Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2000, pages 37, 76

Talking Turkey

As Waves of Clandestine Europe-Bound Refugees Crash Over Turkey, Human Tragedies Rise

By Jon Gorvett

Their fragile wooden craft buffeted by high winds and a crashing sea, the clandestine odyssey of some 150 Iraqi Kurds came to a catastrophic end in early May with the sound of a splintering hull, smashed on the rocks of a tiny Greek islet just off the coast of Crete.

That same evening, a few hundred miles away in Istanbul, many of their compatriots, along with Afghans and Turkish Kurds, were among the 400 people rounded up by police in a harbor warehouse while waiting their turn to go aboard similar craft.

Elsewhere, a few days later, Turkish police swooped again on the Greek border to arrest 211 others trying to cross the frontier at Uzunkopru, where Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria all meet in a narrow band of forests and rivers.

In recent months, these events, and the numbers involved, have become by no means unusual. Turkey has long been a transit route for people trying to get into the European Union illegally, with organized crime creaming off large profits from human smuggling operations. It has also hosted large numbers of refugees fleeing conflicts beyond its borders—in Iraq, Chechnya and Kosovo. However, the recent boom in traffic is now causing some concern, and leading increasingly to tragedy. In early May, Turkish troops on the Iraqi frontier opened fire on a group of people they thought were members of Turkey’s Kurdish separatist guerrilla group, the PKK. When the smoke cleared, though, they found they had shot dead nine would-be asylum seekers.

In the eastern city of Van, the number of people arriving from over the border to claim refugee status has lead to locals renaming part of the city center “Little Tehran.” On average, a busload of asylum seekers turns up in the town every 20 minutes, according to a private NGO, the Asylum Seekers and Migrants Solidarity Association. They are working in the Turkish city under the auspices of a program developed by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), and have over 3,000 people on their books who are looking to gain asylum in EU countries.

Most are from Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. Many are escaping political, ethnic or religious persecution, and often poverty too, and see Europe, more than Turkey, as a place where they will be freed of these oppressions, a view that Solidarity Association chair Ferda Cemiloglu Cilalioglu finds disturbing.

“They have too many expectations,” she says, “and that worries us.”

Frequently the refugees never make it into Europe.

They are also vulnerable to exploitation by organized criminals. The going rate for being smuggled into Europe by one of Turkey’s gangs of human traffickers is around $5,000, though frequently the refugees never make it, ending shipwrecked on a Greek island, or in a Turkish police cell. Even if they get through to a European country, they may still be faced with criminal exploitation as they face a life of illegality and the growing prejudices of Europeans, with the “asylum seekers issue” activating many European governments into passing tougher and tougher laws against them.

Cilalioglu’s group is trying to prevent the refugees from being exploited.

“Asylum seekers don’t know foreign languages, they don’t know laws and regulations, they don’t know what they can do to help themselves,” she says. “Some of them are in such a bad way, that simply by having someone to offload their troubles onto gives them a great morale boost.”

Most will probably fail to find any legal way of getting to their promised land, giving Cilalioglu’s association, and the UNHCR, the problem of persuading them to return home, as Turkey itself lacks any policy for dealing with migrants of any kind. Naturally enough, return is out of the question for most. Instead, they often try to remain in the country illegally, sometimes working for as little as $40 a month, or simply for board and lodging. Turkey’s eastern and southeastern provinces, where most turn up, are also the poorest regions of the country.

However, that may be about to change. Since the effective end of the conflict between the Turkish army and the PKK, the southeast has seen a flurry of visits in recent weeks by overseas investors—particularly from the U.S.

Investment Potential

The U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Mark Parris, completed a tour of the region in late May in the company of U.S. business representatives and government officials. The purpose of the trip, Parris explained, was to make U.S. businesses aware of the potential for investment in agriculture and energy in the region. On the issue of the Kurdish conflict, he remarked that “the fact that we can make this journey in safety is a powerful expression of the advances made in the field of security since the start of 1999.”

Of particular interest was agriculture. Over the last 20 years, Turkey has invested a great deal in the Southeast Anatolian Development Project, or GAP, a highly ambitious regional program that has seen the construction of dozens of dams in the area, harnessing the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for hydroelectric and irrigation purposes.

Land has been compulsorily purchased and plantation crops—such as cotton—introduced to farms which traditionally dealt in livestock grazing and fruit and nut growing in small, family units. Now the region is looking for larger investors and American agribusiness has expressed an interest. Parris also called for Turkey to dismantle its system of agricultural subsidies and protectionism, echoing recent statements by the World Bank and IMF to the same effect.

The other area of investment is in dam construction and energy distribution. Parris visited a dam built by U.S. companies at Hakkari, previously a center of the Kurdish conflict, and said that the region’s hydroelectric potential “enthralled American energy companies.”

It has been a lot less than enthralling to some of the region’s inhabitants and many archaeologists. The dam at Birecik, on the Euphrates, was finally completed at the end of April, with a consequent rise in the river level behind the dam starting to flood several villages and an important archeological site at Zeugma.

This ancient city, described by archeologists working to rescue its many priceless mosaics as a “second Ephesus,” once stood at the very frontier of the Roman Empire. There the soldiers of the 4th Legion watched for any sign of movement from Persia and beyond in the dusky hills and plains on the other side of the river.

Standing amongst its columns and tumbled down villas now, it seems striking to think that this was once the border of the European and Mediterranean world. Two thousand years later, the soldiers are still there and, as far as the asylum seekers are concerned, this is still the frontier of a European fortress.

Jon Gorvett is a free-lance writer based in Istanbul.