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2 Syria,
Turkey and the camp cover-up By Erin Banco and Sophia Jones
A friend
who made the trip with him explained how the
patient was shot by Syrian Armed Forces in Idlib
that morning. He wanted us to take a picture of
his friend, now clinging to life with a gaping
hole in his leg, to show the severity of the
situation inside Syria. Our translator was forced
to explain that, by order of the Turkish
government, we weren't allowed to take photos
inside the hospital. Guest-fugees In
August 2011, The Euro Mediterranean Human Rights
Network (EMHRN) published a report outlining
several human-rights violations occurring in the
camps in Hatay province, including the denial of
access by outside monitors. In their report the
group stated, "The Coordination for Refugee Rights
(CRR), a group of seven Turkish and international
human-rights organizations have had no access and
said it was impossible to verify reports and
information they received."
The governor
of Hatay province, who grants permission to the
camps for human-rights
groups, said the government was trying to protect
the refugees from "potential danger". But without
outside observers, refugees in the camps said they
worry that he conditions will continue to
deteriorate.
Food supplies are already
insufficient, potable water is only delivered
periodically, and there are only two bathrooms in
each camp, one for men and one for women. Of the
six operational camps in Hatay, three of them are
set up in old tobacco warehouses, while the others
are simply rows of white tents set up in barren
fields.
Syrians fleeing their shelled-out
homes are finding relative safety in Turkey, but
not as refugees. The Turkish government classifies
all people who flee from non-European countries as
"guests" of the Turkish state. Under this
classification, Syrian refugees receive basic
protections, but their status is open to
revocation. Guest status fails to confer even the
minimum guarantees that the 1994 Turkish Asylum
Regulations would provide, meaning that Syrians do
not have the ability to register as asylum
seekers, and do not receive identification cards
or residence permits.
Turkey ratified the
1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees
with a provision that allows them the option only
to apply refugee status only to people who have
fled Europe. Turkey claims it has no international
obligation under the Geneva Convention to provide
refugee status to Syrians, and therefore, has no
obligation to grant them permanent residency in
Turkey, only in another country.
But
according to the August 2011 Euro-Mediterranean
Human Rights Network report, providing full
protection to the Syrians seeking asylum in Turkey
is "not only a humanitarian imperative but a legal
obligation under international refugee law and
international human rights law".
Refugees
fleeing the violence in Syria mainly enter Turkey
through official border crossings and register
with the Turkish authorities before being sent
into a camp. Once they enter the camps, Syrians
effectively have no access to UN refugee
assistance since they are rarely allowed to travel
far from the camp perimeter. This gives them no
real possibility of travelling to UN refugee
agency offices in the cities of Ankara or Van to
file for asylum status.
One exception to
this rule has been for FSA members living in the
soldiers' camp in Reyhanli. Not only have FSA
members received permission to leave their camp,
but the Turkish government has reportedly provided
large sums of money for non-essential surgeries
they would not have been able to afford in Syria,
according to doctors we spoke with.
Some
Syrian activists, as well as other dissident
soldiers in Hatay's capital, Antakya, believe
payments for these surgeries are being used as a
form of bribery. One defector we spoke with, a
former officer in Assad's army, said he thought
the Turkish government was paying off people to
silence them for fear they would return back to
Syria and spread politically damaging information,
including the full story of the treatment of
refugees in the camps.
From refugees to
prisoners Typically, the Turkish
government arrests refugees entering Turkey
without proper documentation and sends them to one
of the country's seven detention centers,
previously known as "guesthouses". Since the civil
war in Syria began, the government has been making
exceptions for thousands of undocumented Syrians,
but not all of them. The conditions in these
facilities is also alarming.
Omar Najjari
was arrested by Turkish authorities and jailed in
Antakya's foreign guesthouse under suspicion of
smuggling arms across the border into Syria. What
he told us about the prison's conditions match the
findings of the Global Detention Project, a Swiss
organization that investigates countries responses
to global migration.
According to the
group, Turkey's foreign detention centers are
notorious for overcrowding, poor nourishment,
limited access to safe drinking water and
inadequate medical services for inmates. Najjari,
for instance, said he was confined in an
overcrowded room without sufficient bedding for
the inmates.
The detention centers aren't
the only places Syrians are being imprisoned.
After being held in Antakya, Turkish officials
transferred Najjari to a small detention camp set
away from the others - a place to detain
"problematic" refugees, which included women and
children. Informal and unregistered, Najjari said
the camp conditions were abysmal including, for
example, providing only six bottles of clean
drinking water for 60 people over two weeks.
With friends like these ... Political and religious factionalism among
Turkish human-rights groups in Antakya has also
stifled efforts to adequately aid refugees in the
nearby camps. Hatay province was, prior to 1939,
part of Syria and is home to a large Alawite
population, many of whom support the Assad regime.
The majority of the refugees in the camps,
however, are anti-Assad Sunnis, creating extreme
tension in the region.
A conversation with
Mithat Can - one of the most prominent
human-rights activists in Antakya and a man with
the power to affect aid flowing into the camps -
drove home just how much old enmities are
affecting the way supposed advocates are dealing
with needy refugees.
Can, an Alawite,
bluntly told us: "There is no war in Syria. The
conflict in Syria," he said, "is not between the
government and the people." According to him,
there is an international imperialist plot by
"Western gods" to remake the Middle East. He also
claimed that the Syrian army was not targeting
citizens at all, stating that the turmoil in the
country stemmed from the fact that the Syrian
government would not allow foreign intervention
alter the political and economic landscape of the
region.
Can, whose formal job is to help
refugees file for asylum with the UN but whose
opinion holds sway over local donors on whose aid
refugees depend, told us that he believed that the
news coming out of Syria was baseless Israeli and
American propaganda and that the Syrian people
were "actually okay".
In his words,
"so-called refugees" who claim to be fleeing
violence in Syria are actually relocating to
Turkish refugee camps to make a profit selling
their goods in Turkish bazaars or markets. Can
said that the only people in the camps that were
complaining were the radical Islamists, and that
their reported problems were actually
self-inflicted. He also told us that refugees were
refusing to see Alawite doctors and threw stones
at drivers who came to pick them up - something we
neither witnessed nor heard in credible reports.
Additionally, Can also claimed torture was
not being carried out by the Assad regime and
claims by refugee women of brutal sexual assaults
were untrue. He told us, for instance, he could
"just tell" that a woman who claimed to have been
raped by Assad forces was lying.
With the
Turkish government already restricting press
access to the camps and controlling information
about deteriorating conditions, suffering Syrian
refugees are almost solely dependent on local
human-rights advocates. But if one of the most
influential humanitarian activists in the region
doesn't believe there is really a civil war raging
in Syria, contends that needy refugees are greedy
illegal immigrants, and is not serious about
advocating for Syrians, then who will?
Erin Banco is a freelance
journalist based out of Cairo. Sophia Jones
is a recent Overseas Press Club fellow and a
Cairo-based freelance journalist.
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