Turkey has taken in 2.8 million Syrian refugees since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War in 2011. But there are also 290,000 people from other countries, mainly Afghanistan and Iran. Are these refugees being overlooked by the government?
A new Human Rights Watch (HRW) report released Wednesday titled "Turkey: Education Barriers for Asylum Seekers" found that non-Syrian asylum seekers face a disadvantage when joining the workforce or entering school in Turkey.
Unlike Syrian asylum seekers, who can move around Turkey more or less freely, asylum seekers from countries such as Iran and Afghanistan are assigned to various Turkish cities such as Denizli and Trabzon, where they have little opportunity to leave. These cities have fewer job opportunities and less access to education for these asylum seekers, according to HRW. If asylum seekers leave their assigned city to go to another Turkish city with greater job opportunities such as Istanbul, they risk their legal status and can be subject to arrest. Children, for example, may have limited opportunities to pursue education for example and non-Syrian refugees are not allowed to start their own informal schools in their assigned cities.
Turkish asylum law and practice differentiate between European, Syrian and non-Syrian asylum seekers. Non-Syrians must obtain and maintain by registering every two weeks in their assigned city, cannot change their city on the basis that there is no available work or humanitarian support there and must obtain permits even to travel temporarily,
the report said.
Non-Syrian refugee children may drop out of school or may be kept out of school, thus being driven into child labor. They move to Istanbul and other big cities in Turkey and work illegally. A social worker working with refugees in Istanbul told HRW that she has never heard of non-Syrian refugees getting work permits. In the city of Trabzon, only 25 out of 4,200 Afghans have work permits. Poverty often forces these refugees to work illegally without a permit and drop out of school.
One Afghan asylum seeker, 16-year old Osman, told HRW that he works in a textiles shop 11 hours a day, 5 days a week. Another, 44-year old Alia, said that three of her sons under the age of eighteen work illegally to support their siblings.
HRW recommended making work permits easier to obtain for non-Syrian asylum seekers, allowing children of asylum seekers to enroll in schools and granting more freedom of movement to them.
Refugees International, a U.S. based non-profit, said in a report in February 2017 that Turkey should "lift its geographic restriction to the 1951 Refugee Convention" and enable people of all nationalities to benefit from the rights provided under the Convention, including the rights to work and to freedom of movement."
Religious persecution
According to the New York based Refugee Solidarity Network (RSN), Turkey hosts around 30,000 people from Iran as of 2016. Many of them are persecuted on religious grounds such as Sunni Muslims or Christian converts. LGBT people also face discrimination in Iran, they are driven to seek protection in neighboring countries such as Turkey, RSN states.
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that there are around 120,000 Afghan refugees in Turkey as of January 2017. Many of them are in Turkey and have fled the war in Afghanistan, where the Taliban and the Afghan government continue to fight in many regions. In 2014, a protest took place at the UNHCR offices where Afghan asylum seekers sewed their lips together to demonstrate against the long asylum screening processes in Turkey. Many Afghans eventually leave Turkey for Greece, where they hope they can get asylum in the European Union.
Other non-Syrian refugees in prominent numbers are Iraqis and Somalis, who also only qualify for "temporary asylum status." Some qualified Iraqi refugees, however, could get be granted Turkish citizenship if they pass a screening process, as reported by Al-Jazeera in January.