Introduction
This article scrutinizes how the Syrian crisis affects the management of Turkey’s refugee regime. It also analyses how the Turkish government has treated the Syrian refugees preferentially in comparison to refugees of other nationalities. The article illustrates that the current Turkish humanitarian assistance to refugees is selective, and it predominantly welcomes those that have religiously, ethnically and politically acceptable backgrounds to the Islamist AKP (Justice and Development Party) ideology in government. This attitude is merely in line with the selective application of what remains as the anomaly of the Turkish asylum regime, that is, it limits itself to accepting asylum applications only from European nationals. This geographical limitation dates from the time when Turkey adopted the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees in 1961, while having published a declaration that it would admit only aliens coming from Europe due to the geographical region in which Turkey is located. Non-European asylum seekers who qualify for the internationally accepted ‘refugee’ definition are granted the right of temporary asylum (Asylum and Migration Legislation, 2005, pp. 13-14) in Turkey, while the UNHCR deals with their cases to find a country of settlement. This process can take years in many instances, and these refugees can neither leave their places of temporary residence nor be afforded any employment rights while waiting.
Similar to the AKP, based on their ideologies, previous governments have also been lenient toward non-European refugee groups despite the geographical limitation policy. In addition to accepting Bosnians, Bulgarian Turks, and Kosovars, thereby, previous right-wing governments settled Afghans of Turkic descent in Eastern Turkey in the 1980s, and later allowed immigration of Ahıska Turks from Central Asia in the 1990s as ‘national refugees’ (Baydar Aydıngün, 1998–1999). Looking at the Syrian case, this article argues that the AKP’s humanitarianism in Turkey is merely a continuation of the selectiveness that these governments also pursued. Yet, the numbers are incomparably higher this time, raising doubts about how the AKP government can retain its pragmatic stance with selective opening.
The empirical context that informs this article is the Syrian refugee population of more that two million in Turkey, and their status under two new laws that deal with them and stateless people coming from Syria within a ‛temporary protection’ framework (Göç İdaresi Genel Müdürlüğü n.d.). In effect, this status allows Syrians to receive protection in Turkey. However, as an impact of, first, the discursive making of the Syrian crisis by the AKP government as a war between the Sunnite victim and Alawite oppressor and, second, Turkey’s association with the Sunnite warring factions in Syria, the ethnic and religious background of Syrian nationals, there is a difference in terms of what Turkey offers in practice and what the refugees are willing to accept.
Nevertheless, the principles of temporary protection are such that Turkey will maintain an open border policy’ for all Syrians, and it will respect their non-refoulement on condition that they register with the Turkish authorities. The policy includes renewable but unlimited stay, protection against forcible returns, and access to reception arrangements where immediate needs are addressed. Yet, temporary protection precludes any right for permanent residence and, ultimately, citizenship. Therefore, while the state has been willing to extend some security and protection to Syrians, it is still reticent to guarantee their permanence in and integration with Turkish society. In practice, temporary protection means the provision of services to those in camps, but a lack of similar protection to those outside the camps. At the time of writing (early summer 2015), assistance to non-camp refugees has been ad hoc and delegated to local actors such as NGOS or local governments, with the notable exception of the state guaranteeing their continuous access to public medical healthcare. Outside the camps, Syrians of school age with residence permits can enrol in public schools or attend informal schools taught in Arabic and run by volunteer Syrian teachers and supported by local authorities or NGOs (UNHCR, n.d.). However, given their swelling numbers, finding teaching facilities has been problematic. Regarding access to employment, at the time of the interviews in winter 2014, the Turkish Ministry of Labour indicated that, with temporary protection, there also came renewable one-year work permits.Footnote 1 However, there is as yet no systematic analysis of the Syrians’ uptake of work permits.
This article argues that, despite resting on a legal framework, the temporary-protection framework is an essentially discursively constructed mechanism with vague implications, particularly regarding settlement and integration. To give a few examples, there is a selective operationalization of temporary protection following the AKP government’s discursive construction of the typical Syrian refugee as a Sunnite victim escaping the atrocities of the Alawite Assad dictatorship. The management of services provided to Syrians is delegated to AFAD (Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency), indicating that the government assesses Syrians in Turkey within a crisis management framework. The Law includes a clause that temporary protection should not imply any threats to national security. Upon complaints from the locals, Syrians have been transported out of Turkish cities either to camps or to other cities. The political authorities, including the President, have been keen to emphasise publicly that Syrians will go back to their countries once the Assad regime is ousted.
Therefore, in order to analyse how the AKP government has framed the Syrian refugee crisis in Turkey, this article introduces discursive governance as a theoretical tool. Discursive governance works more efficiently to address the ‘selective opening’ and ‘preferential treatment’ narratives of AKP, rather than the formally institutionalized immigration systems in which the rights of refugees and protection by the host state and nation toward the refugees are much clearer. When investigating how political narratives affect the governance of the refugee crisis, therefore, discursive governance helps us to understand the process in which political discourses become normative mechanisms: first, by marking socially constructed realities in politics; second, by playing a role in delineating the subsequent policy frames; and third, by influencing the public sphere (Korkut, Mahendran, Bucken-Knapp, & Cox, 2015). In this context, discursive governance has operated in the following manner. Since its initiation, the AKP has delineated the Syrian refugees as merely Sunnite Muslims and in so doing politically engaged with the Syrian crisis as an active supporter of the Sunnite forces in Syrian opposition (Aras, 2004; Gürsel, 2012; Han, 2013; Hinnebusch & Tür, 2013). This deliberate narration of the crisis as a war between the Sunnite victim and Alawite oppressor sought to justify preferential treatment for Syrian refugees as the rightful recipients. It was also aimed at preventing a possible reaction from the public, which is generally nativist and essentially foreignness-averse (Korkut, 2014) regarding the refugees. That is why the temporary-protection legislation introduced in 2014 extended protection merely to Syrians but not to other refugee groups in Turkey. Moreover, as an impact of Turkey’s overt discursive, political and military association with the Sunnite forces to drum up support from the AKP constituency, non-Sunnite Syrian refugees have been reticent to fully take up the protection that the legislation has provided.
As I will spell out below, to gain support, the tenets of opening have appealed to the collective memory of the public as Turkey being a ‛charitable’ polity with close personal and historical relations with the Syrian nation. The discursive making of selective humanitarianism therefore reflected on ‛how things have been and always are’ in Turkey and within Turkish society. These discourses qualify ‛innovative’ policy-making at the central and local levels of public administration in response to the troubles of Turkey’s Syrian ‛guests’ – according to Turkish public administrators interviewed for this article. Thereby, governance through discourses has enabled the government to avoid extending full protection to all refugee populations on Turkey’s territory, and bolstered its role as a host to Sunnite Syrians. In the end, the AKP government merely maintained earlier political preferences of the Turkish state, and it accepted only those refugees that were religiously and sometimes ethnically in confluence with the composition of its voter base. However, Turkey has faced a more complex refugee problem since summer 2014 with the emergence of so-called the Islamic State (IS), as the Syrian civil war spilled into Iraq and engulfed the Kurdish areas in Syria bordering south-eastern Turkey. As I argue below, the complexity that the refugee crisis has gained presents us with a possibility for comparing the protection for Syrians with others in Turkey, but particularly the Middle Eastern refugees suffering from the regional repercussions of war in Syria.
In order to delineate the tenets of pragmatism, moral responsibility and selective opening, the article offers the following. The first section looks at the implications of the Syrian refugee crisis for Turkey, presenting the background to the crisis, the development of the guest narrative, and the troubles that mass reception of refugees has generated. In the second section, I propose why discursive governance offers the most optimal format for dealing with the Syrian refugee crisis rather than a formally institutionalized immigration system. This reflects on reactions to foreignness among the Turkish public as well as the recently changing ethnic and religious composition of refugees arriving due to the regional repercussions of civil war in Syria. The subsequent empirical discussion comprises two sections. First, I delineate selective opening and preferential treatment discourses that govern the Syrian refugee crisis by reflecting on interviews with Turkish bureaucracy. Second, I illustrate the implications of discursive governance for refugees by depicting a comparative picture of Syrians and others seeking protection in Turkey. In conclusion, I reflect on how the ideological tenets of selective opening and humanitarianism preclude more permanent integration policies that not only the refugees in Turkey but also Turkish society need to come to terms with as Turkey remains a target county for international migration flows.