HRW: Turkey Deporting Refugees to Syria Using Force

Human Rights Watch, HRW, the international human rights watchdog, said on Monday that Turkish authorities arbitrarily arrested, detained, and deported hundreds of Syrian refugee men and boys to Syria between February and July 2022.

“In violation of international law, Turkish authorities have rounded up hundreds of Syrian refugees, even unaccompanied children, and forced them back to northern Syria,” said Nadia Hardman, refugee and migrant rights researcher at HRW.

Based on their interviews with deported refugees, HRW said Turkish officials arrested them in their homes, workplaces, and on the street, detained them in poor conditions, beat and abused most of them, forced them to sign voluntary return forms, drove them to border crossing points with northern Syria, and forced them across at gunpoint.

Turkish authorities deny these claims.

Savas Unlu, head of the Presidency for Migration Management, emphasized that Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees in the world and rejected HRW’s findings in their totality as baseless.

“Turkey carries out migration management in accordance with national and international law,” Unlu told HRW by letter.

The HRW also said that many deportees said Turkish officials – either removal centre guards, or officials they described as “police” or “jandarma” [gendarmerie] interchangeably – used violence or the threat of violence to force them into signing “voluntary” return forms.

Turkish government insist that these returns are on voluntary basis.

“Since the beginning of 2021 until September [2022] the number of voluntary returnees was 43,420. The number currently has become 50,000” Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said on Saturday.

Soylu also praised Turkey’s efforts to stop new migration waves.

“Six million people ready to migrate remained in the regions in northern Syria, which we have made safe with the measures we have taken,” Soylu said.

However, HRW says that Turkey has turned its militarily controlled territories in Northern Syria into a refugee dump.

“Although Turkey provided temporary protection to 3.6 million Syrian refugees, it now looks like Turkey is trying to make northern Syria a refugee dumping ground,” Hardman said.

According to the official numbers, Turkey hosts nearly 4 million refugees the majority of whom are Syrians. This makes Turkey the world’s largest refugee-hosting country.

However, experts and opposition parties say that the real number is much higher and some estimates are high as 8 to 10 million.

HRW underlined that, over the past two years, there has been an increase in racist and xenophobic attacks against foreigners, notably against Syrians.

On August 11, 2021, groups of Turkish residents attacked workplaces and homes of Syrians in a neighbourhood in Ankara a day after a Syrian youth stabbed and killed a Turkish youth in a fight.

Experts say that as the Turkish economy tanks and the number of refugees remains high, tensions between them and the host community are worsening and opposition politicians have made speeches that fuel anti-refugee sentiment before the general elections in 2023.