Status: 08/13/2021 4:57 a.m.
Turkey is home to around four million refugees, mainly people from Syria. The population is increasingly hostile to them, most recently there have been targeted attacks. Parts of the opposition are fueling the mood.
There are terrible scenes that take place on the night from Wednesday to Thursday in the Turkish capital Ankara: A mob of several hundred people moves through the Altindag district and repeatedly attacks Syrian houses and shops.
Videos on social media show angry and screaming people throwing stones and using force to break into stores. Cars are damaged, windows smashed. Looting occurs, reports several Turkish media outlets, a Syrian girl is injured in the head, the head of the Turkish Red Crescent later reported on Twitter.
The trigger for the attacks was alleged to have been the death of an 18-year-old Turk who, according to the media, was allegedly stabbed by a Syrian when two groups got into an argument on Tuesday. The young man succumbed to his serious injuries on Wednesday, and the riots began a short time later. The governor’s office said during the night that the situation had been brought under control.
This fashion store was also attacked on Thursday night.
Image: REUTERS
Stay or go – just where?
“Such events deeply shake the confidence of the Syrian citizens in Turkey,” says Mehdi Davut, a doctor from Syria and chairman of the Federation of Syrian Associations in Istanbul. “As a result, many Syrians who actually want to stay in Turkey are starting to think about whether they should continue to Europe or even return to destroyed Syria.”
According to official figures, around 3.6 million Syrians live in Turkey, which means that the country has taken in more refugees than any other country in the world. In addition, there are hundreds of thousands of Afghans, most of whom, unlike the Syrians, have no protection status and are not part of the EU-Turkey Agreement.
Tolerance gives way to hostility
The mood in Turkey towards refugees has been deteriorating continuously for years. The tense economic situation has made the initially great willingness to help and tolerance disappear in many places within Turkish society. The hashtag “I don’t want any more Syrians in my country” was trending on Twitter at the beginning of 2019.
Even then, parts of the Turkish opposition took advantage of the charged atmosphere. The head of the nationalist Iyi party, Meral Aksener, accused the Erdogan government of spending too much money on the refugees. Syria’s ruler Assad is working more economically, should he take care of his compatriots again, according to her tweet at the time.
The largest opposition party in the country, the CHP, has recently massively tightened its rhetoric against refugees and migrants. CHP chairman Kemal Kilicdaroglu said he would send all refugees back to their country of origin should his party come to power.
Government under pressure
It is dangerous populism, says Mehdi Davut from the Federation of Syrian Associations. “Many Turkish citizens now think that the treasury is empty because of the refugees. Most of them work and earn their own money.” A spokesman for Erdogan’s AKP party now blamed the opposition for the recent incidents in Ankara and spoke of the risks that hate speech entails. A means that the AKP regularly likes to use itself.
The Erdogan government is under domestic political pressure and is itself open to attack. On numerous occasions in the past, the Turkish President emphasized how much money Turkey spends on the Syrian refugees – always turning towards Europe in order to build up political pressure, also with regard to the funds from the refugee agreement.
The EU is standing still
Meanwhile, the EU is resting on the existing agreement, say numerous observers. Also with a view to the fact that more and more people are joining us, especially from Afghanistan, where the Taliban took control of most of the country after the withdrawal of NATO. The challenge for a country of integrating almost four million refugees cannot be met in the long term with monetary payments alone. “The problem is that Turkey still has no real refugee policy,” says the Syrian club leader Davut. “I therefore expect the situation for us Syrians to get worse in the near future.”