Bordering Isolation: on the margins of the Middle East

written for Index on Censorship, Summer 2014

Kate Maltby reports on the Dom people, nomads who have been forced by the Syrian war into Turkey and “pass” as Kurds to improve their treatment

Before the Syrian civil war, 60-year old Shaima was used to slipping over Turkey’s porous eastern border twice a year. “They hated us here, but in the summer there was always work. The men helped with the harvest, and there were weddings for the girls to dance. And at the wedding parties, they’d pay our men for music, then you-know with our women. Every winter, we would go back to Aleppo, to the big family.” Did she ever have a passport to ease her transit? “Of course not! Haven’t the Turks told you, we are gypsies?”

Shaima is a Syrian Dom, a member of a marginal group whose nomadic existence has left her people barely documented and all but invisible in their place of refuge. Today Shaima lives in a refugee camp near Gaziantep, Turkey’s sixth-largest city. She is among the 2.5 million people who have fled Syria as civil war ravages the country. As of March 2014, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had documented the arrival of nearly 650,000 Syrian refugees in Turkey. Activist Kemal Vural Tarlan, a photographer who has documented the Dom for the last decade, argues that the true number is nearly double that, and should include hundreds of thousands of unregistered refugees who have illicitly crept or bribed their way across the border and now work in the black economy. The Syrian Dom are among the least likely Syrians to have ID papers, and all people arriving at the border without papers spend months in spontaneously established border camps, shanty towns in the no-man’s land between the spot where Syria ends and Turkey begins, denied entry. Tens of thousands of Syrians are reported to have died of starvation here, just out of reach of refuge.

Since the emergence of jihadist guerilla opposition to the Syrian regime, most importantly ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, access to much of the border is controlled by Islamist fighters. So the unofficial shanty camps stretching for miles just inside the Turkish border are places of starvation and suspicion. “To bring aid to the starving,” claims Vural Tarlan, “you have to be permitted by the jihadis.” Shiraz Maher, senior research fellow at King’s College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, has similar tales from the region: “No one can get aid inside the border without the agreement of the IHH.” Wildly popular in Turkey, the IHH is an Islamist-leaning organisation that collects funds seemingly for humanitarian aid: it is frequently accused of siphoning its funds to Islamist fighters. In the West, the IHH is mainly known for its role in the 2010 “flotilla raid” to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza strip. To its defenders, the IHH is merely an Islamic version of Christian Aid; to its detractors, it is a front for terrorism. What is clear is that the Syrian Dom are undesirable to Islamists. In regions where access to aid is dependent on perceived piety, the Dom, with their reputation for Alevi theism and promiscuity, rarely make the cut.

Those who do get to eastern Turkey find that ethnic rivalries have preceded them. Broadly speaking, the Turkish population has been welcoming to their Syrian guests: the Turkish government has spent $2 billion on refugee support, and for all the country’s political divisions, the cost to the Turkish taxpayer has been accepted with barely a murmur from the opposition. But this generosity rarely extends to those refugees who swell the numbers of ethnic minorities that Turkey already finds inconvenient. And as the total number of refugees in the country approaches one million, the reluctance in some quarters to integrate Syrians culturally in Turkey is creating a demographic timebomb.

At present, Turkish officials and Syrian refugee leaders alike choose to murmur about a swift end to the Syrian war and a return home for refugees, ducking questions about how far Syrians should put down roots in Turkey. The ruling AK Party proudly boasts that it will pay for any Syrian who meets the entry requirements to attend a Turkish university – but in reality a mere thousand state scholarships have been awarded, because few of the hundreds of thousands young Syrians in the country meet the required proficiency in Turkish.

This is not a hurdle the Turkish government is keen to remove. The question of whether Syrian children should learn Turkish has become a political battle. In a nation which for years denied Kurdish children education in their own tongue, the ministry of education now insists that children in Syrian refugee camps should learn in their own language – and only their own language. In the Gaziantep region’s generously funded network of showpiece refugee camps, the ministry provides schoolbooks based on the Turkish curriculum, but only in Syrian Arabic. Aid agencies talk, off the record, of serious difficulties in encouraging camp governors to provide lessons in Turkish, or even English. Fatima, a Circassian refugee in the flagship Nizip II camp in Gaziantep, told me she had abandoned her post as a volunteer in the camp school in protest against the authorities’ refusal to provide even a basic introduction to Turkish for her children. “They told me, why do I need to learn Turkish, when I won’t be staying in Turkey? So I said, what is the point of teaching our children at all, if they will never have a life in this country?”

This is not to say Turkish citizenship is off the table for all Syrians: ahead of the April 2014 elections, reports emerged in Gaziantep of incumbent officials handing out ID cards on condition that the recipients performed their first civic duty by obediently voting AKP.

Meanwhile, as Prime Minister Recep Tayypi Erdogan continues to rally his supporters against those considered insufficiently Islamic, his main targets have been Turkey’s Alevi population, a group closely associated with Domari speakers. The Alevi religion combines music and dance: as Hussein, a young Alevi from Istanbul, tells me: “Almost every ritual is a dance – we worship the divine through music and with our bodies.” Alevi religious practices have long fascinated the West, with their Sufi-influenced mysticism lionised as a liberal Islam. Nonetheless, most Alevi traditions quite clearly predate Islam, a fact that is not lost on their Islamist detractors. One of the most significant demonstrations against Erdogan last year, during the Gezi park protests, took place on 2 July, the 20th anniversary of an arson attack on an Alevi conference in which 33 leading intellectuals were killed at Sivas, Istanbul. Two months earlier, Erdogan had announced the name of the latest structure to bridge the Bosphorus: the Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge, named for Selim the Grim, notorious for massacring Alevis. As Anglo-Turkish author Alev Scott notes in her recent book, Turkish Awakening, Selim famously declared: “The killing of one Alevi has as much heavenly reward as the killing of 70 Christians.” On the anniversary of the Sivas massacre, for which no one has been convicted, it felt like a slap in the face.

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