Seeing no future in Turkey
Prospect of being granted citizenship adds appeal to often dangerous trip into Europe
Policies don’t grant most Syrians refugee status, so many are willing to risk journey into Europe,
ISTANBUL— Fifteen-year-old Osama Subu’ has made up his mind. The coming weeks and months are likely to see the slight, bespectacled boy join the thousands of others trekking across Turkey, Greece and the Western Balkans to try to forge a new, safer life in Germany, Austria or France. He says there is no other way.
Osama was 11 years old when a group of soldiers marched into the house where his father and three uncles were staying in the Syrian city of Homs, and shot them all dead. “They weren’t at protests, they were just sitting in the house,” he said.
He is still visibly traumatized. Even as he looks at the ground in front of him, his gaze isn’t focused on anything. He speaks slowly and quietly. He helps out at a school for Syrian children in Istanbul, where management has been trying to convince him to stay, to no avail.
“If I stay here in Turkey I must work. There’s a future of security in Europe,” he said. “If I go to Germany I can study; I want to become a doctor.”
Osama’s 4- and 6-year-old sisters are in Lebanon with their mother, living in refugee limbo. He says the drowning of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi 10 days ago hasn’t discouraged him. “My plan is to reach Germany and then have my family come too,” he said.
Syria’s youngest have known nothing but a life of war.
However, with more than 1,800 children killed by regime barrel bombs and rebel shelling since 2011, and youths living under Islamic State extremists faced with radical indoctrination and recruitment into murder squads, few families see any alternative but to take their families away. That can mean paying traffickers thousands of dollars to take their families to Turkey and then on to Greece by boat, despite the obvious dangers.
This month, the image of little one such victim, Alan Kurdi, who washed up on a Turkish beach, catapulted the plight of Syrian children into homes around the world for the first time. Governments in Europe and across the Americas have pledged to accept hundreds of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers in the aftermath of the boy’s drowning.
But none of that means that children have stopped getting into boats un- worthy of sea crossings. The forced migration from Turkey to Europe continues apace.
In the quiet, residential neighbourhood of Fener in central Istanbul, Arabic-speaking women and men are busy renovating a series of rooms. The Syrian Elite School opened three years ago with the exact goal of discouraging Syrians and their kids from attempting the perilous journey to Greece.
“By getting them into a routine, making friends and opening a network, we’re trying to get Syrians to put down some roots here,” said school manager Khalid Abdulaziz, a former real estate agent from the Damascus suburbs.
“Some of the kids were unable to speak because of what they experienced in Syria. But after a few months I’ve seen them totally change,” said Abdulaziz.
The building that hosts the school also serves as a dentist’s clinic and temporary accommodation for 25 Syrians unable to find a place to stay elsewhere in the city. Half of the two million Syrians in Turkey are children, according to the United Nations High Commissioner f or Refugees (UNHCR), and less than half regularly attend school.
But for Osama, the Kurdi family and thousands of others, Turkey is not a country in which they feel they can build a new life. Despite the Turkish government’s conspicuous support for Syrians, which has included building 22 camps and hosting more refugees than any other country in the world at a cost of $7.3 billion, the majority fleeing the war appear intent on leaving for Europe.
In part, that’s because Turkish law does not consider Syrians refugees or allow them to seek asylum. Instead, they are categorized as “guests,” a form of temporary protection. Syrians can enter Turkey without a visa and are granted short-term residency permits for up to a year. A negligible number have been granted outright citizenship.
Furthermore, the recent upsurge in violence between the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK, and the Turkish military has led to the deaths of dozens of police officers, fuelling virulent nationalism that has led to attacks on Syrian-owned vehicles and homes.
Abdulaziz, the school manager, says that now, more than ever, the Syrians who do come to Turkey do so with the plan to stay a short time and leave as soon as possible on boats for Greece.
“The last two, three months there has been a huge upsurge in the number of Syrians coming to Istanbul for this reason,” he said.
With no change to Syrians’ legal status likely and Turkey’s political crisis deepening, the route to Europe is set to become even more popular for families. But some who have already done the journey warn against any attempt.
For 28-year-old Dima, who comes from an area south of Damascus that has been almost completely levelled by government shelling, the journey to Austria was horrific.
She arrived there recently after a month-long trip through six countries with her husband and infant daughter.
“I am telling people in Syria not to embark on the trip; all the people here (in the refugee camp in Austria) have been deeply affected by the boy’s (Alan Kurdi’s) drowning,” she said in a phone interview. “The sea is for fish; it is not for Syrians.”
Despite his own unbroken desire to leave Turkey, when Osama is asked whether he would put his 4- and 6year-old sisters in a boat bound for Greece following what happened to Alan, he looks at the ground and thinks deeply for several long moments. Finally he has decided.
“No. I wouldn’t let them go,” he said.