BLAME IT ON THE BIG MEN, NOT ON THE REFUGEES OR ON THE LOCALS
By: Turkish Heritage Organization
Tags: Syria

By THO Non-Resident Fellow Alpcan Karamanoglu

20th of June marked World Refugee Day. As a Turkish citizen I feel responsible to share my modest experience with refugees, to defend the refugees’ rights and sympathize with their pain, but also to explain and try to empathize with the xenophobic sentiments of the Turkish people.

Weekends spent in the seaside town of Mudanya, just 20 minutes away from my home in Bursa, marked my childhood summers. The long walks by the Marmara Sea, watching the ferries, having fish and raki nights with my family at restaurants, feeding some ugly seagulls… It was a safe haven for kids staying up late, and for girls in mini shorts going out. Usually empty in the winter seasons, Mudanya was a summer vacation village, disconnected from the city without much access to public transportation. It was exclusive, only for those of us who could afford to visit.

As public transportation helped democratizing Mudanya and made it more accessible for everyone in the city center to come and enjoy the sea, the small beach town got bigger both in population, and in actual size. Although the demographics changed, the spirit of the tolerant and progressive town stayed pretty much the same.

The drastic change happened in the last few years, to Mudanya, and to many other beach towns of Western and Southern Turkey. People who grew up by those beaches started abandoning them due to crime rates, growing conservatism in lifestyles, and the ‘nomad-style’ settlements in the beaches by the uncontrollably growing refugee population. This change did not only leave the local public without their favorite beaches, but also motivated the disgustingly xenophobic and racist policies that are enforced by many municipalities, including in Mudanya, such as not letting Syrians come near the beaches.

Turkey is the biggest refugee hub in the world. Although numbers are disputed, it hosts about 4 million Syrians, and almost a million of non-Syrian Muslims from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran. As a proud humanitarian state, and a hospitable nation, many Turks had positive sentiments about helping our ‘Muslim brothers’ back in 2011. It started as a couple hundreds of thousands living in controlled settlements in the Eastern Turkey where refugees were hosted in the camps, offered food, shelter, and education. Many Turkish citizens saw it as a religious duty to help those in need. Sharing the empty lands of the country for a temporary term seemed to be the right thing to do.

Over time, however, the refugee issue in Turkey, I argue, has grown to be the single most important problem that should be dealt with. Refugees are now living in every major city without the support of the state, without speaking the Turkish language, and without adapting to the traditions and customs of the local citizens. I, therefore, argue that what started as offering the low density areas to the suffering as a deed for a short amount of time supported by the citizens, has now become a messy integration problem in already over-crowded cities of the West making the Turks more xenophobic and anti-refugee. Moreover in this change, I cannot blame the refugees for their failure to integrate, or the locals for their racist sentiments, and can only hold the government responsible for not providing the necessary conditions and letting refugees to scatter around in the metropolitan cities without assistance.

There are so many struggles that refugees have to face every day in Turkey. They are excluded from the society with no opportunity for integration, most of them are too uneducated to get legal jobs, and have too big of families to live in a single room apartment that they can afford. As a non-expert, I would not take the liberty in explaining how hard their lives are. For this, I only urge all my fellow citizens to sympathize with them, and ignore the fake racist news being circulated around about how much benefit they are getting from the state.

On the other hand, however, I would like to urge the foreign NGOs, academics and politicians who are too quick to blame the Turks for being not welcoming enough, and for holding anti-refugee sentiments. Just as demonstrated in my modest experience, Turks did feel threatened by having to share their neighborhoods with refugees who will stay for generations, all of a sudden without their consent. The locals in the West were not ready to share their public sphere with a population that is so inherently different from them in language, culture, and education. Considering how even legal and controlled immigration of Poles to the UK could make the English feel threatened, it is easy to understand how the Turks felt.

The social and cultural costs of uncontrolled refugees are far more than the economic costs which are discussed more often. The crime is on the rise in almost every major city, hospitals are always full, there are not enough classrooms, and jobs for the blue collared Turks are scarce due to refugees who are willing to work below the state regulated minimum wage. While these are concerning indicators, the cultural change that is being experienced in Mudanya, and hundreds of other Western cities and towns is more critical. Turkey is becoming more religious, more conservative, more Muslim, and more Middle Eastern. For all this, I cannot blame the refugees, but I also cannot blame the Turks who blame the refugees. I blame it on the big men.