Refugee Movements and Turkey
| Date | 01 December 1991 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.1991.tb01039.x |
| Published date | 01 December 1991 |
Refugee Movements and Turkey
K.
KIRISCI
*
In three consecutive years almost a million refugees from neighbouring countries have
entered Turkey. In August 1988, soon after the cease-fire between Iran and Iraq was
signed,
60,000
Kurds escaping a brutal military operation directed against them fled to
Turkey. The following year,
310,000
ethnic Turks from Bulgaria arrived in Turkey.
They were fleeing from repressive measures taken against them by the Bulgarian regime
since 1985. Today, another cease-fire in the Gulf has created what the new United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, called the largest refugee
movement in recent times. More than one and a half million people has amassed around
a mountainous area where the Iranian, Iraqi and Turkish borders meet. Half a million
of them have actually sought refugee from Turkey.
The Turkish Republic, and before that, the Ottoman Empire, has had a long tradition
of receiving refugees. This tradition predates the emergence of the modern refugee
regimes since the First World War. The most significant example of this tradition is the
arrival of large numbers of Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition. In December
1492,
Ottoman ships were sent to pick up Jewish refugees from a Spanish port where,
by coincidence, Christopher Columbus was preparing to sail due West to discover a new
land that subsequently was to become a refuge for many millions. Almost a third of the
300,000
Jewish refugees that left Spain settled
in
the Ottoman Empire.'
There were other important movements into the Ottoman Empire which include, for
example,
the
arrival of Hungarians and Poles fleeing the revolts
of
1848-1849 against
Austrian rule
in
Central Europe. The commitment of the Ottoman authorities to these
refugees was
so
strong that the Sultan did not hesitate to risk the danger of going to war
against Russia and Austria to safeguard their protection.2 Generous administrative,
economic and humanitarian facilities were granted to them
in
the form of land,
agricultural equipment, exemption from taxation and military service.3 One relic of
these refugee movements survived
until
today
in
the form of a Polish village on the
Anatolian outskirts of 1stanbul.j Istanbul, towards the end of the First World War,
became a sought after city for those escaping the excesses of the Bolshevik Revolution
in
Russia. Many of these refugees integrated themselves into the multi-ethnic life of the
city and left marks that can still be observed after more than seventy years.
Refugee movements into the Ottoman Empire territories were not limited to those
coming from other countries. There were also people of Turkish descent that returned
to
Anatolia
in
large numbers as the geographical size ofthe Empire began to shrink. They
*
Bojjazici University, Istanbul, (Turkey).
545
were mostly the descendents of Turks who had settled in various parts of the Balkans
for cent~ries.~ These “national refugee” movements continued well into this century and
about 1.6 million of them were resettled in Turkey between 1923 and 1962.‘ Between
1859 and 1922 almost
4
million Circassians from the Caucuses and Tatars from Crimea
arrived
as
these areas came under Russian rule.’ However, once the Soviet regime
consolidated itself, these mass movements of refugees towards Turkey stopped.
The long history of Turkey
as
a
country
of
asylum is at the same time accompanied
with
a
history of being
a
country
of
origin for people leaving
as
refugees or immigrants.
Especially, starting from the turn of the century, many Armenians, Greeks and Jews left
the Ottoman Empire mostly for the United States. Another significant movement of
people resulted from the Treaty of Lausanne signed
in
January 1923, which brought
about the transfer of ethnic Greeks and Turks between Turkey and Greece.8 From those
ethnic Greeks that under the terms of the Treaty stayed behind in Istanbul many had left
by-1960s. Similarly, the large Jewish community of Istanbul, which had received an
additional 100,000 refugees from Nazism, shrunk to about 25,000 as many left for the
United States and Israel since the
1950~.~
During the 1980s, interest in the study of refugee problems has increased considerably.
As
a result
of
various political conflicts associated with the decolonisation process and
the growing economic and political difficulties of the 1970s, an increasing number
of
people have been forced to leave their homes and countries in search of greater security.
There are conflicting numbers quoted depending on how one operationally defines
refugees. A narrow definition puts the present numbers at 15 million while
a
broader one
suggests that there are 25 to 30 million refugees.1° The sheer weight of these numbers
has attracted the attention of the academic world. A growing number of academics have
found the phenomenon of refugees worth studying on its own independently from the
more general phenomenon of migration and population movements.”
However, despite the long history of Turkey’s involvement in refugee problems, there
is a perplexing absence of any scholarly literature focusing on the topic. More than
10,000 articles were searched from the
Tiirkiye Makaleler BibliyogruJjiusz
(The
Bibliography of Articles in Turkish Periodicals) covering the period between 1980 and
1988,
the last available year. There was only one article which directly focused on
refugees together with a number of entries for migration in and out of Turkey.12
Similarly,
a
close examination of the
Social Science
Index
for the years between 1980
and 1990 and 1990 revealed no article directly examining the Turkish refugee
problems.’? The major scholarly periodicals focusing on various aspects of refugee
problems too did not have any major articles focusing on Turkey.
In the light of this scarcity of literature, the purpose of this article is to offer an
overview of refugee problems in Turkey during the 1980s. The article is divided into
four sections. The first section defines
a
refugee for the purpose of this study. The
following two sections provide an analysis of Turkey both as a country of asylum and
;I country
of
origin for refugees. The political and economic environment surrounding
the movements
of
refugees will also be briefly examined and the legal aspects
of
refugee
movements discussed. The objective of the concluding section is to indicate the possible
future trends
in
respect to refugee movements in and out of Turkey.
DEFINING
“A
REFUGEE’
It
iir
possible to think of refugee movements as aform of migration. Yet, there are at least
three characteristics of a refugee movement which separates
it
from other forms of
migration. Firstly, a refugee movement is composed of people who are essentially
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