Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  On the second floor of a gritty şanlıurfa shopping arcade, barely less hidden than the hawala places, Nabil Aldush ran another smuggling auxiliary – a document forgery office. Syrian passports, some of the weakest in the world, had become hot property since Angela Merkel announced in September 2015 that her country would accept any Syrians who made it over Germany’s borders. Berlin was willingly breaking free of the Dublin Agreement, the EU rules on asylum signed in 1990 which state that refugees must make their claim in the first member state they arrive in. For those travelling the smugglers’ route from Turkey, that had meant Italy, Greece or Bulgaria – poor countries unable to cope with a humanitarian emergency and definitely not places people would choose to stay. But now, if Syrians could make it all the way 1,500 miles north of the Greek islands to the German border, they could claim asylum there no matter what other EU countries they had travelled through.

  Instantly, Germany rather than Sweden became the number one destination for the people trying to reach Europe. And for the scores of non-Syrians who had joined the exodus to Europe via Turkey – mainly Afghans, Pakistanis and Iraqis – a Syrian passport was a must-have. The smugglers told them they would be granted automatic refugee status in Germany if they could pass as Syrians – even though the authorities in Europe quickly wised up. Nabil had opened his office in late 2014, initially providing other kinds of forged documents to Syrians who had lost everything in the war: marriage contracts, driving licences and university certificates were some of his best sellers. A year on, passports had become his most lucrative trade. He had worked for the government back in Syria, and through a contact with the regime in Damascus he was buying genuine blank passports which he would print with the details and photographs of his customers. He charged $2,000 per passport.

  ‘Six months ago the first Iraqis started coming,’ Nabil said. ‘They’re frank – they say they want to go to Europe as Syrians. A lot of people ask me how they can get to Greece, but I tell them I just deal with documents, not with smuggling.’

  Nabil took a certain pride in his work – he even kept an ultra-violet scanner in his office to prove that the holograms on his passports were genuine before he handed them over to his happy customers. He turned his nose up at what he called the ‘Istanbul passports’, the obvious fakes; ten thousand of them had made their way onto the market, he said, but he had never dealt in them. So legitimate was his business, he claimed, that he was licensed by the Turkish government to do it – at least for his Syrian customers.

  ‘They trust us, they know we just want to help Syrians,’ he said. ‘When the refugees go to the municipality and say they’ve come here without any documents, they send them to us.’

  As the trafficking business professionalised, its warp weaving in with the weft of Turkey’s legitimate economy, an even meaner subset of criminals started operating in its shadows. The Syrians dreaming of Europe made easy pickings for the conmen who now flocked to the seediest districts of Istanbul, where they set up informal offices in the tea houses.

  ‘The smuggler told me to meet him by the tram stop,’ a Syrian called Rami told me, a few days after he had been relieved of his life savings and left in huge debt to friends and relatives. ‘When I got there, I waited for thirty minutes and called him three times. I guess he was observing me. When he came, he had an Aleppo accent and told me not to trust anyone. I asked about using the money offices for the payment and he told me no, they’re thieves.’

  The smuggler took Rami to a grungy hotel where his accomplice showed him pictures of the European passports they could provide him with. Rami had decided not to risk the sea route, instead plumping for the high-end option of documents and a flight ticket straight into the EU. The men told Rami they would provide him with the passport of a European who resembled him, and that they had contacts in Istanbul’s airports who would ensure that no one would look too closely. He would fly to the Emirates, and from there to the UK. To ease his doubts they brought in another customer who told him that his cousin had used their services days earlier and was now in England. Convinced, Rami shook on the deal.

  ‘I went around everyone I knew and collected money,’ he said. ‘They wanted $4,500 as a deposit, and the whole thing would cost $15,000. I would send them the rest when I got to Europe. I paid them, and they said my flight would be booked for the next day. But when I went back to the hotel to meet them they were gone. Everything was gone.’

  The deal

  The key to cutting off the smugglers lay not at sea, but on land. That was what the Turkish coastguard wanted to show me when he sneaked me aboard his patrol on a balmy September night. He was the skipper we had found off the Turgutreis bay four months earlier after the Syrian in the sinking dinghy had asked us to follow them to Greece. After a few panicked minutes of moral tussling we decided that we had to report what we had seen, and set off back to the port. The coastguard found us first, speeding up to us with sirens sounding in the gentle dawn sunlight. By law the owner of the boat needed a licence and a radar system to stay out in the bay all night, and he had neither. As the only journalist on board with a Turkish press card and some command of the language, I did the talking as he pulled alongside us.

  ‘And what do you think of how the Turkish coastguard is handling this crisis?’ he asked me after I had explained what we were doing.

  ‘I think you’re doing a good job in a very difficult situation,’ I replied.

  His demeanour changed, the stiff outer shell of officialdom dropping away as a smile crept across his face.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’ll come with you back to the port.’

  Once we had docked he ticked us off for staying out on the water all night and took my details and telephone number. A few months later, he sent me a message asking if I would like to see what the trafficking trade looked like from his eyes.

  A few hundred metres out from the coast he turned off the ship’s lights, opened a packet of chocolate biscuits and handed me some night-vision goggles.

  ‘Look out over there,’ he told me, gesturing back towards the shore. At first there was just blackness, but within minutes I saw the first boats, picked out in sharp green lines. Soon I could see five of them scattered across the bay.

  ‘Now this is my dilemma,’ the coastguard said. ‘If I go to stop one of them, what if another one sinks in the meantime? If I intercept one boat that is not sinking it will take me at least two hours to take all the people back to land and hand them over to the police. And if another boat sinks as I’m doing that, there is no one here to rescue the people.’

  Once the boats were in the water it was too late, he said. The only way to stop the smugglers was for the gendarmerie to set up checkpoints along the coastal roads and catch them and their customers as they travelled to the launch points. He was sick of the blame being directed at him and his colleagues for the huge criminal and humanitarian crisis happening on his watch. Only days earlier, a photo from a nearby beach had torn across front pages around the world: a Turkish gendarmerie officer carrying the limp body of a three-year-old boy who had washed up on the shore. It sparked the first real wave of global rage about what was happening at the edge of Europe, even though it had all been going on for months. Volunteers of every stripe, from professional lawyers and medics to idealist leftists, flocked to the Greek islands to pitch in. Meanwhile, back in Turkey, Abu Laith was talking about how he was planning to send his twelve-year-old son on the boats to Greece and on to Sweden, to claim asylum quickly as a lone child and bring him on the parental visa afterwards. Such paternal cynicism happened. But there were scores of older teenagers I met along the route, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds in parks in Belgrade or harbour fronts on Greek islands who simply knew that it was their responsibility as the eldest son to do something to save their families back in Syria. The brute truth was that it was hard, even at the height of the exodus, for anyone other than the young and fit to complete the trek from Turkey’s shore to Germany’s borders
, via sinking boats, stuffed trains and military lines. Older family members would never make it like that. Many on the route were young people who saw what was going on in their homelands through clear eyes, and wanted no part in it. Ahmed, a seventeen-year-old Shia from Baghdad, had lost his whole immediate family in a car bombing four years earlier. Raised since then by an aunt, all he could think of was his chance to leave for a place where people didn’t kill each other in the name of a God he didn’t believe in.

  ‘Will they accept me in Europe if they know I’m an atheist?’ he asked me with scared eyes as we stood looking back over the sea to Turkey.

  Though young men were over-represented on the smugglers’ boats, there were plenty of girls and young women making the trek to Europe too. Many of the young Syrian women I met on the refugee route were Kurds, camping out in tents at the Macedonian border or crowding around a phone they were charging in a Greek café. A group of young Damascenes I met on Kos reminded me in every way of my group of Syrian friends in Antakya – same urbanity, same funny accent, same way of bursting into song and verbally jousting with each other non-stop. Among ten of them, only one was a woman, Leila, a 21-year-old student in a tight white hijab. They had all hung on to the Damascus life that my Antakya friends had left behind: Assad’s Syria, relatively safe but scarily oppressive. They pushed me for my accounts of the unknown terror, rebel-held Syria, which they had heard so much about but never seen. One of the guys, a cheerful soul sipping a Mythos beer on this balmy evening, said that he supported Nusra, the Al-Qaeda-linked rebel faction in Syria, even after I had told him of all the bullshit they had peddled in Aleppo.

  Leila clicked her teeth at her friend and slapped his leg.

  ‘You need to listen to her, you fool,’ she said, pointing at me. ‘She’s seen them.’

  It would be comforting to think that it was the rising tide of death in the Aegean that finally forced Turkey and Europe to act against the people traffickers, and that the measures they took made it easier and safer for those legitimately seeking asylum to do so. By the end of 2015 more than a hundred people were known to have drowned in the sea and thousands more plucked out by the coastguard or volunteers on the Greek islands. The solution the leaders in Brussels finally hit on, a multi-billion-euro deal with Turkey to stamp out the smuggling industry and improve life for the Syrians Ankara was hosting, succeeded only in the sense that it staunched the flow of boats across the Aegean. But it also handed Erdoğan a major trump card.

  The deal was signed in March 2016, and promised to hand six billion euros to Turkey in two tranches to provide better services for the three million Syrians living there. It also dangled the prospect of visa-free travel in the Schengen zone for Turkish citizens. In return, any person who travelled to Greece from Turkey’s shores via the smugglers’ boats would be sent back to Turkey. For each Syrian returned, one already living in Turkey would be resettled in Europe. On the sunny morning that the deal came into force I stood in the Turkish seaside town of Dikili with a scrum of other journalists, waiting for the first boat bringing in forcibly returned people – the final breakdown of an asylum policy Europe had operated for two decades. The boat was due to dock around lunchtime. But as around a hundred of us, television cameras, photojournalists and newspaper hacks, waited on the rocks next to the wire fence surrounding the port, workers came and hung up huge plastic sheets blocking the television cameras from capturing the big moment. In the end we caught a glimpse of a downcast huddle of men being ushered from the boat into a police bus, filed our stories, and then headed to the beach with beers.

  The money the EU has handed to Turkey has been distributed among the camps, the Turkish health service, schools and other refugee aid projects. It has also funded detention centres where non-Syrians – mostly Afghans and Pakistanis – returned from Greece are held before being deported back to their countries. The flood of people travelling to the Greek islands has slowed to a trickle. But the measures Ankara has taken to cauterise trafficking have not much improved life for the Syrians who remain in Turkey. Most must now get a permission paper from the local government before they are allowed to travel out of the Turkish province where they are registered. Their residency documents must be renewed each year in a lengthy bout of paperwork, and in order to get them they must present a valid Syrian passport – a huge hurdle for those who left the country without documents, or who skipped military service and whose passports have expired. For a time, they too went to the passport forgers for their renewals, but the regime back in Damascus has now started issuing documents to defectors for huge fees in a bid to bring more cash into its coffers. The Syrian consulate in Istanbul, which has stayed open throughout the war despite Turkey cutting its diplomatic ties with Assad back in 2011, is constantly crowded with Syrians desperate to get their papers renewed, queuing from four in the morning down the gleaming pavements of the exclusive consular district. The process often takes six months and by the time the Syrians have their new passports they have already nearly expired again – men who have not done their military service get only two years’ extension each time. Stuck in a never-ending loop between Ankara’s bureaucracy and nonchalant contempt in Damascus, they are often never fully legal in Turkey, always in fear of being stopped by an unfriendly policeman.

  Those caught without the right papers in Turkey have, on occasion, been forced back across the border into Syria – a breach of the UN convention on refugees. Meanwhile, from the middle of 2015, the Turkish security forces started sealing the frontier, building a huge wall along its length and militarising the area around it. There have been countless reports, some of them accompanied by horrifying mobile phone footage, of Turkish soldiers shooting at Syrians as they try to cross the border. Hundreds have been killed. Ankara flatly denies it, but a former Turkish commando who had served at one of the busiest border areas told me the instructions from their commanders had shifted over the course of 2015 and 2016. At first they were told to turn a blind eye, then they were told to keep the refugees back and to fire warning shots into the air if necessary. After that, they were ordered to shoot at their legs if they kept on coming. Finally, they were commanded to shoot to kill if they felt they were being threatened. There is no evidence of European collusion in Turkey’s changing border policy, but it happened in sync with the bloc handing over billions to Ankara to stop migration to Europe. The EU has never criticised or even commented on the reports of the shootings.

  Back in Ankara, Erdoğan has repeatedly used the deal as a way to lash out at Brussels. He has claimed that the bloc has not handed over the promised money, even though it is flowing to Turkey as scheduled. He has accused Europe of insincerity in its promise to grant visa-free travel to Turks – a part of the deal that has never been enacted due to Ankara’s worsening human rights record since it was signed. He has even threatened to call the deal off and open his borders should Europe not give him what he wants, be it more money or more leeway to rule without reproach.

  For most Syrians still in Turkey the biggest problem is insecurity – not knowing how long they will be allowed to stay and if they will ever be granted citizenship. Ankara has so far given passports to a select few Syrians, around 300,000 who are mostly educated professionals. But as opinion polls show that Turks are increasingly fed up with hosting millions of Syrians, so Erdoğan’s rhetoric has turned. He now says the Syrians will eventually have to return to their homeland, that they cannot stay in Turkey for ever.

  The Syrians’ saviour

  Unpicking the story of Syria’s revolution is like trying to untangle a knot of hair. In early 2011 no one wanted to tell a foreign journalist that they were involved in the uprising. By early 2013, everyone did. Two years on again, and everyone was just sick of telling the same old story to a world that had long grown bored of it.

  So it wasn’t until our conversation randomly tilted towards Damascus and the first protests of the revolution that I realised that Ahmed – a smiling, warm-hearted fixer from Aleppo
who was taking me to meet Abu Laith, the smuggler – had been a member of the security forces that I had feared so deeply when I travelled into Assad’s Syria on a tourist visa in 2011.

  ‘Now everyone says they were there in the first protests, everyone tries to outdo each other with what they did for the revolution,’ he said, as we drove along the smooth new highway to Mersin. Then his round face cracked into an irresistible smile. ‘I was at the Day of Rage,’ he laughed. ‘Only I was on the other side.’

  He had told me before how he had spent a couple of weeks fighting alongside the rebels in Aleppo before deciding that he could better use his skills by working as a fixer for the foreign journalists who were flocking to the city, but I had no idea about his narrow and lucky exit from the regime’s army. Ahmed had been called up for his compulsory military service in July 2009. At the time he was vaguely annoyed – ‘I had a good life in Aleppo,’ he said – but he accepted it as inevitable. Every young man in Syria was obliged to spend a year and nine months in the army as soon as they turned eighteen, unless they had the money or the connections to bribe their way out of it. Some leeway was given to university students, who could delay their military service until they had graduated. Many stretched out their time at university for as long as they could, changing courses or signing up for another as soon as they had finished their first one. But Ahmed was a barber from a working-class family, and he had no get-out available. So he decided to make the best of his unavoidable circumstances. He excelled in his six months’ training, and when that was finished he was selected to be one of the prime minister’s bodyguards. It was an elite position, and he jumped at it. ‘I didn’t want to be one of those people who spends their whole military service in the barracks,’ he said. ‘I would have gone crazy if I couldn’t go out every day.’