “they are children in the parks” (this journalist heard all these sentences from the mouths of the Turks). “A large part of the Turkish population hates Syrians without even knowing them, only because of media reports that contain speeches by racist politicians,” explains Taha Elgazi, a refugee rights activist.
In working-class neighborhoods like Ikitelli, Turks and Syrians live side-by-side with little interaction. And little by little, the barrier of mutual ignorance turned into a barrier of rejection, since the economic crisis of the last few years – with insane inflation figures of up to 85% – the brutal competition for jobs and thus also the friction. “They hold us responsible for everything, for the rent increases, for inflation, for everything bad that happens in the neighborhood,” complains Muhammed. Three years ago, a false rumor spread that a Syrian man had molested a Turkish girl, and that hundreds of neighbors were robbing shops and throwing stones at houses in Ikitelli. Muhammed closed the grocery store and locked himself in the house with his family for two days, afraid of what might happen to them. Since then, the mood has deteriorated even more and the shopkeeper assures that his children are constantly being verbally abused by their Turkish classmates at school and that young people are walking the neighborhood streets at night beating up Syrians without the police doing anything. nothing to avoid it.
The most serious attack occurred in Ankara’s Altindag district last year when, after a young Turk was stabbed by a Syrian during a fight, an orgy of violence was unleashed against hundreds of houses inhabited by Syrians.
The opposition has long smelled blood on this issue, mobilizing in the most populist ways, whether center-left or right, to stoke anti-immigrant sentiment, Elgazi criticizes. This poses a serious problem for Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government as many of these working-class neighborhoods house their large polling stations, so the Interior Ministry has gone to work and adopted a policy to try to “dilute” the foreign population in the Turkish majority.
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Nearly 1,400 neighborhoods in 64 provinces have been declared “closed,” meaning foreigners of any nationality are banned from staying in them unless they are registered prior to the measure or have bought a home there. Refugees (Syrians and, to a lesser extent, Iraqis and Afghans) are also barred from settling in 23 entire provinces. Among them are those of the most important cities (Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and Bursa), certain border areas or provinces with certain political importance; for example those from whom the heads of the governing coalition come. In total, more than a third of the country’s territory.
The problem is that the provinces that remain open aren’t exactly the ones that offer the most chance of survival. “Many Syrians prefer to move to the larger cities, where they have more job opportunities. Refugees need a special permit to leave the province in which they are registered, so if they are found without one and outside the province in which they are officially resident, they can be arrested,” explains Emma Sinclair of Human Rights Watch (HRW). . If the agents feel sorry for the fugitive, they simply force him back into the province of registration – where they usually have no roots – but if unlucky, they may end up in a detention center and be deported back to Syria. It has happened to hundreds, according to HRW reports.
There are other more subtle measures. Four months ago, tens of thousands of records of foreigners disappeared from the system, although the Migration Administration Directorate assured that it could be solved by a new appointment with the administration, Elgazi assures that “many had problems renewing their residence address and they lost their registration have”, with the risk that this will turn them into undocumented migrants.
“In April 1,309,394 foreigners lived in Istanbul and since then the number has dropped to 1,271,279 despite the arrival of Russians and Ukrainians. That means the restrictions are working,” congratulated Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu in October, who ordered a multiplication of raids to search for undocumented migrants and foreign criminals.
become invisible
The Interior Ministry has also proposed reducing the number of foreigners in neighborhoods where they make up more than 20% of the population. Of those in Altindag district, where a pogrom took place last year, more than 4,500 Syrians have been displaced to other places, 177 shops they owned have been closed and dozens of abandoned houses demolished by the refugees. “Pilot projects like this have been launched in Altindag and some districts of Gaziantep province [sureste]but they raise more questions than answers: who decides who goes and who stays, what happens to Syrian jobs or companies?” asks Syrian academic Omar Kadkoy of the Turkish think tank TEPAV, who sees similarities with certain Syrian government policies In the 1920s and 1930s, the government of the nascent Republic of Turkey ordered forced relocations between provinces of populations speaking languages other than Turkish or religions other than Sunni Islam so that they could assimilate the majority.
This is the prevailing opinion among Syrians: in order to remain in Turkey, they must become invisible. “When you walk down the street, you can neither laugh nor speak your language out loud, nor have a picnic in a park in front of a Turk,” complains Muhammad. It may seem like an exaggeration, but it isn’t. In Bolu province, after the mayor of “the opposition party CHP” fought foreigners and forced them to pay ten times the water bill and a waste tax, the governor “depending on the Executive Central” gathered representatives of migrants and transmitted a number of Rules of conduct, including not meeting in groups in public places, not leaving the house after 9 a.m. and not cooking with lots of spices so as not to disturb the neighbors with the smell.
“Unfortunately, there is a lot of political tension in Turkey due to the economic crisis and the approaching elections. Turkey has been very generous in accepting Syrians fleeing the war and the Turkish government used to be very supportive of refugees but now we are seeing a change in policy and obviously these new restrictions are met with fear and anxiety by those affected concern welcomed. explains Haya Atassi from the Syrian Association for Citizen Dignity (SACD).
Many respondents see some of this social and administrative pressure as a way of forcing Syrians to return to their country, but Atassi believes that neither the areas under the control of Turkey and its border allies, nor those under the regime of Assad or other actors provide sufficient security guarantees. “Erdogan’s goal is for a million Syrians to return voluntarily. But how can we speak of voluntary return when this is done through pressure, deletion of your files, detention and forced signing of deportation papers?” criticizes Elgazi.
For some, the solution lies in exactly the opposite direction. In front of Muhammad’s shop, a young man waits anxiously for an hour until a friend shows up. They go in and start shopping: two orange sodas, two waters, two cans of tuna, two cans of meat. “Tonight we fly to Europe. We’re tired of being slaves,” claims the first. “I’ve been asking for the papers for years and they haven’t given them to me, so I’m afraid they’ll raid me and deport me to Syria. Better try your luck in Europe, where you will at least be treated like a human being. Here, before you are human, you are a Syrian, there is a lot of racism.” The two young people say goodbye and lose themselves in the darkness outside. On the way to the border with Greece.
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