CESME, Turkey — As the European Union and Turkey focus on stemming the flow of Syrian refugees attempting perilous journeys across the Aegean sea to Greece, another migrant community whose numbers are also swelling says it is being overlooked.
Largely denied the chance for legal resettlement in Europe and struggling to find work or support in Turkey, Afghans account for around a quarter of the migrants risking their lives in the small boats leaving Turkey’s shore.
Ahead of an emergency European Union summit with Turkey on Monday, the EU executive has announced the first payouts from a 3 billion euro ($3.3 billion) fund meant to help Turkey cope with an influx of more than 2.7 million Syrian refugees and encourage them to stay put.
But while Afghans are unlikely to be prevented from using services such as medical centres and education facilities set up with European funds in Turkey, the fact they speak Pashto and Dari, rather than Arabic, risks excluding them from projects designed for Syrian refugees, aid workers warn.
“The EU is not even discussing these issues and is exclusively focused on Syria,” Kati Piri, the European Parliament’s rapporteur for Turkey, said last month.
“Even if the Syrian crisis would be solved tomorrow, there would still be a serious refugee crisis, with a large number of refugees in Turkey who don’t have access to their rights.”
Afghan migrants in Turkey interviewed by Reuters said that over the past few years they had been denied interviews with UNrefugee agency UNHCR that would formally determine their refugee status, a key step in the journey to being resettled.
Polat Kizildag, program coordinator at ASAM, an organization which registers asylum seekers in Turkey, said they were generally told they were ineligible because Turkey was the third country on their journey and the expectation was that they apply for refugee status in their second, in many cases Iran.
Human rights groups have said Iranian forces deport thousands of Afghans without giving them a chance to prove their asylum status and that they are pressured to leave the country.
“We want to stay (in Turkey) but ... there is no support here. It’s too expensive,” said Najebullah, 45, a father of four originally from Kabul waiting in Cesme, on Turkey’s Aegean coast, to make an illegal crossing to the Greek Island of Chios. “In Europe we will get work and they will help us,” he said, echoing a commonly-held belief among the migrants flooding to Turkey’s shore that once they arrive in Europe they will be more easily able to build a new life.
Selin Unal, UNHCR spokeswoman in Turkey, said the most vulnerable, including Afghans, still received interviews, adding that close to 500 Afghans had been interviewed last year. She said the sheer numbers meant those most at risk were prioritized among UNHCR’s active case load of some 254,000 non-Syrians.
More than 63,000 Afghans came to Turkey last year, a sharp rise from 15,652 in 2014, according to ASAM, counting only those who registered. Some came directly from Afghanistan, others from Iran, where they had tried unsuccessfully to settle.
Kirikkale, near Turkey’s capital Ankara, is one of several satellite towns where registered Afghans are allowed to reside.
Hakima Rezai, in her late thirties, said she was trying to get to Europe to be reunited with her four children, taken to Europe by sea by her brother-in-law almost a year ago. She said UNHCR — which declined to comment on individual cases — had told her they could not help.
Rezai lives in a single room with a coal-burning stove and relies on the charity of neighbors. She does not receive the cash cards given to some Syrian refugees by international NGOs and their local partners to help meet basic living costs because there is no such scheme specifically set up for Afghans.
“I cry every day,” she said, showing the identity documents of her absent children.
The exodus from Afghanistan has been prompted by an increasingly precarious security situation, with 11,000 civilians killed or injured in 2015, as well as widespread corruption undermining faith in the future and a war-ruined economy that cannot provide enough work for its population. — Reuters
