KEBABBLE Heading for home -
with government help By Fazile
Zahir
FETHIYE, Turkey - Summer in Turkey
is lovely. Along with migrating vacationers, birds
in abundance come to enjoy the warm weather and
easy pickin's. Great snipes, olive-tree warblers
and rufous turtle doves perch on branches and
pluck worms from recently watered fields, but the
effects of the sunshine are not limited to the
countryside and our avian friends alone.
In Istanbul, summer is when rural-to-urban
migrants, crammed swelteringly into public buses
and stuck in traffic, think back wistfully on the
villages they left behind and the ease with which
their sunny days passed by there. Some are taking the
daydreaming further and
packing up their bags, jumping on intercity buses
and heading for home.
Reverse migration is
a relatively new phenomenon in Turkey, but each
year the number of returnees increases. The
Istanbul city council began a scheme of sponsoring
returns in 2002, with good reason. In 1985 the
population of Istanbul was 5 million, in 2000 it
had doubled, and in 2006 it stands at 13 million.
Formerly quiet suburbs such as Umraniye,
Kucukcekmece and Pendik have swollen and become
small cities in their own right with populations
of up to 600,000 people each.
Now the
official attitude is that anyone who wants to
leave is welcome to go. They will even be helped
on their way. When the program was first launched,
the council matched the resident's budget for
reverse migration. Most of those wanting to go
home were poor and failing to thrive in the big
city, and in the first year of its operation 247
families were returned (1,131 people). Istanbul's
city leaders hoped they would spread tales of
their woes and hard times and that would go some
way toward putting off others thinking of
migrating to the city.
The council has
extended its scheme from just providing financial
help and, with thoughtful foresight, is looking at
helping to provide livelihoods for those who
choose to go back. The latest initiative announced
last week is to provide employment for farmers
reverting to their homelands.
Council
chief Kadir Topbas has offered five-year
guaranteed purchase contracts (at above-market
rates) to farmers who will use their fields to
grow organic wheat and rye. He has also offered
free educational courses in organic farming and
promised support to existing farmers in the
southeast, the south coast of the Black Sea and
Inner Anatolia - the areas from which most
migrants to Istanbul come. The other element of
his policy is to provide families with the direct
means to go back. Since April, council trucks for
moving household possessions have been leaving
from all over Istanbul's suburbs and heading out
to Corum, Tokat, Kars and Igdir.
Gurbet
Yuce is the 17-year-old daughter of a Kurdish
family who moved to Istanbul four years ago in
search of a better life. Last week she watched
their goods get packed up and sent home, and then
waited for a state-sponsored bus to pick up her
and her family. The closest she ever got to
Istanbul was Pendik, 30 kilometers from the
center, and she is returning without ever having
seen the Bosporus, the Blue Mosque or the Grand
Bazaar. She leaves behind her friends and school
and perhaps her dream of becoming a music teacher.
For her father, Seyhzade Yuce, though, the
move is a relief. He sold his taxi license to move
to Istanbul, thinking he could set up a business
with the money and get rich, but his dreams
crumbled on arrival. Nothing had prepared him for
life in an urban environment: "No one tells you
that if you earn 1,000 liras, at the end of the
week all you have left is 5 liras. That money
would last six months in my village."
He
came seeking a better life and work opportunities
and instead found himself working as a laborer on
a building site earning 10 liras (US$6.50) a day.
Sometimes there was no work at all or no pay for
work done. Yuce expected to get support from his
extended family in Istanbul but failed to find it.
"Without money people won't even give you bread
here - family ties have been forgotten. I should
have listened to my father and never left the
village."
The sponsored return program has
grown in popularity year after year, and from the
modest start of 1,131 people in 2000, 17,200
people have chosen to leave Istanbul in the past
six years. When the Yuce family get back to Igdir,
they are unlikely to surprise anyone with their
return. Over the past few years most of those who
went to Istanbul have come back. This is happening
all over Turkey. Over the past five years, 137,636
people have returned to the southeast and to
eastern Anatolia from Istanbul, Izmir, Ankara,
Izmit and Antalya.
The reverse migration
is an encouraging sign of the increased stability
in the previously terror-stricken southeast and a
result of the new dynamism of Turkey's growing
economy. One no longer needs to live in a city to
get by or to attend a reasonably good school. As
jobs and facilities become available in villages,
the trend is likely to speed up, and rural areas
will undoubtedly gain from the "brain gain".
If other government bodies were, like the
Istanbul council, to plow much-needed money into
local industries, farming and public services,
Turkey might swiftly overcome the crushing social
problems in cities caused by rural-urban
migration. With luck and determination, musical
teenagers like Gurbet Yuce will be able to qualify
and teach the flute in their home towns.
Fazile Zahir is of Turkish
descent, born and brought up in London. She moved
to live in Turkey in 2005 and has been writing
full-time since then.
(Copyright 2006
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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