Could Turkish elections affect Syrian refugee students?

Turkey’s 7 June elections sent shockwaves through the country and internationally. With the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, failing to win a majority of votes for the first time since 2002 and unable to form a single-party government, the elections have been described as a rebuff to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s domestic and international ambitions, including his plan to modify the Turkish constitution and transform the country into a presidential system similar to the United States.

The election results may also significantly impact upon the nearly two million Syrian refugees residing in Turkey, including tens of thousands of displaced university students and academics.

While President Erdogan has faced criticism from the Turkish electorate for his autocratic behaviour, polarising rhetoric and interventionist foreign policy, his AK Party has kept Turkey’s border open throughout the Syrian conflict, maintained a practice of non-refoulement and granted refugees inside its borders access to public services, such as health care and education – to the tune of an estimated US$6 billion.

AKP policy towards refugees and higher education

As my co-authors and I detailed in We Will Stop Here and Go No Further: Syrian university students and scholars in Turkey – a joint report from the Institute of International Education and the University of California, Davis – the AKP has pursued a humane and largely forward-thinking approach to refugee higher education.

It has taken several proactive measures to facilitate the integration of Syrians at Turkey’s universities, including waiving tuition fees for students with academic and identification documents who gain admission to the country’s public universities.

Since the report’s publication in October 2014, the Turkish government announced plans to establish a university for Syrian refugees in Gaziantep province and it also granted hundreds of university scholarships to Syrian students through the Türkiye Burslari programme.

By no means has the AKP’s refugee education policy been perfect.

It has been characterised as lacking coherence, coordination and transparency, with mixed results in terms of the actual enrolment of Syrians at Turkish universities. Additionally, many in Turkey mistrust AKP motives, suspecting that the party sees the refugees as a future political constituency.

Nonetheless, these policies do hold the potential to help enrol large numbers of Syrian refugees at Turkish universities. And significantly, they reflect the astute recognition that Syrians likely will be in Turkey for years to come and that many will settle permanently, even after the war ends.

Implications of the AKP’s ‘defeat’

While refugee policy was not a paramount issue for most voters, there are legitimate concerns that Turkey’s generally benevolent and sensible policy may shift.

The AKP still won the most parliamentary seats (47%), and it must now form a coalition government or call for early elections. The most viable coalition partner is the Nationalist Movement Party or MHP (14.5%), which is generally hostile to any policy that hints of Syrian integration.

MHP votes nearly doubled in several southern provinces that host large numbers of refugees, where one representative described the Syrian presence as his city’s principal problem.

The remaining two parties that gained seats are expected to oppose any coalition formed by the AKP, but could nonetheless play an important role in defining Turkish policy towards the refugees.

The centre-left Republican People’s Party (24%) has vehemently opposed intervention in Syria’s civil war, contending that Erdogan’s meddling in the country has wrought the refugee crisis. The party does not support investing substantial public resources in the refugees and, prior to the elections, its chair pledged to “send our Syrian brothers back”.

The Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP, is a Kurdish-Alevi-progressive coalition that crossed the 10% threshold to gain representation (14.5%) in parliament for the first time. The party does not have nationalistic roots and its co-chair has stated that Syrian refugees who choose to remain in Turkey after the war ends should be allowed to stay and enjoy the legal rights to become Turkish citizens.

Yet progressives in Turkey have been tentative in supporting the refugees to date, associating such policies with the AKP agenda. If the HDP were to accept an open border and public services for refugees, this would send an important signal within Turkish politics, with two major parties on different ends of the political spectrum embracing the refugees.

A likely scenario is that the AKP will call for early elections this summer. If it does so, it may choose to soften its support for the refugees as part of a strategy to reclaim lost votes in southern Turkey in particular.

Potential consequences for refugee access to HE

The ultimate shape of Turkey’s next government is unpredictable, as is the impact of national political change on Syrians in the country. It is likely, however, that the new government will face pressure to modify its refugee policy, with potentially negative consequences for the refugees.

Public expenditure on services for refugees, including in the field of higher education, could be placed under greater scrutiny and ultimately reduced.

Scholarship budgets could tighten. Work permits to hire Syrian faculty could be restricted. International partnerships to support Syrians could become less palatable. Plans to establish the university for refugees could be placed on hold.

And if Turkey were to reverse its open door policy or restrict Syrians’ ability to stay in the country, it would no longer function as a vital safe haven for university students and scholars fleeing the violence in their home country.

If there is a silver lining, it would be that the loosening of the AKP’s grip on power may begin to depoliticise the refugee issue, at least to some extent.

As we described in We Will Stop Here and Go No Further, Turkey’s support for the refugees has been closely linked with the AKP’s political and social agenda, leaving non-AKP-aligned individuals and institutions – including those from the human rights-oriented left – suspicious of government programmes.

During our research mission to Turkey last year, several university administrators we met with noted that they would like to hire Syrian academics, but only outside of schemes created by the AKP.

The role of the international community

As Turkey’s political landscape continues to take shape, it is critical that the international community supports and encourages the Turkish state to maintain and expand its commitment to refugee education.

In particular, governments and non-Turkish organisations and higher education institutions must help alleviate the pressure that Turkey is facing by dedicating their own resources towards university scholarships and other educational programming for Syrian refugees, both inside Turkey and in their own countries.

This fundamentally humanitarian issue is also a strategic priority.

Increasing Syrian access to universities and vocational training programmes in Turkey will help ensure that the refugee population does not become a permanent underclass in the country. Equally significant, trained young people and faculty will be needed to rebuild Syria, including the Syrian academy, and bring stability to the region.

As a Syrian student enrolled at the Ankara-based Middle East Technical University told us: “I want to take what I learn here and bring it back home to help build universities like this one.”

Illustration credit: The accompanying illustration is from the 2014 IIE report, We Will Stop Here and Go No Further: Syrian university students and scholars in Turkey.

James R King is senior research and programme officer at the Institute of International Education (IIE)'s Scholar Rescue Fund. He is co-author of IIE-University of California, Davis reports on Syrian refugee access to higher education in Lebanon and Turkey and has also published on Yemeni politics and Yemen’s Zaydi community. Email: jking@iie.org.

COMMENT

The Turkish Council of Higher Education (CoHE) provides for Syrian refugees to get acceptance from Turkish universities by using affirmative action. For example, although the medical schools in Turkey are the most competitive schools chosen by Turkish students, especially, CoHE place Syrian refugees in the medical schools before helping their own citizens. On the other hand, the most significant point is that the author mentioned that Turkey cannot subsidise itself anymore without any support by non-Turkish governments and international organisations.

Ibrahim Biçak on the University World News Facebook page