‘Europe needs to learn from Turkey on hosting refugees’

By Muhammad Mussa

LONDON (AA) - A U.K. panel on Wednesday discussed the humanitarian role of Turkey in the refugee crisis and analyzed the details of the European Union’s immigration policy, including those of the 2016 EU-Turkey deal.

The conference organized by the TRT World Research Centre was held in the Houses of Parliament. It was hosted by Lord Mark McInnes with guest speakers including Talip Kucukcan, a professor in Marmara University in Istanbul, Shoshana Fine, an academic at CERI Sciences Po, and Eiko Thielemann, an associate professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

“From a statistical perspective, Turkey today hosts the greatest number of refugees in the world. When you look at the Turkish economy and the geography, it is not that big," Kucukcan said.

"But when you look at the number of refugees Turkey hosts and the money spent on taking care of them, Turkey is spending more money on the wellbeing of refugees than any other country in the world,” Kucukcan said.

"Europe needs to learn from Turkey on hosting refugees", he asserted.

Kucukcan also cited a UN report released Tuesday which said there are 75 million people displaced throughout the world, of which 25 million are recognized as refugees and of which 4 million are residing in Turkey.

He said that in 2018, Turkey spent more than $70 billion on humanitarian purposes, and not just within Turkey but across the world. He also praised Turkey for allowing millions of refugees in the country access to free healthcare, education and public services.

Syrian refugees have benefited from the Temporary Protection Regulation that was passed by Turkey’s parliament in 2014 which allows Syrian nationals to be admitted into Turkey, to apply to the Turkish government for protection and prevents them from being sent back to Syria. It also granted them a number of rights such as free healthcare, education and the right to work.

“The theme of today’s panel is looking at Turkey in this issue of refugee government, and I’ve been looking at migration practices in Turkey for quite some time now, but very much from the perspective of European and international interventions in Turkey,” Fine said, explaining how Turkish humanitarian organizations have been trained by European and international organizations for the migration policy.

Fine also explained how the categorization of Turkey as a “transit country” for refugees is reductive and overlooks the complexities of so-called “transit migration”. Many are led to believe that “transit migration”, in the case of Turkey and the EU, implies that migrants and asylum seekers are simply using Turkey as a transit point to their main destination, which is Europe.

Fine, however, explained that many migrants who initially planned to travel to Europe have decided to remain indefinitely in Turkey, the “transit country”, and thus “transit migration” as a category has been criticized as it does not take into account migrants’ intentions. Rather, it generalizes certain trends that nominally point to Europe as being the final destination for migrants and so has been labelled a “Eurocentric” category.

“We know that actually, migration is much more complex, and there is also an illegalized connotation for ‘transit migration’ in which it is associated with people smugglers and illicit forms of mobility. But we know, once again, that we see refugees and migrants using these same pathways, so I think that this categorization is quite problematic.”

Analyzing the EU’s immigration policy and its response to the refugee crisis prior to the EU-Turkey deal in 2016, Thielemann said the bloc needed to take more responsibility in accepting refugees and implementing laws that would protect their status and give them a fair representation when being accepted into a member state.

“There are a couple of things that the European Union should do. On the one hand, it should provide safer entry routes for asylum seekers and refugees. As we all know, a lot of migrants die in the process of trying to reach Europe. It should try and close implementation gaps that exist in the various member states where refugee representation is unequal, despite there being one policy for member states,” he said.

Thielemann also emphasized the need for the EU to share responsibilities for refugees more equally, and as such, attention should be given to introducing quota-based approaches to share refugee responsibilities equitably across member states and effectively ensure their rights and protections by enforcing the laws they have introduced regarding refugee rights.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Turkey hosts up to 4 million refugees, of which 3.6 million are Syrian as well as hundreds of thousands from Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq, a figure that represents 4% of the Turkish population.

Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees in the world and spends more per capita GDP on their wellbeing than any other nation in the world.