Invisible and Forgotten: Syrian Domari Refugees in Turkey
13 October 2014
“Whenever there is a war, it hurts us. Nobody wants us Doms. People see us as their enemies in Iraq, Lebanon, and now Syria. They say ‘You are reprobates, thieves, you play drums and drink alcohol.’ But in fact they are the real thieves since they stole everything from us.”
(Elderly Domari refugee)
As the chaos and suffering of war deepens in Syria, the number of registered refugees now exceeds 3 million, according to the UN which has called the crisis ‘the biggest humanitarian emergency of our era’.
Of the estimated one million registered and unregistered refugees In Turkey, some 30,000 are of Domari origin. They are living in appalling conditions in makeshift camps and abandoned buildings with no access to basic facilities. ERRC staff member Sinan Gokcen, and local activist and researcher Kemal Vural Tarlan met with Domari refugees in South East Turkey to get first-hand information about their desperate plight.
They visited several informal camps, some of them were composed of no more than 5 to10 tents, others as many as 100 tents. The Dom choose places near cities with at least some access to water. However, none of these informal settlements have any basic amenities. Children cannot attend school. There is no sewage system, no garbage collection, nor potable water. These settlements are way below anything that could be considered minimum acceptable living standards.
Refugees reported that Turkish security officials visit these camps and tell the people to move somewhere else. None had received any official humanitarian aid from Turkish authorities or from international relief agencies. Very occasionally, they received food and clothing from local populations. Their main sources of income are begging, recycling scrap, or working in the fields and farms for a pittance.
The health conditions in these camps are grim and deteriorating. Some children had the skin disease leishmaniosis. With families reduced to begging and foraging for food, malnutrition is rife, and the prospects for the health of the many newborn infants is alarming. A few Domari refugees have official registration cards which entitles them to free treatment in state hospitals. However, most of the Dom interviewed prefer to be almost “invisible” and don't get registered.
There are no reliable figures on the number of Dom in pre-war Syria. Ethnologue estimates 37,000 Syrian Dom speak Domari, but the Syrian newspaper Kassioun, reported twice that number in 2010. According to the Dom Research Center, “250,000 to 300,000 is the best Gypsy population estimate for Syria”. According to Tarlan, Dom have always been viewed as outsiders and intruders, and have always faced deep discrimination: “The official Dom population could be much higher than estimated, because so many Dom describe themselves as Kurdish, Arab or Turkmen. Whatever the number, more Dom live in Syria than anywhere else in the Middle East.”
In pre-war Syria the main sources for livelihood for Dom were traditional dentistry, as musician, hunters, fortune-tellers, and tin smiths, collecting paper and metal scrap, and doing seasonal farm work. In the early stages of the war, most of the Dom took refuge in areas controlled by government forces. However, they soon started to flee the country mostly because of a lack of safety and food. Those who can speak Turkish and/or Kurdish chose Turkey as their destination, while the rest went to Lebanon, Jordan and other Arabic countries. Some groups, who speak Kurdish, went to Northern Iraq as well.
Tarlan described coming across a group of Domari refugees in an abandoned station near Gaziantep. There were mainly women and children living in improvised plastic and canvas tents, as the men had moved closer to the city in search of work. They came from Aleppo. One young woman with tattooed hands and face explained: “Opposition fighters entered our hometown. The Syrian Army came to tell us war planes will come and bomb our homes and that we must leave. So we abandoned our houses and property and left. News has since arrived that it is now bombed. We no longer have houses.”
Then he asked her “Which side did you support?” She replied: “For us there is no difference between sides. Our houses are bombed; we were miserable all the time, and now we’re all in need of food.”
Ali and his family are living in a tent and constantly on the move. Ali says they are Alewi: “We have no choice but to live here today. In the past, nobody was interested who was Alewi or Sunni, but now there is blood. Everyone despises the other. They did not like us when we were refugees. We are also fleeing because we are Alewi.”
Another refugee, Mehmet told Tarlan: “We are trying not to go hungry. Before the war, we made a living collecting and selling scrap in Aleppo. When the war broke out, opposition fighters came to our districts and took our homes and seized our cars. They told us to get away from here and they humiliated us. They told us that we were irreligious. After that, conflicts started and my brother lost his leg.” He then showed his 20-year-old brother lying in the tent, whose leg was chopped off above the knee.
Among the many families huddled in the ruins of Armenian houses in the ancient city of Antep, Tarlan encountered a young family, with a month-old baby wrapped in rags clinging to its mother’s breast. The father said: ‘I worked as a tailor in Aleppo, but there is no work here. So I collect paper and rubber from street garbage. If I had a job, I would rent a small house and buy milk and food for my baby.”
Wary of the official camps, despised and discriminated against by other refugees, ignored and invisible as far as the authorities are concerned, the Dom are victims of a war not of their making. Forced to subsist in perilous conditions, the desperate plight of the Domari refugees is a humanitarian catastrophe in the making.
Photo credit: Kemal Vural Tarlan
