A refugee twice over and still one of the lucky ones

Mohamed Salem is quite sure he’s lucky. The thirty-three-year-old Palestinian has been living in Turkey for over a year, a refugee of the Syrian civil war. His luck, he is quick to qualify, is only “compared to the others.”

Mr. Salem considers himself a refugee twice over. His father was born in Safed, in what is now northern Israel. In 1948, his family, like hundreds of thousands of other Arab refugees, lost their home and were displaced to Syria and settled in what became known as Yarmouk Camp, then on the outskirts of Damascus.

The camp grew into a well-established district with a population of several hundred thousand Palestinians and Syrians. Mr. Salem’s father, two brothers, and a sister are among the few thousand people remaining in Yarmouk, under siege for more than a year by Syrian government forces.

Though born in Syria, Mr. Salem’s status as a Palestinian refugee means he is not entitled to a Syrian passport. In 2012 Mr. Salem was stuck in no-man’s land when Jordanian border guards refused him entry, despite his holding a Jordanian visa and an invitation to visit from his Jordanian mother.
 

Then the Syrians wouldn’t let him return. He sneaked back in. “Then I went to Lebanon for two days and I got kidnapped by Hezbollah,” Mr. Salem told me. First with a gun to his head in a taxi, then thoroughly shaken-down, he was able to eventually talk himself free. Later returning again to Lebanon, he stayed seven months on a six-day visa. “Then, because I’m lucky, I got a visa for Turkey.” Since his arrival in Turkey, the travel document which Syria provides resident Palestinians, has expired and he is effectively stranded.

The biggest refugee crisis in forty years

The Syrian civil war has resulted in 12.2 million people (more than half the country’s population) requiring humanitarian assistance, with 7.6 million people displaced inside the country and 3.3 million people made refugees in neighbouring countries, according to the United Nations.

At least 1.6 million Syrian refugees live in Turkey, more than in any other country, and their situation has become increasingly dire, as described by a new report “Struggling to Survive,” published last week by Amnesty International. Only 220,000 refugees live in reportedly well-run and well-resourced refugee camps operated by the Turkish government; the remainder have settled and are fending for themselves in various cities across Turkey, many without access to food or housing.

As of October 2014, Turkey has spent more than $4.5bn on receiving and providing for Syrian refugees, according to AFAD, the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency, the Turkish government agency in charge of providing for Syrian refugees in the country. Officially, Turkey maintains an “open door policy” towards Syrian refugees, which means the country does not turn any refugees back and provides them with “Temporary Protection Status.”

Turkey has been generally praised by the United Nations and NGOs such as International Crisis Group for this commitment. Still, the security of Syrian refugees in Turkey has deteriorated and a gap has grown between Turkey’s lauded response and conditions on the ground.

“Families are living in conditions no one should be forced to live in,” Andrew Gardner, Amnesty International’s Turkey researcher and co-author of “Struggling to Survive,” told Middle East Eye. “We’re talking about buildings which are empty shells, which are not weather-proof, that don’t have any heating, which don’t have bathrooms, which don’t have kitchens. Families are living basically on the charity of their neighbours, but not knowing where their food will come from tomorrow,” Gardner said.

A complex problem

“There’s 1.6 million refugees in the country at least. And if Aleppo falls, we will be talking about 2 million by the end of the year,” Mr Gardner said. The vast majority of money spent by Turkey on refugees has been set spent on the 220,000 refugees living in camps. “The people outside these camps have been left out, in every sense of the word.”

Policy is only now catching-up with the situation. Last month, the Turkish authorities passed the “Temporary Protection Directive” which, for the first time since the crisis began in 2011, defines what “temporary protection” entails, provides for Syrians to be given Turkish identification, a “secure legal status,” access to schools and work permits, and guarantees they cannot be returned to Syria.

But registration remains a major obstacle to implementing such protections; less than half of Syrian refugees in Turkey are registered, Mr Gardner said. Amnesty International’s recent report described several factors inhibiting registration, not least the logistical complexity of registering so many people, but also problems of unclear communication: “[S]ome Syrian refugees thought that the first to be registered would be the first to get jobs and assistance, whereas others thought that these would be the first to be deported from the country.”

“People can’t find work. Their kids can’t go to school. But the biggest problem,” Salem told me, “is the language.”  Although Turkish and Arabic share some vocabulary, the two languages are as similar as English is to Russian. The “Temporary Protection Directive” also provides for free translation services.

Istanbul seems to be adapting further each day to its approximately 330,000 Syrian refugees, with more and more formal and informal Arabic signs on display. Mr Salem, who studied economics and once worked as an accountant in his father’s Damascus pharmacy, had been an entrepreneur before the war, importing medical supplies. Since arriving to Istanbul, he and some other Palestinian-Syrians have opened a cultural centre not far from central Istanbul’s famous Galatasaray High School (from which the Istanbul football club takes its name). They teach Turkish and English to Syrians and Arabic to Turks and foreigners. Mr Salem is struggling himself to learn Turkish. He told me of a time he felt brave enough to call for the waiter in a restaurant, but instead of calling out the proper and polite “Bakar misin?” (literally: Are you looking?), Mr Salem called out “Bekâr misin?” (tr: Are you single?).

The world has failed the refugees

International response to the Syrian refugee crisis has been “absolutely shameful,” Andrew Gardner of Amnesty International said. The “Struggling to Survive” report describes the “hopes of safety and security for most refugees cruelly denied” as a result of this failure.

The Syrian refugee situation “has become the world’s worst refugee crisis in a generation. [Yet] the UN’s regional response plan remains only 51 percent funded, while European Union states and other wealthy countries continue to deny access to their territories.” More Syrian refugees crossed into Turkey over a single weekend in September (from Kobane) than the total Syrian refugees resettled in all of Europe.

This lack of international support has greatly complicated the response in Turkey, Mr Gardner said. Especially as the lack of support intersects what has become a diplomatic refrain that Turkey must do more to prevent foreign fighters crossing from Turkey into the Syrian war zone.

“It’s very difficult to keep [the border] open one way and closed the other, especially in the current situation which is completely irregular,” Mr Gardner said. “On the one hand, the international community calling on Turkey to close the border to [foreign fighters travelling through Turkey to Syria] has probably had, I would speculate, a negative impact on the ability of Syrian refugees to cross into Turkey.”

But on the other hand, because resources are so stretched, Turkey’s “open border policy” has been limited to official border crossings and only for Syrians with passports or those with urgent medical or humanitarian needs. This has meant the vast majority of Syrians are crossing the border “irregularly” on their own or by paying smugglers.

As such, Turkey argues it has the right to stop people from crossing the border irregularly, as an “open border policy” should not provide for smugglers or armed groups to freely travel between Turkey and Syria. The sad result of this is increasing abuses on the border. Amnesty International has documented 17 separate incidents of border guards shooting dead refugees trying to cross the border between December 2013 and August 2014.

“In terms of solutions, they’re not secret. It’s not some genius idea that we came up with that you should have open, regulated, sufficiently located border crossings for refugees,” Mr Gardner said. “But realistically, it would be much more feasible politically for Turkey to have a genuine open border policy if the international community gave genuine commitments to meet the needs of refugees outside the camps.”

With winter coming, and possibly hundreds of thousands of more refugees, circumstances are not likely to improve soon. I ask Mr Salem his plan. He has no papers and is separated from his family - what will he do? “Waiting,” he says with resignation. It is a measure of the situation that that is the response of a lucky man.