SOHR: Wave of racist killings against Syrian refugees in Turkey
Racism kills. In Turkey, where xenophobic discourse against Syrian refugees has led to a wave of indiscriminate violent attacks, four youths have been killed in two recent episodes. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, on November 16 three workers were burned in the Mediterranean province of Izmir. For no apparent reason A Turk threw gasoline at them and set them on fire while they slept in a building materials factory.
Mamoun al Nabhan (23), Ahmed al Ali (21) and Muhammed el Bish (17) were admitted to hospital in serious condition. All three died a week later. Despite the brutality of the events, the event was barely reported in the press. “It is a calamity that the incident came to light 35 days later,” denounced the Platform for Refugee Rights. From the NGO they affirmed that the murderer spoke days before with the Turkish owners of the factory, and advanced his plan to “Burn those Syrians.” The police arrested the aggressor, but he was released shortly. Just five days later, he stabbed two other Turks.
The other murder occurred on Wednesday, when the young Syrian Mahmoud Shobak tried to stop a fight between his roommate and an armed Turk who broke into the building. Finally, he was fatally shot.
The racist campaign against the 3.7 million Syrian refugees settled in Turkey has exploded since August, when a Syrian killed a young Turkish man in Ankara. Since then, parties across the political spectrum have openly called for the “return” of refugees to their country.
Pogroms are the order of the day. After a fight between Turks and Syrians on September 29, some 150 residents of Torbali decided to take the law into their own hands: they burned and stoned Syrian apartments, and set their vehicles on fire. The same happened on August 11 in Altindag (Ankara), with mobs shouting anti-Syrian slogans. As a result, many refugees ended up leaving their homes in fear for their lives. On social media, the “hashtags” demanding their mass expulsion are spreading like wildfire.
Taha Elgazi, a Syrian who left his native Deir el Zor in 2013 to start a new life, thrived in Istanbul teaching physics in schools. He is one of the 200,000 privileged people who obtained Turkish nationality due to high professional qualifications. Recently, he took on a new goal: to combat the discourse that criminalizes his compatriots. «In a society, not only in Turkey, the street responds to the speeches of politicians. Unfortunately, they are using racist speech towards refugees, and their words have direct consequences, ”Elgazi explained to Al Jazeera.
To reverse the dynamics, he and other activists have held private meetings with formations from across the political spectrum. They have a clear objective: to prevent refugees from being used as an electoral asset. Opposition parties, who feel that the Recep Tayyip Erdogan era could come to an end, have openly made xenophobic speeches. “We want you to see us from a human perspective, not a political one,” Elgazi continued. They even met with Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main center-left opposition party, who promises to get rid of all Syrians in two years. His training aims to modify the reception policy of Erdogan, who after the wave of a million refugees that arrived in Europe in 2015, received 6,000 million euros from the EU in exchange for containing them within its borders. This June, Turkey received another 3 billion extra.
The Turkish opposition is studying ways to reprimand the diminished ties with Damascus, thus facilitating the eventual deportation of the Syrians. To snatch votes from Erdogan, they claim that “We cannot give up that our neighborhoods are taken over by Syrians.” From the right-wing IYI center, Ugur Poyraz clarifies that the rancor against the refugees is spread by the lack of a “long-term strategy.”
Syrian Ali Khatib crossed into Turkey six years ago fleeing the fighting. In addition to being exploited at work, in his new home he always felt like a stranger. “Racism became routine. The Turks began to hate us, to demand that we leave. They repeated that the government pays us salaries and houses ”. He recently returned to Idlib with his wife and a baby. In a city where the bombings and water and electricity cuts continue, they assumed that “here, at least, we have a family to trust.”
SOURCE: 24 Happenings