Hate crimes against Syrian refugees in Turkey on rise: Experts

Special Hate crimes against Syrian refugees in Turkey on rise: Experts
A Syrian refugee mother puts her baby in a stroller, Nizip refugee camp, Gaziantep province, Turkey, Nov. 30, 2016. (Reuters)
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Updated 05 September 2022

Hate crimes against Syrian refugees in Turkey on rise: Experts

Hate crimes against Syrian refugees in Turkey on rise: Experts
  • Migration analyst suggests Turkish political parties should put forward peaceful integration proposals in election manifestos
  • Many Syrians do not wish to return to their country while Bashar Assad remains in power

ANKARA: Syrian refugees, once welcomed with open arms to Turkey, are now living in fear amid a rise in hate crimes against them, experts have claimed.

Many believe they are being used as political leverage in the upcoming Turkish elections scheduled for next year.

Syrian teenager Fares Elali became one of the latest victims of the backlash when he was recently stabbed to death in the southern Turkish province of Hatay.

The 17-year-old, whose father died during the Syrian conflict in 2011, had managed to get a place to study medicine at a Turkish university and had ambitions of becoming a doctor. His body will be now moved to Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib.

Elali had been working in a tomato pastry factory and was allegedly killed in a revenge attack following a disagreement with a female worker. 

Turkey is home to around 3.6 million registered Syrian refugees, the world’s largest refugee population. Physical and verbal racial attacks against them have been steadily increasing in Turkey amid rising inflation and cost-of-living rates that have fueled hostile attitudes toward foreigners.

The country’s economic downturn has seen the official inflation rate hit 80.2 percent and the unofficial one more than 181 percent.

With Turkish parliamentary and presidential elections on the horizon, the issue of repatriating 1 million Syrians back to northern Syria has become a hot topic in domestic politics.

Some right-wing opposition figures have capitalized on the growing resentment by pledging to send Syrians back to their homeland.

There are no official figures relating to violent attacks on Syrian refugees in Turkey.

But in June, two young Syrians — Sultan Abdul Baset Jabneh and Sherif Khaled Al-Ahmad — were reportedly killed by angry Turkish mobs in separate incidents in Istanbul.

On May 30, Syrian woman Leila Muhammad, 70, was hit in the face by a man in the southeastern province of Gaziantep, and recently a 17-year-old Syrian student was verbally abused in the street by an angry Turkish crowd.

Metin Corabatir, president of the Research Center on Asylum and Migration (IGAM), an Ankara-based think tank, told Arab News that increased provocation was being orchestrated by certain elite circles in Turkey.

He said: “Umit Ozdag, leader of the far-right Victory Party who pledged to expel all refugees, is using Syrians as a political card to stoke tensions against foreigners as elections loom.

“Popular figures in the media are also fueling these tensions by disseminating misinformation about Syrians and by drawing a rosy but unreal picture about their living standards in Turkey,” he added.

Omar Kadkoy, a migration policy analyst at Ankara-based think-tank TEPAV, told Arab News that Turkish public opinion was becoming increasingly unfriendly toward foreigners.

He said: “In parallel, resentment is particular toward Syrians and this feeling is not new. Along with an ambiguous harmonization policy, the deeper the nosedive of the economy, the greater the resentment and anger Turks feel about Syrians.”

He pointed out that the death of Elali highlighted the dangers of what could happen when misunderstandings got out of control.

“The deterrent here is the rule of law where the penalty is proportionate to the crime. It is skewed justice to make announcements of deporting Syrians for sharing videos on social media, for example, and not informing the public about the punishment of Fares’ killer or killers,” Kadkoy added.

Although Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu reportedly passed on his condolences to Elali’s family there has been little public condemnation of the attack from political parties in Turkey.

Corabatir said all political groups should include in their election manifesto proposals on how they planned to deal with the Syrian refugee situation, adding that under international law Turkey could not unilaterally send Syrians back home.

“Political parties, ahead of the elections, should lay down their alternative integration proposals in their manifesto in order to convince voters and contribute to peace rather than triggering more tensions,” he said.

Recent reports have hinted at the prospect of a normalization of relations between Turkey and Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime, but Kadkoy noted that many Syrians did not wish to return to their country while Assad remained in power.

“If Turkey goes down the path of rapprochement without considering the agency of Syrians in any voluntary return, Syrians will be left between a rock and a hard place. The alternative? The shores of the Aegean again,” he said.


180 dead from Sudan fighting buried unidentified: Red Crescent

180 dead from Sudan fighting buried unidentified: Red Crescent
Updated 56 min 59 sec ago

180 dead from Sudan fighting buried unidentified: Red Crescent

180 dead from Sudan fighting buried unidentified: Red Crescent
  • Volunteers have buried 102 unidentified bodies in the capital’s Al-Shegilab cemetery and 78 more in cemeteries in Darfur

KHARTOUM: Persistent fighting in Sudan’s twin flashpoints of Khartoum and Darfur has forced volunteers to bury 180 bodies recovered from combat zones without identification, the Sudanese Red Crescent said.
Since fighting between Sudan’s warring generals erupted on April 15, volunteers have buried 102 unidentified bodies in the capital’s Al-Shegilab cemetery and 78 more in cemeteries in Darfur, the Red Crescent said in a statement Friday.
Both regular army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and his deputy-turned-rival, paramilitary commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, have issued repeated pledges to protect civilians and secure humanitarian corridors.
But Red Crescent volunteers — supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross — have found it difficult to move through the streets to pick up the dead, “due to security constraints,” the Red Crescent said.
In cease-fire talks in Saudi Arabia last month, the warring parties had agreed to “enable responsible humanitarian actors, such as the Sudanese Red Crescent and/or the International Committee of the Red Cross to collect, register and bury the deceased in coordination with competent authorities.”
But amid repeated and flagrant violations by both sides, the US- and Saudi-brokered truce agreement collapsed.
Entire districts of the capital no longer have running water, electricity is only available for a few hours a week and three quarters of hospitals in combat zones are not functioning.
The situation is particularly dire in the western region of Darfur, which is home to around a quarter of Sudan’s population and has never recovered from a devastating two-decade war that left hundreds of thousands dead and more than two million displaced.
Hundreds of civilians have been killed, villages and markets torched and aid facilities looted, prompting tens of thousands to seek refuge in neighboring Chad.
More than 1,800 people have been killed in the fighting, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.
Medics and aid agencies have said repeatedly that the real death toll is likely to be much higher, because of the number of bodies abandoned in areas that are unreachable.


Exchange of fire occurs near border with Egypt - Israeli military

Exchange of fire occurs near border with Egypt - Israeli military
Updated 20 min 40 sec ago

Exchange of fire occurs near border with Egypt - Israeli military

Exchange of fire occurs near border with Egypt - Israeli military

JERUSALEM: Israeli troops shot and killed a gunman on Saturday in a shootout in southern Israel along the Egyptian border, the military said.
It said the assailant was in Israeli territory when he opened fire at troops. The soldiers returned fire, killing the gunman. In an earlier statement, the army said two people were wounded.
Israel and Egypt signed a peace agreement in 1979 and maintain close security ties. Fighting along their shared border is rare.
The exchange of fire reportedly took place around the Nitzana border crossing between Israel and Egypt. The crossing is located about 40 kilometers (25 miles) southeast of the point where Israel’s border with Egypt and the Gaza Strip converge. It’s used to import goods from Egypt destined for Israel or the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
Israel built a fence along the porous border a decade ago to halt the entry of African migrants and Islamic militants who are active in Egypt’s Sinai desert.


UN agency for Palestinian refugees raises just a third of $300m needed to help millions

UN agency for Palestinian refugees raises just a third of $300m needed to help millions
Updated 03 June 2023

UN agency for Palestinian refugees raises just a third of $300m needed to help millions

UN agency for Palestinian refugees raises just a third of $300m needed to help millions
  • UNRWA chief grateful for the new pledges but they are below the funds needed to keep over 700 schools and 140 clinics open from September through December

UNITED NATIONS: Despite a dire warning from the UN chief that the UN agency for Palestinian refugees “is on the verge of financial collapse,” donors at a pledging conference on Friday provided just $107 million in new funds — significantly less than the $300 million it needs to keep helping millions of people.
Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner general of the agency known as UNRWA, said he was grateful for the new pledges but they are below the funds needed to keep over 700 schools and 140 clinics open from September through December.
“We will continue to work tirelessly with our partners, including host countries — the refugees’ top supporters — to raise the funds needed,” he said in a statement.
At the beginning of the year, UNRWA appealed for $1.6 billion for its programs, operations and emergency response across Syria, Lebanon, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and Jordan. That includes nearly $850 million for its core budget, which includes running schools and health clinics.
According to UNRWA, donors on Friday announced $812.3 million in pledges, but just $107.2 million were new contributions. The countries pledging new funds were not announced.
Lazzarini told a press conference Thursday that UNRWA needs $150 million to keep all services running until the end of the year, and an additional $50 million to start 2024 without liabilities. In addition, he said, the agency needs $75 million to keep the food pipeline in Gaza operating and about $30 million for its cash distribution program in Syria and Lebanon.
UNRWA was founded in the wake of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 to provide hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes with education, health care, social services and in some cases jobs. Today, their numbers — with descendants — have grown to some 5.9 million people, most in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, as well as neighboring countries in the Middle East.
UNRWA has faced a financial crisis for 10 years, but Lazzarini said the current crisis is “massive,” calling it “our main existential threat.”
“It is deepening, and our ability to muddle through is slowly but surely coming to an end,” he said. “The situation is even more critical now that some of our committed donors have indicated that the will substantially decrease their contribution to the agency.”
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a speech read by his chief of staff at the start of the pledging conference that “when UNRWA’s future hangs in the balance so do the lives of millions of Palestine refugees relying on essential services.”
Those services include education for over half a million girls and boys, health care for around 2 million people, job opportunities for young people in Gaza and elsewhere, psycho-social support for hundreds of thousands of children, and a social safety net for nearly half a million of the poorest Palestinians, he said. More than 1.2 million Palestinians also receive humanitarian assistance.


Turkiye: Erdogan to be sworn in for third term as president

Turkiye: Erdogan to be sworn in for third term as president
Updated 03 June 2023

Turkiye: Erdogan to be sworn in for third term as president

Turkiye: Erdogan to be sworn in for third term as president
  • Erdogan’s inauguration in parliament will be followed by a lavish ceremony at his palace in Ankara

ANKARA: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is set to be sworn in on Saturday as head of state after winning a historic runoff election to extend his two-decade rule for another five years as Turkiye’s economic woes worsen.
The inauguration in parliament will be followed by a lavish ceremony at his palace in the capital Ankara attended by dozens of world leaders.
Turkiye’s transformative but divisive leader won the May 28 runoff against a powerful opposition coalition, and despite an economic crisis and severe criticism following a devastating February earthquake that killed more than 50,000 people.
Erdogan won 52.18 percent of the vote while his secular rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu 47.82 percent, official results show.
Turkiye’s longest-serving leader faces immediate and major challenges in his third term driven by a decelerating economy and foreign policy tensions with the West.
“From a geopolitical point of view, the election will reinforce Turkiye’s recent pursuit of an independent foreign policy,” said Matt Gertken, chief geopolitical strategist at BCA Research.
“This policy aims to extract maximum economic and strategic benefits from eastern and autocratic states while still preventing a permanent rupture in relations with western democracies,” he said.
“Tensions with the West will likely increase again, within that framework, now that Erdogan has a new mandate.”
Addressing the country’s economic troubles will be Erdogan’s first priority with inflation running at 43.70 percent, partly due to his unorthodox policy of cutting interest rates to stimulate growth.
Late on Saturday the president is due to unveil his new cabinet with media speculating that former finance minister Mehmet Simsek, a reassuring figure with international stature, could play a part.
A former Merrill Lynch economist, Simsek is known to oppose Erdogan’s unconventional policies.
He served as finance minister between 2009 and 2015 and deputy prime minister in charge of the economy until 2018, before stepping down ahead of a series of lira crashes that year.
“Erdogan’s government looks like it will pursue an orthodox stabilization program,” said Alp Erinc Yeldan, professor of economics at Istanbul’s Kadir Has University.
“What we see now is that the news about Mehmet Simsek and his team is greeted with enthusiasm by the markets,” he said.
Turkiye’s new members of parliament started being sworn in on Friday in a first session after the May 14 election, also attended by Erdogan.
His alliance holds a majority in the 600-seat parliament.
Erdogan’s victory came against a unified opposition coalition led by Kilicdaroglu, whose future as leader of the CHP party remains in doubt following the defeat.


UNSC condemns Sudan violence, calls on parties to honor ceasefire agreements

UNSC condemns Sudan violence, calls on parties to honor ceasefire agreements
Updated 03 June 2023

UNSC condemns Sudan violence, calls on parties to honor ceasefire agreements

UNSC condemns Sudan violence, calls on parties to honor ceasefire agreements
  • Council members urge Burhan and Dagalo to honor Jeddah Declaration and African Union Roadmap
  • More than 700 Sudanese have died and thousands have been injured in six weeks of clashes

NEW YORK: The UN security council on Friday expressed concern over the continued fighting in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces and condemned attacks on civilians and UN and humanitarian workers, as well as on medical workers and facilities, and the looting of humanitarian aid. 

In a statement issued after a meeting on Sudan late on Friday afternoon, council members called on the warring parties to grant humanitarians safe and unimpeded access across the country, in line with international law and UN principles. 

According to the UN, at least 730 people have been killed and 5,500 injured since the outbreak of hostilities last month. The actual toll could be much higher. 

Clashes between military leader Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF, and the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, a paramilitary group led by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, have continued across several parts of the country, including in the capital Khartoum, and in Zalingi, Central Darfur, Al-Fasher, North Darfur and Al-Obeid. 

Security Council members stressed the need for an immediate ceasefire to allow for humanitarian access, and to arrange for a permanent ceasefire as well as “resume the process toward reaching a lasting, inclusive, and democratic political settlement in Sudan.” 

Their statement reaffirmed the council’s support of the United Nations Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan, or UNITAMS, and urged its continued engagement in the war-ravaged country. 

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday rejected a request from Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan to remove his office’s special envoy, Volker Perthes, who serves as the special representative for Sudan and head of UNITAMS. Guterres said that the Security Council had the final say on the fate of the mission. 

The 15-member body, tasked with the maintenance of international peace and security, underscored the need for “strengthened international coordination and continued collaboration,” and reiterated its support for African Union, or AU, efforts to establish mechanisms to address the conflict. 

They also welcomed UN and Arab League efforts toward a viable peace process and the resumption of the transition to democracy in Sudan. They also backed the AU Roadmap toward those goals. 

The Security Council statement welcomed the May 11 signature in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, by the SAF and RSF, of the Declaration of Commitment to Protect the Civilians of Sudan — or the “Jeddah Declaration” — and called on both parties to implement its provisions. 

Council members encouraged international support for the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement, which “remains binding for all its signatories (and) must be implemented in full, in particular its provisions on a permanent ceasefire in Darfur.” 

The statement concluded by reaffirming the Security Council’s “strong commitment to the sovereignty, unity, independence, and territorial integrity of the Republic of Sudan in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principle of good neighborliness, non-interference and regional cooperation.”