Interview with Professor Dawn Chatty:
The Situation of Syrian Refugees in the Neighbouring Countries
Syrian Civil War made many to escape the violence; more than four million refugees have left the country during the course of the war. Neighbouring countries like Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq still have the majority of the Syrian refugees while thousands also ended up in the Caucasus, the Persian Gulf, North Africa and Europe.
As Centre for Policy and Research on Turkey (Research Turkey), we conducted an interview with Professor Dawn Chatty about the situation of Syrian refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq as well as European Union countries. In this interview, Chatty evaluates the current situation and variety of problems that refugees face in those countries such as education and identity.
Professor Dawn Chatty is a social anthropologist whose ethnographic interests lie in the Middle East, particularly with nomadic pastoral tribes and refugee young people. Her research interests include a number of forced migration and development issues such as conservation-induced displacement, tribal resettlement, modern technology and social change, gender and development and the impact of prolonged conflict on refugee young people. Dawn is both an academic anthropologist and a practitioner, having carefully developed her career in universities in the United States, Lebanon, Syria and Oman, as well as with a number of development agencies such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).[1]
Synopsis of the Interview
“Now, Turkey, unlike Lebanon and Jordan actually has domestic legislation to deal with refugees from Syria.”
“If I were to compare Turkey to Lebanon and Jordan and how they have responded to these numbers (of refugees), Turkey is doing much better. They have spent nearly 3-4 billion dollars on these refugees, but it needs to consider how to better integrate these refugees from Syria in the country temporarily because many will go back someday.”
“The situation in Jordan is becoming so bad that even last week I heard the United Nations High Commissioning for Refugees (UNHCR), Andrew Harper maintained that Syrians are returning to Syria at the rate of 200 a day now from Jordan, because the situation in Jordan is so bad. That is the overall picture. Now, the refugees who are trying to reach Europe. Go ahead.”
“I think the problem that we are seeing in the city is people who could not get into refugee camps. So they are in the city and you are finding more people begging because they have run out of their savings.”
“You have to find ways to help people feed themselves, which means job creation while at the same time you provide food. It is a ‘tekiya’ system.”
“For those who move on many actually have relatives in Germany, Sweden, not so many in the UK, but they have relatives in Europe, so they are trying to move on, find a place, where they can settle temporarily, more than anything else if they have children. Now it is time to try to avoid a ‘lost generation,’ to provide education to the children. So families with children, they are trying to get to Europe because in the end if they cannot educate their children, they will become a lost generation.”
“Europe needs to think about a program of temporary protection, whereby it is possible to make an asylum request along the eastern Mediterranean and southern Mediterranean Rim, rather than have to go through criminal, smugglers to get in to the northern Mediterranean Rim in order to apply for an asylum.”
“The problem is that the European money, most of the money, has been going to assist not the refugees, but to assist the ‘moderate opposition,’ I think they call it, and also, for non-lethal arms.”
“Maybe, as a temporary place, to buy an island where people who have been displaced can receive shelter and food but how do you educate your children?”
“Suddenly you have this image of a dead boy picked up by the Turkish police officers, and I think it just hit people that we are doing something inhuman.”
“Obviously, there is more discrimination in Turkey against Kurds than rest of Syrians and this Kurdish Syrian family was tempted to immigrate to Canada where they had relatives.”
“However, we are in a very critical stage now because we have, we do have very large migrant flows, people looking for work but there is no work in their country massive unemployment or corrupt government and at the same time, you have people who are refugees by the 1951 Convention.”
“Syrians started their protests as in massive social movements for greater freedom and greater personal respect. Nevertheless, it was hi-jacked. It was hi-jacked by, I am going to say, extremist groups originally and then Assad of course fearing that he would not be able to defeat them, he brought in allies from Lebanon Hezbollah and of course from Iran.”
“The US and Russia are talking but they are talking really cautiously with each other whereas they should be embracing each other and trying to work with Iran and other regional powers including Turkey, to bring some kind of transitional transformation to Syria.”
“In Turkey, I know that the Turkish government, the ministry of education was a little bit slow recognising the education element for Syrians in Turkey because there is a language problem, which you do not have in Lebanon and in Jordan.”
“If Daesh is going to send infiltrators, they would not make them walk 200-300 miles; they would put them on an airplane, with a visa.”
“You have to remember that Angela Merkel herself was a refugee as a 5-year-old, she knows that. She recognises the tragedy before us. She has a very deep sense of what it means to be a refugee.”
“I would really like to see the West work together for a political solution with a transitional government even if it means that the Ba’ath party remains in power for few years and that there is a coalition that is able to work to destroy Daesh.”
Full Text of the Interview
According to Turkey’s President Erdoğan, the Turkish coast guards have rescued over 42 thousand refugees in the Aegean Sea in the first five months of 2015, and more than 2000 in the last week alone. Moreover, Turkey is hosting around 1.8 million Syrian refugees for a considerable time. We do know that there is a tension between refugees and the local people in the area, mainly the southeast of Turkey. Are you aware of the situation of these refugees in Turkey? According to you, is Turkey doing the best she could about help these people?
Well I can only speak from my experience in Turkey, but that was last October and then again in April this year. I can compare it with the situation in Lebanon and Jordan, because I have been conducting research with refugees in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan and exploring their relationship with their host communities. Obviously whenever population densities become very high there are going to be some social difficulties. Turkey has accepted nearly 2 million refugees from Syria. The majority seems to be managing well in Turkey. About a quarter of a million are in refugee camps set up by the Turkish Government not by the international system. Moreover, the camps run in a very humane fashion. So, that there is a waiting list of Syrian wanting to go to the camps. Nevertheless, this is only about 20% of the refugees from Syria. Of course, Syrians who are middle class, who have money, are managing without being in camps. Those who might have had money and they are running out of money are not doing so well, because they need to find employment. Now, Turkey, unlike Lebanon and Jordan actually has domestic legislation to deal with refugees from Syria. I know that in January of this year, actually two years ago they implemented some laws and they passed the laws and now they are trying to implement these laws, which give the refugees from Syria an ID, access to healthcare and access to education. The education issue we will come back to because it is more complicated.
“Now, Turkey, unlike Lebanon and Jordan actually has domestic legislation to deal with refugees from Syria”
Was it the same for Lebanon? I know this is the case for Turkey.
No, this is the case for Turkey. The problem in the southeast of Turkey is that the density of Syrians, in some places, in some towns is reaching almost 50%. In addition, there is some discontent, especially as Syrians who are desperate to work, to make some money, to feed their families are accepting jobs at lower pay than Turkish people. Therefore, there are Turkish people who are upset due to this situation. This is inevitable. The reason why I would say, if I were to compare Turkey to Lebanon and Jordan and how they have responded to these numbers, Turkey is doing much better. They have spent nearly 3-4 billion dollars on these refugees, but it needs to consider how to better integrate these refugees from Syria in the country temporarily because many will go back someday. In the meantime, the children need education; they need to learn Turkish quickly. I know that the Turkish Government has already passed a law allowing Syrians who finished secondary school may enter university in Turkey free but the problem is they have to learn Turkish. I know some Syrian young people who were in a big rush and they entered Turkish universities before their Turkish language was strong and they failed the first year. Nobody knows what is going to happen to them. Therefore, that is the situation in Turkey. I think the situation in Turkey is much better than the situation in Lebanon and Jordan. Why do I say that? Lebanon and Jordan have no legislation whatsoever on refugees. Neither of them has signed the 51 Convention,[2] which Turkey has, even though the Turkish government did not sign the 1967 protocol meaning that it was only interested in providing refuge to Europeans under the 51 Convention. That is back in the 1950s. In Lebanon for the refugees coming from Syria, there are no refugee camps. Therefore, they dispersed in thousands of small impromptu camps.
Can we say that the population of Lebanon, in terms of the density becomes higher?
Population density is automatically higher, because the population of Lebanon is only about 4 million and there are about 1.1 million people from Syria in Lebanon. The problem in Lebanon is that, have you ever heard the English expression, ‘familiarity brings contempt’?
“If Turkey is compared to Lebanon and Jordan and how they have responded to these numbers, Turkey is doing much better”
Ah yes, I have not heard but I understand that.
You have to remember that Syria and Lebanon are very close, that there was not even a border between Syria and Lebanon until 2005, when the US government insisted that the Syrian government define its border. Therefore, until 2005 Lebanese and Syrians could cross the border without visa.
It is historically like that.
It is historically like that and on top of that, Syrian laborers work almost completely at the construction industry and agricultural sector. So before 2010 there were half a million Syrians anyway, in Lebanon. They were the workers. Therefore, in many ways what you are seeing now is that the workers’ families have now joined them because it is not safe to remain in Syria. These are the poor, the less educated and now of course the most vulnerable and the most desperate. Moreover, the Lebanese government really cannot support them. They are looking at the UN system to support them. UN is trying to register them, to provide them with some elements of healthcare, some food vouchers, some cash transfer, and some education. Nevertheless, I say ‘some’ because it is very inadequate. Now we have just heard the announcement from the World Food Program that there is going to be a cut, because there is not enough international support. Therefore, you have people starving.
Is this a recent development?
Last week. Jordan is similar but not so extreme because again, most of the refugees from Syria in Jordan are from the south of Syria and they have strong kinship ties, strong tribal ties, and so on. However, the point, though, is that, in Jordan, the Jordanian government insisted on setting up a refugee camp, which is called as Zaatari. It was very poorly running, and there were very large discrepancies in that camp. It almost reached a 160 thousand people in one single camp in 2013. Now the numbers have dropped, people are leaving, they are finding ways of leaving, but they can only leave if they can have sponsorship. That has created a kind of smuggling system outside of the camp into Jordan. Syrians who are outside of the camps in Jordan have similar problems. They have to find work. Many of them are skilled; skilled carpenters, they are mechanics and so on and they are finding work but it has considered illegal. Therefore, if the police catch them, they send them back to the camps or some of them say that they send them sent across the border. However, the situation in Jordan is becoming so bad that even last week I heard the United Nations High Commissioning for Refugees (UNHCR), Andrew Harper maintained that Syrians are returning to Syria at the rate of 200 a day now from Jordan, because the situation in Jordan are so bad. Ok? That is the overall picture. Now, the migrants who are trying to reach Europe. Go ahead.
We will be coming there, but maybe if we can focus a bit on Turkey. I am sure that you know the extent of the refugee influx into Turkey, but even in west as Istanbul, Ankara İzmir, I am actually from Ankara, there are reports of Syrian refugees begging for food etc. What would be an appropriate solution to refugee situation of this magnitude? Because now not only the southern problem of Turkey but the big cities of Turkey, you know the pictures of Aylan which was very desperate. So what do you saw about this magnitude of refugees within the big cities, rather than the towns of southeastern, rural area?
We have to…
“Syrians are returning to Syria at the rate of 200 a day from Jordan, because the situation in Jordan are so bad. Now, the migrants are trying to reach Europe”
Does it mean that Syrian refugees are not willing to be in the camps anymore as it was 2 years ago in Turkey?
No, I do not think so at all. I think that Syrians, who are in refugee camps in Turkey, are still in refugee camps. The camps that I visited, people can go out in the morning and some of them they go out, they work, and they come back. Therefore, it is not like a prison. I think the problem that we are seeing in the city is people who could not get into refugee camps. Therefore, they are in the city and you are finding more people begging because they have run out of their savings. Therefore, this is now 2-3 years. Moreover, it may be that the civil society cannot cope. At the time, I went to one of the associations that are based on ideas of Sufism, and they were providing hot meals for anybody every day. So a hot meal and bread. Anybody, they did not have to be from Syria, in the neighbourhood could come… I saw that in Gaziantep, that was very well done. But these civil society efforts to try and provide at least food to people who have no more money, and for one reason or another have no way of working, is a temporary measure. In the end, there has to be an effort made to help people find work without threatening the employment of the local people. Because if the local people are unhappy with the refugee presence, then the situation will become very bad. Nevertheless, if you are assisting the local poor at the same time as you provide assistance for the refugees from Syria then it becomes more manageable. However, some of the begging, and not all the begging, I must say, is also because of the massive displacement of the gypsy communities of Iraq and Syria. In addition, I am sure there are also gypsies in Turkey. Nevertheless, their economies have been completely disrupted, too, because most gypsies in Syria and Iraq and Lebanon, used to make seasonal income from summer tourism, from festivals, from weddings, from these kind of celebrations. They do not have that income anymore and many of them have gone to the big cities. You find them even in Amman, in Beirut and they are begging on the street. Their children are begging on the street. This is a sign of the massive disturbance to the economy. What can you do? You have to find ways to help people feed themselves, which means job creation while at the same time you provide food. It is a ‘tekiya’ system. The ‘tekiya’ system, it was an old system in the Ottoman period. Now they are beginning to do that in Jordan. Some of the big mosques are now…
Do you mean ‘tekke’?
You say ‘tekke’ I say ‘tekiya.’
“In the city there are more people begging because they have run out of their savings”
‘Tekiya’ is, in the Islam religion, if you are pretending to be someone that you are not, to overcome an Islamic goal, it is doing ‘takiye.’ ‘Tekkes’ are some places where the education, clothes, food are given.
Yes. Therefore, they are beginning to do that in Jordan and I think some of the mosques in Lebanon are also doing that. I am sure also that you would find that widespread in Turkey, no?
Yes, as you mentioned before, the Sufist organisations, we a lot of international assistance, international Islamic associations, to Gaza, to Sudan, to Afghanistan. They are also providing, there were some trucks of them in Bodrum, in the coastal side, providing hot food as you said. Not the mosques itself because in Turkey mosques are operating independently and are bounded by the central authority and the Directorate of Religious Affairs. It is very much similar how government has operated after the republican era. So probably, Islamic civil society organisations are doing the same in Lebanon and Jordan by the mosques and communities maybe. In that manner, I understand that there is a problem of putting a balance between the refugee poor and the local poor and just providing them jobs, which seems not very likely in this current economic and political situation of Turkey as you follow, too. Is it justifiable that Turkey, appealing for financial help for the developed world to take refugee problem, from not only the UN but also EU and US? President and the prime minister openly says that for 2-3 years. What do you think about that? Is it justifiable to appeal for that kind of assistance?
Of course it is. If you look at the figures, but I do not have the exact ones with me, but you could consider that Turkey has spent approximately 5 billion dollars. UK and US together, have not spent more than 3 billion during the same period. So, why should the burden be on Turkey? We have to share the burden and even if it becomes a matter of a serious of bilateral agreements, this is a form of job creation during depressions and so on. That is very important. I know that the US government is now talking with the Jordanian government to create some large infrastructure projects, big road building projects and so on, with the idea of hiring 60% Jordanian, 40% Syrian refugees. It is kind of a bilateral system to bring in money, to give a boost the economy but also at the same time to be able to provide employment for the, I am not going to say unskilled, but for the poor and the refugees.
Yes, do you agree this statement, Erdogan says, ‘Europe is responsible from every refugee death,’ in that manner, by not helping Turkey or Lebanon or not expecting the security zone proposal of Turkey?
You are asking me really a political question. I do not know that safe havens work; we know what happened in the safe haven in Srebrenica. I think, yes, there is a problem, and that is that of course not all of the nearly 2 million refugees coming from Syria to Turkey are happy. Some are trying to move on to Europe. Many of them, who are trying to move on, have reached the stage where they realised they are not going back straight away. Therefore, originally, they wanted to stay close, same in Lebanon and Jordan but now they realised it is not possible. Therefore, they are trying to move on. For those who move on many actually have relatives in Germany, Sweden, not so many in the UK, but they have relatives in Europe, so they are trying to move on, find a place, where they can, more than anything else if they have children. Now it is time to tyr to avoid a lost generation, to provide education to the children. So families with children, they are trying to get to Europe because in the end if they cannot educate their children they will be a lost generation.
Yes, this is one of my questions.
Therefore, I do not think, I think Europe has been irresponsible and that led by the UK and some of the statements by the Theresa May that if we save people from drowning in the Mediterranean we only create a ‘pull factor.’ She made that statement when she refused to help the Italians in their program of the Mare Nostrum. It did not stop refugees from trying to come. If your life is under threat behind you, you are going to take any measure you can to come forward. What I think she did, was to create a more profitable smuggling, a criminal, smuggling program. I have been saying this for a very long time, at least the last 18 months. Europe needs to think of a program of temporary protection, whereby it is possible to make an asylum request along the eastern Mediterranean and southern Mediterranean Rim, rather than have to go through criminal, smuggler to get in to the northern Mediterranean rim in order to apply for an asylum. So it means that, the Great Britain, France, Sweden, Germany, they all need to have mechanisms which they can apply while they are still in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan.
“Europe needs to think about a program of temporary protection, whereby it is possible to make an asylum request along the eastern Mediterranean and southern Mediterranean rim”
So do you think that they were not prepared in the first place and now they are trying to find a solution?
They were definitely not prepared. They were lulled into a false belief that you can throw money at a problem and that will solve it. What I mean by that is, after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq it took about three years before the Iraqis began to flow out in massive numbers, nearly 2 million Iraqis left Iraq between 2006 and 2008. Most of them went to Syria; a few went to Jordan. They did not invade Europe, but the aid came to this region. Many of them wanted to stay near Iraq and some went to Australia, some went to Canada and so on. However, Europe had no mass influx, so they thought if you just give money that will solve it. The problem is that the European money, most of the money, has been going to assist not the refugees, but to assist the ‘moderate opposition,’ I think they call it, and for non-lethal arms.
In Syria, you mean.
In Syria and on the southern Turkish border because the opposition is in Gaziantep. These are all receiving salaries, they take training and they have equipment. Of course, there is a lot of corruption. I would be surprised if the percentage of the corruption was very deep into the two figures.
“The problem is that the European money, most of the money, has been going to assist not the refugees, but to assist the ‘moderate opposition,’ I think they call it, and also, for non-lethal arms.”
“Maybe, as a temporary place, to buy an island where people who have been displaced can receive shelter and food but how do you educate your children?”
“Suddenly you have this image of a dead boy picked up by the Turkish policemen, and I think it just hit people that we are doing something inhuman”
“Obviously there is more discrimination against Kurds than other Syrians and they were tempted to immigrate to Canada”
“We have very large migrant flows: one group is for labour migration due to their home country’s unemployment and at the same time you have people who are refugees by the 1951 Convention”
“Syrians started as in massive social movements for greater freedom and greater personal respect. It was hi-jacked by extremist groups originally and then Assad of course”
Do you think that right now nobody knows this? The answer to this question…
“The US and Russia are talking cautiously with each other whereas they should be embracing each other and try to work with Iran and other regional powers including Turkey, to bring some kind of transitional transformation to Syria”
“In Turkey, the ministry of education was a little bit slow recognising the education element because there is a language problem which you do not have in Lebanon and in Jordan”
“If Daesh is going to send infiltrators, they would not make them walk 200-300 miles; they would put them on an airplane, with a visa”
“I would really like to see the West work together or a political solution with a transitional government even if it means that the Ba’ath party remains in power for few years that there is a coalition that is able to work to destroy Daesh”
Thank you very much. It is the end of our interview.
Please cite this publication as follows:
Research Turkey (November, 2015), “Interview with Professor Dawn Chatty: The Situation of Syrian Refugees in the Neighbouring Countries” Vol. IV, Issue 11, pp.64-86 Centre for Policy and Research on Turkey (Research Turkey), London, Research Turkey (http://researchturkey.org/?p=9901)
Endnotes
[1] See Refugee Study Centre at Oxford University: http://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/people/dawn-chatty
[2] Note: She refers to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees adopted by the United Nations General Assembly by the Resolution 2198 (XXI).
