On the Syrian refugee crisis

They look to be between ten and twelve, maybe the youngest among them is only eight. I can’t be sure. I’m bad at telling people’s ages.

They’re too far away for us to be able to tell what languages they’re speaking, but they don’t look Turkish. The two girls in the group have taken over the stage and ask all their friends to sit down; they’re now performing a play, about a pair of lovers, perhaps a variation of star-crossed Romeo and Juliet, as one of the girls lay dying in the other girl’s arms. Everyone claps. One of the boys has grown bored of this play and decides to explore the space underneath the stage. He pries open one of the boards that cover the sides of the stage and crawls inside. Another follows behind him. Yet another boy in the group decides to play a prank on his two friends and replaces the board so his two friends are trapped inside. It must be dark inside. The two boys under the stage, upon finding that they’re suddenly without light, kick the board from the inside – sending it flying in the air – and rush out to punish the boy who had tried to trap them under the stage. Everyone cheers and screams. I notice one of the girls, the one who’s not wearing a hijab (headscarf) has a dark blonde hair, with piercing eyes that look more European than Turkish. They are Syrians.

There are around 3.6 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, out of the five millions that are fleeing the country’s civil war. I encourage everyone to pause and try to grasp the number using a context that makes sense to you. For me, I try to imagine what happens if everyone in Los Angeles (4 million) are suddenly homeless.

Two middle-aged men saw what the boys were doing to the stage and give them a firm scolding. They told the kids to leave the amphitheater. The kids scamper away but quickly return to the stage when the men are gone. They sit on the side of the stage watching people crossing the front of the stage. The girls, upon seeing a woman dressed in furry pink jacket, rush to her and proceed to pet her furry jacket aggressively. The woman looks unsure of what is happening but feels uncomfortable with the whole situation of having her jacket petted, so she runs away from the kids. The kids laugh and shout to her, in English, “You’re so beautiful! Where are you going??”

Two days into our Turkey trip, we heard that Turkey just ordered an incursion into Syrian territory, its neighbor to the south, to create a so-called “safe zone”. What it means is that the Turkish army is going into Syrian territory (in violation of Syria’s sovereign border but what’s anyone going to do about it, really?), to get rid of the Kurds army that were there so as to be able to control the area, so they can move Syrian refugees who are currently in Turkey into this area. It’s the government’s way of resettling the 2-3 million Syrian refugees (technically “guests” as they were never given proper refugee status by the Turkish government) due to mounting criticism from Turkish people who begin to think that the government is wasting the country’s resources on the refugees and giving them preferential treatment instead of taking care of its own people. The bottom-line is: people are sick of the refugees and want them gone.

One of the boys found his way to the back of the amphitheater, where we’re seated. He looks at us, we say hello. He says hello back and asks in English, “Cigarette?”, his fingers mimicking the act of smoking. He must be only ten or eleven. I can’t tell. I’m bad with people’s ages. But he’s definitely not old enough to be smoking, not that we have any cigarettes to give to anyone, underage or not.

No one wants the Syrian refugees. The EU, perhaps the first to understand the scale of the problem and the havoc it will create on its politics and economies if the refugees start flooding en masse into Europe, agrees to give Turkey 6 billion (with a B) euros to take in the refugees, and implicitly, to keep them away from EU borders. I find it ironic to think that Europa comes from the name of a Syrian girl in Greek mythology. It’s the beautiful daughter of a Phoenician king (Agenor) and Phoenicia was an ancient civilization located in the current Syria, Lebanon and Northern Israel. We turn away from our namesake when it’s too burdensome to bear.

I came to the refugee issue firmly on the side of the refugees, ready to accuse anyone who exhibits the slightest animosity towards the refugees as xenophobes. I assume that they must be racist, because how else do you explain the lack of empathy? These refugees have nowhere else to go. Their houses have been bombed, their cities flattened, their economies drained lifeless. How do you expect them to stay in Syria? They are seeking refuge because they have to, not because they want to.

Then we started hearing locals explain their sides of the story. These are our new friends, who are educated, well-read, well-traveled, kind and gracious: we’re empathetic to the plights of the Syrians but they have to go back. There are too many of them, one said. They are changing the culture of this country, another said, referring to the fact that Syrians are mostly Sunni Muslims and speak Arabic while Turkish people are quite proud of their modernist take of moderate Islam first championed by Kemal Attaturk. They’re getting too much money from the government but what about us who need help too, said another. They can’t stay, is the prevailing mood everywhere we go, and the government must have sensed the growing dissent and understand that they have to send the refugees back or lose the election.

Until this trip, I didn’t fully understand the gravity of the situation and why it deserves the name ‘refugee crisis’. But these days we overuse the word crisis so much that it’s somehow lost its meaning because everything on the news is a crisis. It’s not until we live and breathe the reality of what’s happening in Turkey and Syria, that I fully grasp the meaning. It somehow never dawns on me that we’re talking about re-homing the population of Los Angeles somewhere else. And we expect the host country (in this case, Turkey) to absorb this many people. We expect the locals, the host, to accept a mass influx of strangers, who speak a different language, with different customs from theirs, to share their land. And notice how conveniently we can portray the situation using language like they should do this and they should do that. It’s not “we” because it’s not “us” who have to grapple with the situation. Until “they” become “we”, five million is just an abstraction.

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