Europe | The new neighbours

Turkey is taking care of refugees, but failing to integrate them

If Syrians become a permanent underclass, the country is headed for trouble

|KAHRMANMARAS

THE refugee camp on the outskirts of Kahramanmaras, in Turkey’s south, glows as brightly as the local officials singing its praises. The air-conditioned container-unit houses, home to 24,000 displaced Syrians and Iraqis, are spotless. Each unit comes with a kitchen, a bedroom, a television and a laundry machine. The camp also boasts a school, a hospital and a supermarket. “We have all that we need,” says Muhammad Darwish, cradling his baby niece, Hiyam, one of over 240,000 refugee children born on Turkish soil since 2011. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, surveys the scene from a huge banner near the camp’s entrance, his image next to that of a distraught child. “It is a matter of conscience,” reads the caption.

To the people of the surrounding villages, it is also a matter of controversy. The camp’s residents are all Sunnis. The village locals are Alevis, members of Turkey’s biggest religious minority and distant cousins of the Alawites, the sect that forms the backbone of the Syrian regime. Fearing sectarian tensions and the loss of grazing land for their livestock, the villagers protested against the camp’s construction last year. Police doused them with tear gas. To make amends, the municipality gave each household a cow.

But the mistrust endures. In Lower Terolar, a village down the road from the camp, farmers say they avoid going out after dark and give the refugees a wide berth. “They’re a very different people,” says an elderly man. “We should not have to be neighbours.” The camp residents are equally anxious. “I would not go there on my own,” says Ammar, a 25-year-old from Aleppo. “They’re Alevis. They’re not the same ones as in Syria, but they’re Alevis.”

Compared with other countries, Turkey has done an excellent job of looking after the 3m refugees who have poured in since the start of Syria’s civil war in 2011. Mr Erdogan’s Islamist government says it has spent $25bn managing the two dozen camps near the Syrian border, home to 250,000 people, and providing aid to refugees outside of camps, in other parts of the country. That cost, and the strain on public services (Syrians in Turkey receive free health care), will probably keep rising. The refugee population is growing much faster than Turkey’s. At the Kahramanmaras camp, it is set to double in under 10 years.

Most Turks’ solidarity with the newcomers remains strong. Across Europe, anti-immigrant parties have jumped at the chance to turn fear of refugees into votes. In Turkey, neither the nationalist nor the secular opposition has attempted to do so.

Yet there are signs of trouble ahead. Opinion polls show attitudes towards refugees hardening. Reports of crime involving refugees, some of them bogus, have provoked clashes. In Istanbul, fighting lasted for days after a Turkish man who tried to stop a group of Syrian and Afghan men from harassing local girls was stabbed and killed. “Whenever a Syrian and a Turk get into a fight, entire neighbourhoods tend to jump in,” says Selcuk Delibas, a human-rights activist. In Kahramanmaras, the risk is compounded by old traumas. Villagers often recall a riot in 1978 in the provincial capital in which more than 100 Alevis were killed by mobs of nationalists and Islamists. Some are convinced that the refugee camp houses radical Syrian insurgents. “The villagers think the refugees are jihadists, and the refugees think the villagers are Assad supporters,” says Mr Delibas.

Don’t make yourselves at home

Some see these problems as the result of a flawed policy. While Turkey has met the newcomers’ basic needs, it has made few efforts to integrate them. Instead of offering Syrians full refugee status, it has granted them “temporary protection”, which implies fewer rights. The labour market remains largely off-limits. At the start of last year Turkey allowed Syrians to apply for work permits. To date, it has issued fewer than 20,000, corresponding to perhaps 1% of the working-age refugee population. About 500,000 others have entered Turkey’s shadow economy, where they are routinely exploited. Education is an equally big problem. Of the 900,000 school-age Syrian children, less than 60% are enrolled. Just 18% attend normal schools, as opposed to temporary learning centres like the ones in the camps.

One reason why Mr Erdogan’s government has yet to acknowledge that, after six years of war, the Syrians are in Turkey to stay, is the risk of a domestic backlash. Another is the fear that calls to integrate them are a ploy. “The government sees this as a trick by the Western countries, to force these refugees to remain in Turkey instead of going to Europe,” says Murat Erdogan (no relation), a migration expert at Hacettepe University.

Even if that were true, a better integration policy would be in Turkey’s own interest. The longer it kicks the can down the road, says Mr Erdogan, the bigger the risk that the refugees will become a permanent, stateless underclass, susceptible to radicalisation. Opening the job market could help prevent the backlash the government fears. “If we can turn them from being dependent on aid to earning a living, they would be less exposed to resentment by locals,” says Omar Kadkoy, a researcher at TEPAV, a think-tank in Ankara.

In Lower Terolar it is the economy that has started slowly bringing together the Alevi locals and the Sunni camp residents. Mustafa, a local farmer, has hired four Iraqi Turkmen refugees to help with the harvest. Shortly after midday, the men head down to the village for a meal prepared by Mustafa’s wife, followed by cigarettes, anecdotes and political banter. Mustafa takes a dim view of Turkey’s president. One of his new hires, Ziyad Ali, a former policeman who escaped Islamic State’s assault on Mosul in 2014, thinks him a hero. But they enjoy working together. That is a start.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "The new neighbours"

Trump’s Washington is paralysed

From the July 1st 2017 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Discover more

Vladimir Putin blames an Islamist attack on Ukraine and America

How to use a disastrous security failure to bolster dictatorship

Why the French are drinking less wine

A younger generation is rejecting old Mediterranean habits