A Syrian boy with long hair kneels on the carpet of an apartment in Turkey. His hands are palms up on his knees, and tears are in his eyes. He murmurs a quick prayer: “Please God, let Erdogan win the elections.” This video was readily shared in WhatsApp groups of Syrian refugees in Turkey in recent days. “Look, this is a friend’s nephew,” reads the accompanying text. “He cries and prays with his mother because they fear being deported to Syria if the opposition wins the elections.”
Fear of an opposition victory is high among Syrian refugees in Turkey, said Mohammed Sheikh, a Syrian lawyer who works for an NGO in the southern province of Hatay. “The day after the first round, I visited a camp for Syrian earthquake victims. People said, ‘we haven’t slept a wink all night. We followed the news and prayed for Erdogan’. Some Syrians even sell their houses and cars in anticipation of an opposition victory. My uncle said to me: ‘I will put my car in your name in case I get deported’.”
Billboards depicting opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu are displayed all over Hatay with the text: ‘Suriyeliler gi-de-cek’ (Syrians will leave). “It is heartbreaking for us to see those things,” says Sheikh. He knows two boys who recently left for the Syrian province of Idlib to be better prepared for a possible opposition win. “They have requested permission from the Turkish authorities to visit Syria. They left for Idlib to find a house and a job. The situation there is bad, but better than in other parts of Syria.”
Target
For the second round of the presidential elections on May 28, the refugees are the target of an unprecedentedly negative campaign. Kilicdaroglu has moved from an inclusive and unifying message to aggressive anti-refugee rhetoric. His trademark heart-shaped hand gesture, which he invariably made during campaign rallies, has given way to the Gray Wolves sign (an ultra-nationalist movement). Signs have been hung everywhere with Kilicdaroglu’s portrait and slogans like ‘Syrians will leave.’ and “Terrorism will end” and “Poverty will end.”
In videos on Twitter, Kilicdaroglu lashes out at the president. “Erdogan, you have not protected the borders and honor of our country,” he said. “You deliberately let in 10 million refugees. You sold Turkish citizenship to get imported votes. As soon as I come to power, I will send all refugees home. We will not leave our homeland to those unable to protect our honor, and watch every day as this stream of deranged people enters our veins and threatens our very existence.”
It’s all part of the battle for nationalist voters critical of Erdogan’s government. This is a significant group of voters, some of whom voted in the first round for ultra-nationalist Sinan Ogan. He received more than 5 percent of the vote. Both Kilicdaroglu and Erdogan were angling for his support. Before the first round of the presidential election, Erdogan said that deporting Syrian refugees is “inhumane and non-Islamic”. Now he too promises to send them back to Syria. Ogan chose Erdogan.
Still, the question is whether Ogan’s voters follow his voting advice. Because some of them are secular Turks who don’t like Erdogan. Many follow the nationalist firebrand Ümit Özdag, the leader of the anti-immigration party Zafer, who supports Kilicdaroglu in the second round. One of them is Ali Yüce (21), an English student from the southern city of Kahramanmaras. “Özdag is better than Ogan. In exchange for his support for Kilicdaroglu, he has been assured that all Syrians will be returned within a year. I don’t want to live with Syrians, they are a danger to our country.”
Turkey is home to 3.5 million refugees from Syria, who have fled war, hardship and repression. Many of them live in the southern provinces devastated by the February earthquakes. Kahramanmaras is a wasteland of concrete rubble and battered building skeletons. Many Syrians have fled to other cities. “Fortunately,” says Yüce. “In the first years they only lived in tent camps. But then they came to live in the city, driving up the rents. Moreover, fights regularly broke out between Turks and Syrians.”
Laying the first stone
Yüce does not think Erdogan’s plans go far enough. The president promises the “voluntary” return of 1 million Syrians to a “safe zone” in Turkey-controlled northern Syria. Interior Minister and now MP Süleyman Soylu attended the foundation stone laying of 240,000 homes in northern Syria on Wednesday, financed by Qatar. The ceremony was widely reported in the pro-government press. But Yüce was not impressed. “Deporting 1 million Syrians is not enough, I cannot count on Erdogan.”
Yet not all Syrians are unnerved by the anti-refugee rhetoric of recent weeks. Because it is not the first time that anti-Syrian sentiment has flared up in Turkey. In recent years, refugees have been handy scapegoats for economic problems such as unemployment, the shortage of affordable housing, and the skyrocketing inflation. This led to tensions in many places and sometimes even riots, with Syrian shops being attacked by Turks. After the earthquakes, Syrians were accused by nationalist politicians of stealing scarce aid.
Abu Ali (62) can relate to that. He owns a breakfast shop in the Syrian neighborhood of Mirzaçelebi in the southern city of Adana. “I was the first Syrian to open a business here ten years ago,” says Ali, a man with a gray mustache and a bald head. “In the beginning it was great here. The Turks welcomed us. But there were troublemakers from both sides who started fights and caused other problems. The atmosphere changed. In 2019, Turks smashed our stores after rumors that a Turkish child had been assaulted by Syrians.”
Many Syrians in the area complain about their Turkish landlords, who are said to be stingy and surreptitiously increase the rent. “They are threatening to give our houses to relatives who have lost their homes because of ‘the earthquake,’ says Ali. “Unless we agree to a sharp rent increase. I used to pay 10,000 lira rent per year for my business, now 10,000 per month. It’s pure blackmail.”
Ali is not worried about deportation. “Both candidates have plans to send us back, but that’s just election rhetoric,” he said. “Because Turkey cannot just deport us since there are international treaties that it must abide by. The government can give permission to troublemakers to make our lives here unbearable, in the hope that we will go back to Syria.”
Syrian companies have not had Arabic nameplates since the government banned them in response to growing resentment among Turks. Refugees are also sent to a deportation center for the smallest violation of their residence permit. Yet the government does not seem to want to get rid of the Syrians entirely because employers benefit from the cheap labor. They often do not comply with the legal minimum wage and do not pay social security contributions. Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavusoglu warned this week that returning all Syrians would cause employment problems. “My father has sheep and complains that he cannot find shepherds. There is an urgent need for staff.”
Fikret Yenigün (35) has a hairdresser’s shop in Adana that consists of two rooms separated by a sliding door. One room is for Turks, the other for Syrians. “Syrian customers want different haircuts and beards, so I hired Syrians,” says Yenigün. Nevertheless, he is not entirely happy with their arrival. He complains that his rent has risen sharply. “There are just too many of them. ”
Yet Yenigün will vote for Erdogan again on Sunday. “Turkey is not the only country where Syrians cause problems, that also applies to Europe,” he says. “The numbers are just bigger here. But Syrians are not the only reason that life has become so expensive. We’ve had a lot to deal with in recent years: the pandemic, the earthquakes, global inflation. Erdogan has promised to return all Syrians as soon as the situation in Syria improves. He will make a deal about this with Syrian President Assad. It’s only a matter of time.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 27, 2023.