Aug 10, 2016

Five years into the Syrian civil war, not one of Turkey’s 81 provinces is without a refugee community, big or small. The border province of Sanliurfa tops the list in numbers of refugees, with 401,000 Syrians, followed by Istanbul with 394,000. Bartin, on the Black Sea coast, has the fewest, at 27. In terms of region, the southeast has the largest concentration of refugees, with the provinces of Gaziantep, Diyarbakir, Sanliurfa, Batman, Adiyaman, Siirt, Mardin, Kilis and Sirnak hosting a total of slightly more than 1 million Syrians. In other words, more than a third of the 2.75 million Syrians in Turkey live in the southeast, mainly because of kinship and cultural bonds with border communities, among other factors.

Some in Turkey, however, see politics behind the refugees' concentration in the southeast. At a panel organized by Istanbul’s Bilgi University in December, Ayhan Kaya, a scholar of international relations at the university, argued that a “social engineering” effort was underway to balance the southeast’s mainly Kurdish population and curb the rise of Kurdish nationalism. His colleague Ilter Turan saw no direct link between the refugee wave and the Kurdish issue, but agreed that the Syrians, who are overwhelmingly Arab, were indeed changing the ethnic composition of the southeast. Murat Erdogan, head of the Migration and Politics Research Center at Ankara’s Hacettepe University, also dismissed the claim of social engineering, arguing that the Turkish government did not foresee the refugee influx reaching such proportions and therefore had no basis for planning such a policy.

Nevertheless, Ersoy Dede, a columnist for the staunchly pro-government daily Star, last month advocated altering the southeast’s demographics by permanently settling Syrians in the region. “There was a demographic transformation project hatched up decades ago,” Dede wrote.

He then proposed, “Let’s give these people the right to [Turkish] citizenship. Let’s settle them in housing estates in the cities of the east and the southeast. Let’s have them reside in Hakkari, Mardin, Diyarbakir and Sirnak.”

The local population in the nine southeastern provinces stands at about 8.4 million. Absorbing a refugee population as big as one-eighth of its size would not be an easy task for the region. Not surprisingly, social unrest and incidents of criminality have been on the rise. The refugees’ economic woes and the poverty that has long plagued the local population make for a dangerous mix that the smallest spark could easily inflame.