One year later

Border crossings: reflections from the border

A land of geographical boundaries – in southeastern Anatolia – for centuries Gaziantep has been a crossroads of stories and ethnicities, where Turks, Kurds, and Arabs coexist. Less than a hundred kilometers apart, Antep and Halep (Aleppo) are divided by the border, but united by history – they were part of the same region of the Ottoman Empire – traditions, and culture. Lastly, both marked by the direct or indirect consequences of the civil war in Syria and the recent earthquake, which a year ago, on February 6, 2023, struck the entire area without distinction of nationality.
Famous for its rich gastronomy – recognized as UNESCO heritage – and cultural vibrancy, Gaziantep is the sixth Turkish metropolis by population. With a dizzying demographic growth, in the last half-century it has reached two million inhabitants: a quarter of whom are Syrians. Walking through the ancient streets of the citadel, one notices indeed the predominant presence of the Syrian community in this central area of the city. Here, Arabic writings – of shops, restaurants, and hairdressers – stand alongside Turkish signs.

The castle, Kale, silently dominates the city since the days of the Roman Empire. Not even the earthquake last February managed to erase the millennia-old history of this city: surviving many empires, dominations, and ethnic struggles: Gaziantep is today a vivid stratification of everything that has passed through here in recent centuries, sedimenting and overlapping with what was already there. A sublime conglomeration of identities. A complex and articulated city, rich in nuances and flavors, as well as contradictions and tensions. Contrasts that perfectly reflect the socio-political and religious fault lines within Turkey: an irreducible opposition between conservatives and liberals, between religious and secular, between the big city and the numerous villages that surround it. Once the periphery of the declining Ottoman Empire – and even earlier, Mesopotamia – today Antep represents a privileged observation point: the reality in the making is better seen from the extremes than from the center.

Reconstruction: between new challenges and others forgotten

Less than 200 km to the west of Gaziantep lies İskenderun (Alexandretta, in Italian, named after its mythical founder, Alexander the Great, who built it in 333 BC after the victory over the Persians). Located in the province of Hatay, the city – which until 1939 was Syrian territory – was severely hit by the devastating earthquake of February 6, 2023.

Exposed in the daylight are gutted buildings and dusty rubble; what remains, survived a night of destruction, in which treacherous time seems to have stopped.

A sinister atmosphere hangs over the promenade and the semi-abandoned inner streets. Windows and shop windows gape like toothless mouths, voiceless in a deafening silence, interrupted only by some distant bulldozer or an unexpected collapse. Life is suspended: a balancing act between dust and debris.

Of the Christian parish – of Caritas Anatolia – only the façade, the eastern colonnade, and the altar remain; the cathedral crumbled like a sandcastle. From beneath the pale rubble emerges the dark wood of the pews, where every Sunday morning a group of faithful gathered to attend the Mass celebrated by a Polish priest.

Just outside the city center, the containers housing the displaced people, there now for months. Not much has changed since the night between the 5th and 6th of February. The wound here is still open; a tear in the economic and social fabric of a country facing numerous contemporary challenges. From rampant inflation to managing migration flows, the humanitarian emergency and post-earthquake reconstruction represent just another challenge that the Turkish government will have to face. It remains to be seen with what results, and above all, whether it will succeed in reconciling the public opinion of Turkey, or if it will exacerbate internal rifts, increasing its paroxysmal dualism. An important card that the re-elected president can play: a bet for reconstruction; or the risk that it remains another forgotten story.

Geopolitical quadrant

Erdoğan's strategic role as an essential actor in current international relations has increasingly projected him onto the global geopolitical stage: recently, as a mediator in conflicts oriented towards pragmatism in the war between Russia and Ukraine, or in the intransigent Israeli-Palestinian conflict; over the past twenty years, as a regional power thanks to its openness to the African continent, promoting an agenda that combines a plurality of interests and actions in various fields (diplomatic, economic, humanitarian, and cultural), to which the strategic defense sector has recently been added.

However, ignoring the need to provide a unifying internal political vision for the country is not a luxury that the Turkish president can afford. And to reconcile his own people, he brandishes the specter of an alleged external enemy – a foreign and hostile body that lives within his own society. This strategy has been employed by both the president reconfirmed by the May elections – shifting after years of an "open-door policy" – and by his challenger leading the opposition coalition, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu: for reasons of electoral consensus, both have promised, during the presidential campaign, the repatriation of Syrian refugees residing in Turkey.

Turkey, a land of contradictions, is the country that welcomes the largest number of refugees within its national borders in the world: 3.6 million – mostly Syrians (almost 3.3 million) and, to a lesser extent, Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, and Somalis.

Since the end of 2022, however, Human Rights Watch has denounced indiscriminate deportation and forced repatriation of hundreds of Syrians and Afghans – rejected at the border or deported even after years of legal residence, with the status of "temporary protection", in the Anatolian country.

With the escalation of nationalist rhetoric in the election campaign, the climate has become increasingly hostile to refugees. The Stockholm Center for Freedom has indeed recorded a significant increase in cases of "hate speech" and hate crimes against the Syrian community: coexistence is therefore not without tensions. Migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are often scapegoated for all the problems of Turkish society – much more complex and multifaceted to resolve: the "external enemy" invoked in response to unresolved internal problems.

The migrants, considered enemies, that Turkey has used – since the signing, in 2016, of the agreements with the EU on the containment of migration flows – as a geopolitical bargaining chip against Europe, instrumentalizing the immigration issue in both domestic and international political debates.

Between August 2015 and June 2018, Ankara erected a three-meter-high wall along most of its 911km border with Syria. The border thus becomes a semi-permeable place (and concept), difficult to cross, often deadly. A non-place of suffering, violence, and discrimination that arbitrarily excludes and divides: a violation of (im)possibile futures, the futures that will not come to pass. Its crossing is a random "game", in which everything is at stake; thus, sometimes, it can give hope and a future to those fortunate enough to cross it, to be reborn on the other side. For all the others, there is only the impotence of civilization: the identity crisis of a humanity incapable of being humane.

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Translated by Stefania Errico