Refugees: Very Useful Victims

Refugees are not numbers. They are not statistics. To paraphrase Max Frisch, Turkey welcomed refugees, but human beings came.
First, let me clarify my vocabulary. Because indeed, in the Turkish and English-speaking media, there are tremendous approximations and misuses of the terms related to migration. In sociology and law, terms that we use have very precise meanings:

A migrant is a person who is currently in movement to go from somewhere to somewhere else.

An immigrant is a person who left a place and came to “settle” in our country/region. He/she is no longer in movement.

An emigrant is a person who leaves our country/region to go elsewhere. He/she will be an immigrant somewhere else, but not yet. He/she is about to move or is in movement.

A circular migration is the name of a process of a movement between point A and point B, but this movement is not linear. The person not only stops at point C and D but also keeps his ties with point A, and sometimes goes back, and comes back to point B, etc. In this concept, “migration” is not linear and static, but circular and dynamic.

A rebound and transit migrant is a person present in a country/region. But he/she tries to go somewhere else; he/she is in movement, too. The rebound migrants do not want to settle in the country where they are but sometimes, because of the difficulties of going further, they have to settle down.

A refugee is not necessarily an asylum seeker. An asylum seeker is someone who says he or she is a refugee but whose claim has not yet been definitively assessed. On average, about 1 million people seek asylum on an individual basis every year. In mid-2014 there were more than 1.2 million asylum seekers.

National asylum systems are there to decide which asylum seekers actually qualify for international protection. Those judged not to be a refugee via proper procedure, nor to be in need of any other form of international protection, can be sent back to their home countries.
If the asylum system is both fast and fair, then people who know they are not refugees have little incentive to make a claim in the first place, thereby benefitting both the host country and the refugees for whom the system is intended.

Turkey no longer only a source of emigration
During mass movements of refugees (usually as a result of conflict or generalized violence as opposed to individual persecution), there is not -- and never will be -- a capacity to conduct individual asylum interviews for everyone who has crossed the border. Nor is it usually necessary since in such circumstances it is generally evident why they have fled. As a result, such groups are often declared "prima facie" refugees.
Turkey is at the same time a country of emigration (people from Turkey are leaving to settle in other places) and a country of immigration (people are coming to settle in Turkey). In 2014 the net migration rate was 0.46 migrant(s) per 1,000 inhabitants. This figure includes the difference between the number of persons entering and leaving a country during that year per 1,000 persons (based on mid-year population).
An excess of persons entering the country is referred to as net immigration (as is the case for Turkey in 2014), and an excess of persons leaving the country as net emigration (e.g., -9.26 migrants/1,000 population). Thus, it is now clear that Turkey is no longer only a source of emigration. It is experiencing the joys and the pains (!) of being a country of immigration, and Ankara is learning how difficult it is.
The last decade has been troubled for the region in which Turkey is at the geographical center. Troubles and war in particular are the main pull factor for millions of people leaving their country and region to flee elsewhere. Turkey has been welcoming them for a long time, and it must be congratulated. It welcomed refuges from the Balkans in the 1920s, from Germany in the 1940s, from Iran in the 1970s, from Bulgaria in the 1980s, from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 1990s and finally from Syria today.
While Western European countries have started to see immigrants as a threat, France and Italy have been discussing suspending the Schengen treaty because of a few Libyan refugees in Lampedusa, Turkey welcomed them. Today there are approximately 3 million refugees living in Turkey, and most of them are in transit. At least, they desire to be in transit. Imagine for one single second 3 million refugees in France or in Germany!
The streets of Turkey's cities, including Istanbul, are full of Syrian refugees living in unacceptable conditions. It is a human, social, economic and political tragedy. But … there is a but: Just as Turkey has acted humanely since the 1970s by welcoming these helpless people, they have also been used politically as a tool for putting pressure on Europe, as a currency of exchange to bargain with Western European countries.
Let me explain: First of all, it is actually wrong to call those who come and seek security in Turkey “refugees” or “asylum seekers.” According to the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is a person "owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country."

Turkey signed this convention in 1951 and ratified it in 1962 but with time and space limitations applied. Indeed Turkey (and the Congo, Madagascar and Monaco) declared that the status of refugee could be granted only to people escaping the “events occurring in Europe before Jan. 1, 1951.” Turkey signed the protocol relating to the status of refugees of 1967 but again with a space limitation (but not time limitations this time), agreeing to apply the convention “only to persons who have become refugees as a result of events occurring in Europe.”
Despite the efforts and pressures of the Council of Europe and human rights defenders, this reservation is still operative. In other words, if sociologically Syrian migrants are indeed refugees, technically speaking they cannot be qualified as such in Turkey.
Turkey uses this lack of legal status to threaten Western European countries, which have become restrictive in accepting refugees since the 1990s. In short, it is intimidation: If Europe criticizes Turkey too much or acts against its policies, Ankara can open this valve.
Let us look, for example, at the 1997 Luxemburg EU summit when the Turkish candidacy was refused. Before and after, by “coincidence” thousands of Kurdish refugees from Iraq were able to take boats from Turkey and to arrive on Italian shores in a matter of a few months. Then it stopped suddenly.

In today's circumstances, while Turkish policy towards the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is unclear and criticized, suddenly thousands of refugees are able to wait in a square in Izmir to be contacted by smugglers, cross the Aegean Sea (dying in some cases) to Greek islands, and continue on further. Thousands wait and go by boat without being disturbed by the police in a country where gathering in a group of more than 10 is suppressed by the police …
Yes, refugees are human beings, they live in pain, they die in inhuman conditions and they are feared by Western Europe. Thus, they are very useful victims. Sad.

SAMİM AKGÖNÜL (Cihan/Today's Zaman)