Turkey’s Syrian refugee bill looms large, reinforces stereotypes

My first encounter with the oft ignored antagonism toward Syrian refugees among opposition ranks took place during a research trip to the secularist stronghold İzmir over one year ago. An octogenarian whom I interviewed seemed fixated on the government's hidden agenda. "The government secretly granted citizenship to Syrians," the retired teacher passionately argued. "Erdoğan will ship them off to here and win the municipal election." In the end, the ruling AK Party failed to win the mayoral race in İzmir but the claim that I dismissed in an instant resurfaced on election day, when pro-opposition Twitter users began circulating "evidence" of Syrians voting in the local elections. The reaction to yet another election defeat provided valuable insights into the opposition's deep-running frustration with the rising number of refugees in Turkey.

The Turkish government is hosting over 480,000 Syrian refugees in tents and prefab homes spread across 22 refugee camps in 10 cities, according to a recent statement released by AFAD, a government agency that oversees disaster relief and emergency response efforts. The agency also announced that 262,644 Syrian nationals had checked out of the facilities and returned to their country. "An average of 7,000 refugees received treatment at mobile hospitals and almost 70,000 children attended on-site schools," the statement read. In an interview with Charlie Rose last month, Prime Min- ister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stated that his government had spent $3.5 billion (TL 7.4 billion) and catered to the refugee popula- tion's every need, including food, medical treatment and education. Meanwhile, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees re- ports that the number of Syrians in Turkey totals some 750,000.

While Turkey's commitment to refugee protection received praise from the international community, opposition figures seem increasingly unhappy with the extended stay of displaced Syrians in the country. Having established early on that they did not sup-port the Syrian opposition's struggle against Bashar Assad, the opposition had long ap-pealed to sectarian and secularist concerns that Turkey's southern border was now home to jihadist fighters. Opposition commentators are now shifting their focus to the rising costs of government policy and argue that hardworking taxpayers should not have to pick up the bill for foreign nationals. Meanwhile, the influx of Syrian refugees into metropolitan areas, especially Istanbul, seems to reinforce stereotypes about new-comers, an all-too-familiar narrative that targeted first-generation Kurdish immigrants in the 1990s, which Turkish urbanites blamed for a range of issues including the black market and purse snatching. Having thrived under the Republic's agenda to eliminate all ethnic and religious diversity, urban elites did not have regular contact with former villagers until the 1970s. Over the past decade, rapid urbanization reduced the rural population to a mere 22.7 percent and perpetuated the urban elite's sense of a cultural siege. Furthermore, the country's economic performance over the years has effectively changed its role as a transit route to Europe into a final destination for thousands.

At this rate, Turkey's urban elites need to do better than trading one group of scapegoats with another. As the Turkish country-side, along with a sizeable immigrant population, continues to relocate to the cities in the hopes of claiming a fair share of the country's wealth, the Republic's embedded urbanites will continue to lash out at new-comers in an attempt to suppress their sense of disempowerment. The target will change but the overtones will remain the same.