Refugees Daily - Internal Global Press Review

Egypt is becoming a key transit country for refugees wanting to travel across the Mediterranean. Even more Egyptians seem to be leaving their country. Now the EU is planning a refugee agreement with Cairo.

The boat had been lying at the bottom of the sea for three days before Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sissi made a public statement. In the middle of last week over 200 people drowned after having been crammed in a boat that was only able to carry half of its 400 passengers. Smugglers in different Egyptian ports kept putting refugees on the boat that sank only a few kilometers off the coast because there were too many passengers on it. The Egyptian military managed to save 163 people. However, the people in the inner part of the boat were sucked to the depths of the sea.

There is no excuse for such a tragedy, declared Sissi in an inauguration speech for a social housing project near the city of Alexandria. The new buildings will accommodate 1,600 families, mostly from the city's slums. Sissi told his compatriots that, "Egypt must not become a country of refugees."

The government will not abandon the population, he stated. He also admitted that Egyptians also want to escape the difficult situation in their country and flee to Europe. "Why are you leaving your country?" he asked. "Are there no job opportunities? Yes, there are." Yet he did not say where they were. Right now, the official unemployment rate is 13 percent. Youth unemployment has reached 40 percent.

He had a very clear message for those who are entertaining thoughts of escape: The state will take tough action against anyone who leaves the country illegally. "You also need to know," he continued, "that we must work to change the reality in which we live."

Criticism of human rights situation

Making changes for the better in the foreseeable future seems questionable – not only for economic but also political reasons. The pro-Muslim Brotherhood website "Middle East Monitor" raises serious allegations against the Sissi government. It claims that human rights violations have forced more and more Egyptians to flee. "Sissi's brutal suppression of freedom of expression, the increasingly noticeable phenomenon of 'vanished' people, torture and sexual abuse have led to the fact that Egypt is now among the first 10 countries whose citizens cross the Mediterranean for a better life."

Amnesty International has also accused Egypt of serious human rights violations. "Government critics, leading representatives of the opposition and political activists have been arrested and detained; some of them have been victims of intentional disappearances," it stated in its annual report for 2016.

Refugees from Africa and the Middle East

Sissi recently presented drastic figures in international talks. At the beginning of September in a meeting with members of the Italian senate, he claimed that his country is currently hosting around 5 million refugees from African and Arab countries. He assured the Italians that the migrants were receiving the same basic health care and education as Egyptian citizens, regardless of the country's economic situation.

The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), however, presents different figures. Last year, it registered 250,000 refugees in Egypt; currently there are probably around 187,000. Most of them – 117,000 – come from Syria.

Violence against refugees

The Egyptian Foundation for Refugee Rights paints a bleak picture of the situation for refugees. The political unrest in the country has contributed to the rise of xenophobia. Violence against refugees has increased and even the number of arbitrary arrests has grown.

At the same time, police are more and more unwilling to investigate crimes directed at refugees. "Access to justice remains a problem," writes the foundation on its website. Because they often have no documents, do not belong to any ethnic or religious minorities, do not speak the language and are economically vulnerable, refugees are especially susceptible to human rights violations.

According to figures from the UNHCR for the first half of 2016, around 115,000 people were registered in Italy after having fled across the Mediterranean. This is about 1,000 people less than the previous year. However, the number of people who are setting out from Egypt is rising. According to the UNHCR, this group made up 5 percent of the refugees last year and this year, until now, 9 percent.

EU plans a refugee agreement with Egypt

The European Union now aims to strike a deal with Egypt modeled on the Turkey-EU refugee agreement. European Parliament President Martin Schulz told the German daily. "Sueddeutsche Zeitung" that it must take into account the fact that more and more refugees from North Africa are attempting an escape across the Mediterranean. He said: "This is the route we must take."

The agreement also strives to eliminate the reasons for flight in the long term. "It must be our goal help stabilize states like Egypt or especially Tunisia – and Libya as well in a few years – and help them help themselves," stated Roderich Kiesewetter in an interview with DW. Kiesewetter, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats, serves as a member of the delegation in a working group on foreign affairs, defense policy and development cooperation. "This is done by offering dual training or establishing structured daily routines and offering minimal measures such as clean water or health care and good nutrition." Human rights must also be addressed. This was underscored by Schulz. He said that the cooperation must be "comprehensive."
 

The acclaimed artist used Kickstarter to fund a trip to the Middle East in search of a fresh perspective on foreign news reporting. The result addresses the plight of refugees with rare poise

In 2010, Sarah Glidden, a young American cartoonist, went on a two-month, Kickstarter-funded trip to Turkey, Iraq and Syria with two friends from a nonprofit journalism collective called the Seattle Globalist. The idea was that she would watch and listen as they reported on the ground: her next book, she hoped, would look at how such journalism works in a world in which many big media organisations, under threat both from free content elsewhere and the rapid disappearance of advertising revenue, find themselves increasingly reluctant to pay for expensive-to-produce foreign news.

It wasn't an easy trip, but nor was it as difficult as people had told her it would be (one Israeli friend insisted that, as a Jewish woman, there was simply no way she should venture into the "axis of evil"). The civil war in Syria had not yet begun and Damascus was then still safe and welcoming; in Sulaymaniyah, the city in northern Kurdish Iraq where she spent several weeks, her gleaming new hotel was full of tourists, even if they were mostly seeking respite from the fighting further south. Even so, every day brought a new challenge. Contacts had to be made overnight, rather than gathered slowly over a period of months, and government minders, at least in Syria, had to be fought off. Even as her friends hunted down compelling stories – here was a group of refugees living in one of Saddam's former prisons; there was a supposedly innocent man who'd been deported from America after his name appeared in the 9/11 commission report – they always had to keep one eye pragmatically, even ruthlessly, on what might go down well at home.

Were they to end up not selling any stories at all, their trip would be little more than an expensive waste of time. Meanwhile, there was the issue of Dan O'Brien, the Iraq veteran (and now university student) they'd invited to come with them. The Globalist journalists, Sarah Stuteville and Alex Stonehill, hoped to make his return the subject of a feature. But would he ever open up about what it felt like to meet some of those on whose behalf he had supposedly fought and whose lives had since been so painfully disrupted? As the days ticked by, they feared he would not.

Six years later, these things, not to mention her own thoughts and feelings about them, form the intricate narrative of Glidden's provocative new comic book. Part memoir, part ethical inquiry and part travelogue, Rolling Blackouts resembles the work of her great hero, Joe Sacco, the author of Palestine and Safe Area Goražde, at least in the sense that it is about as serious and careful as a comic can possibly be. But it also has a gentleness that is all its own, perhaps because Glidden works mostly in soft watercolour, a medium that seems somehow to reflect her refusal to deal in certainties. Stories, as she writes in her introduction to Rolling Blackouts, are "how we make sense of a chaotic world" and she wants those she tells to be gripping; clearly, her material has to be edited, refined. But that doesn't mean that she isn't aware of her responsibilities or that they don't weigh heavily with her. Just as a person's life is much more to them than a mere story, so true objectivity is all but impossible in narrative journalism.

Comics are hugely labour intensive compared with many other forms of reporting and, yes, a tiny part of her worries that while she was busy drawing Rolling Blackouts, things changed almost beyond recognition in two of the three countries it depicts. But in the end, she also feels her book was built to last.

"I think it stands up in its own right," she says, down the line from her home in Seattle. "It is very focused on refugees: on how difficult it is to get resettled, on how only 1% of them make it to a third country. So I hope people will be able to extrapolate, to think: well, if it was this way for Iraqis in Damascus who were registered with the UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] and going through all the right official channels, think how much more difficult it must be for the Syrians now, when the centres are overflowing and the numbers are so vast. But in any case, it's still important to understand what the impact of the Iraq war has been. It's too easy to move past Iraq and Afghanistan and focus only on Syria. Those people [the Iraqis] are still displaced and still in danger. The fact that the news cycle has moved on doesn't make their stories any less important."

Can comics take the reader to places other forms of journalism can't? She believes they can. "There are drawbacks, one of them being issues of timeliness. But work like mine tries to make a connection between the reader and the person being interviewed by showing things like their body language, where they live and what they wear. It's about these slower moments, in which you reveal who they are as people. Text can provide more information, but perhaps it puts more distance in there, too, and we're bombarded by horrific photographs to the point where we're desensitised. Drawings have a more human touch." She tends to keep violent images out of her strips; sometimes, listening to a person looking back and telling their story in their own words is more powerful even than blood and rubble.

Glidden, the daughter of two doctors, studied painting at Boston University. "But then 9/11 happened. I was only 21 and I started to be interested in journalism. My reaction to it, besides feeling a sense of horror, was that if a war was going to happen immediately, there must be more to the story than I knew. So I started reading everything. I was drawn to photojournalism. I think I wanted to be Tyler Hicks [the Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times staff photographer], but I was also very shy. I didn't have what it took to talk to people and take those kinds of pictures and nor did I have any training."

After college, she "blundered around", wondering what she might do with her art, until she discovered graphic novels, at which point something clicked. "I read Maus [by Art Spiegelman] and Persepolis [by Marjane Satrapi] and they were formative. All my life, I'd known comics from Mad magazine or the newspapers; I hadn't realised they could be used to tell true, serious stories. I didn't have a father who survived the Holocaust [like Spiegelman] and I hadn't spent my childhood in Iran [like Satrapi], but I started experimenting with autobiographical comics and from there I began trying to think of a bigger project I could do. That's why I went on a Birthright Israel trip."

Being of a liberal persuasion, she knew she would find this experience challenging (Birthright Israel sponsors free trips to the country for young people of Jewish heritage) and that this sense of conflict would perhaps enable her to turn her travels into a long-form comic. And that's exactly what happened. She drew a couple of chapters – she was then paying her bills by working at a set production company – and when an editor from the comics imprint Vertigo saw them, she was offered an advance to complete it. The result was the award-winning How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less.

Was this brilliantly precise and sometimes withering book controversial in the US? "Oh, I got a few hate mails," she says with a laugh. "One told me I should mind my own business and go back to my loser life. There are some people for whom any criticism of Israel is an offence; do that and you're a self-hating Jew. But actually, I was surprised. I thought there would be more and some of my biggest support came from the Jewish Reform community. I was more amazed by the push back I got from the left, who were indignant I hadn't gone to the West Bank." This was a little unfair, given that she makes no secret in the book of her frustration that she failed to visit the occupied territories. "It was a major regret, which is why I included it. I listened to the things people were telling me about how I would be in danger and I gave into fear. But you know, part of what I like about the book is that it is about confusion. It's a document of me at that time."

Writing How to Understand Israel taught her many things, not least to check her recording equipment before leaving home. "And I should have asked questions of people who weren't part of our scheduled trip – the Palestinians who worked in the cafes where we stayed, for instance. I could have just talked to them."

What about her drawing and writing? "I learned to give space to things, to reduce the amount of text. You need to give the reader a break from information; you need to pace things in the right way." But if her comics have a domestic, even quotidian quality, this is deliberate: "Once you're in a place, you see how similar it is to the world you know and I want to show that. The same lawn chairs that we have in America are all over the Middle East; the Chinese restaurant we ate in [in Sulaymaniyah] had exactly the same dumplings as at home."

Her next project, she thinks, will be closer to home. "There's stuff going on here I'd like to cover. I'm so upset by the misconceptions people have about refugees, especially those coming to the US. We have Trump and equally dangerous politicians saying: we don't know who these people are, they're not vetted, they're terrorists. In fact, the opposite is true: they go through two years of interviews with different agencies."

Does it make her happy that comics such as hers are now taken seriously, the subject of glowing reviews in Newsweek and the New York Times ? "Yes and we've come so far even in the last five years. There are so many comics for young people now – people like Raina Telgemeier [author of the bestselling Sisters ] have just exploded – which means they're going to grow up knowing about comics in a way that my generation didn't. But there's still a long way to go. It's easy to be in a bubble, to forget that most people haven't read any serious comics, that they see the word 'comic' and think: oh, funny. We need a new word." She thinks for a moment. She doesn't write graphic novels, but even if she did, the term wouldn't quite fit: "My mum says that sounds like something very violent. She thinks they should be called narratoons – and you know, maybe one day, they will be."

Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches From Turkey, Syria and Iraq is published by Drawn & Quarterly (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £13.93
 

Refugee influx, economic pressures and ever-present ISIL threat have reshaped the Turkish border city in recent years.

Gaziantep, Turkey – On a wall inside the Qasr al-Omaraq cafe near Gaziantep University, the Aleppo Today news channel plays on a large television screen.

Sipping tea and occasionally glancing at the news feed, cafe owner Ali Yousef recalls fleeing less than two years earlier from Manbij, a Syrian city just an hour's drive east of Aleppo. Branded as a Kurdish "collaborator" by fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group, who seized his restaurant in Manbij, the 47-year-old sought refuge across the border in Turkey.

Upon arrival in Gaziantep, Yousef followed what he knew, launching a cafe that catered to both Turkish and Syrian customers. Although his experience has been largely positive, a ribbon of tension continues to flutter between the two communities, he says.

"Syrian cars have special licence plates. Some Turks will see these plates and harass them because they don't want them here, just because they're Syrian. There is also harassment on social media," Yousef tells Al Jazeera, noting that while some Turks accuse Syrians of harming the economy, he believes their presence has been a net positive.

"When I arrived in Gaziantep, [the Syrian presence] had already changed the city," he says. "The price of housing skyrocketed and the economy has benefited. Syrians take taxis everywhere, so taxi drivers are benefiting. Syrians are hard workers and will work wherever we go."

Renowned for its rich history and unique cuisine, Gazientep is one of Turkey's oldest cities and among its most populous, home to nearly two million people. Originally named Antep, the city adopted the prefix Gazi (meaning "veteran") in the 1920s to commemorate those who fought against the French during the Turkish independence war.

In the aftermath of a devastating blast at a Gaziantep wedding party in August, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim harkened back to that battle, pledging that the city would show the same spirit in its response to the ongoing ISIL threat: "Our grief is great, but be sure our unity and togetherness will defeat all these diabolic attacks," he said.

Today, Gaziantep is a city in flux, affected deeply by the events continuing to unfold across the border in Syria. The flow of Syrian refugees has swelled its population by nearly a quarter, with approximately 350,000 people seeking shelter in Gaziantep. The price of rented accommodation has skyrocketed, while competition for jobs has fuelled tensions between Turkish and Syrian residents, occasionally leading to violence.

In places such as the Turkmenler Caddesi neighbourhood, where many Syrian refugees are now living, it is an uneasy coexistence.

"Before the Syrians came, I was renting a house for 200 or 300 Turkish liras [$66-$100]. Now, if I want to rent it's up to 600 liras," Nadim Dogan, a 42-year-old Turkish convenience shop owner, told Al Jazeera.

Standing behind a red countertop stacked with rows of gum and candy, Dogan said that the new-found economic challenges have fostered significant resentment among Turks. Some business owners now prefer to hire Arabic speakers who are better able to cater to the large and growing Syrian community, he said, while in other cases, Syrians have been undercutting the prices of goods in Turkish stores by selling items more cheaply through their own informal shops.

"I charge one lira [for a pack of gum]; they charge a half-lira," he said.

In a small pharmacy across the street, Turkish worker Ahmed Geng was also critical of the Syrian influx, alleging that it has made the city less safe.

"Before they came, it was not crowded like this ... There have been many changes," Geng, 32, told Al Jazeera.

"It has become dangerous. We can't leave our homes because of the threat of bombs in some neighbourhoods. [I believe] the government should find a safe place for the Syrians and take them to live there."

In fact, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced plans to create a "safe zone" for Syrians along a swath of northern Syria. Significant progress towards that goal was made last month, when rebels backed by coalition forces pushed ISIL (also known as ISIS) out of the strategic Syrian town of Jarablus.

But Ahmad Primo, an independent Syrian journalist and activist who has been living in Gaziantep for more than two years, described comments such as Geng's as unfair, citing no causative link between the influx of refugees and increased violence in the region. Refugees simply want to survive, he noted – and violence among armed groups has negatively affected both communities.

"Terror attacks inside Turkey are not just harming Turks. They are harming Syrians even more. There have been at least five Syrian activists or journalists killed in Gaziantep recently. They have been targeted by ISIS," Primo told Al Jazeera, noting that Kurdish rebels seeking self-determination have also destabilised the country's southeast.

"Syrians should not be blamed for this."

Many Syrians believe they have been made scapegoats for ISIL's actions after the group, taking advantage of Gaziantep's proximity to the Syrian border, reportedly established a transportation network in the city, including "guesthouses" for new recruits.

ISIL has been linked to two major bombings in Gaziantep this year, including the August wedding attack and an earlier bombing at a local police station. Locals say that they have grown used to living under a near-constant state of heightened security: In the span of one week last month, a warning was issued about a "terror cell" plotting to target western businesses in Gaziantep; AK Party facilities were reportedly cleared out in the face of a threat; and the Sanko Park mall was evacuated after a suspected explosive device was found.

"Turkey failed, from the beginning of the Syrian crisis, to separate the armed elements from refugees," Metin Corabatir, president of the Ankara-based Research Centre on Asylum and Migration, told Al Jazeera. "Many wounded fighters, not necessarily ISIS members, received medical treatment and went back to Syria. There was a general fear among the population about the existence and influence of ISIS."

Gaziantep Mayor Fatma Sahin acknowledged in an interview with Al Jazeera that the city was initially unprepared for the massive refugee influx, but since then, substantial efforts have been made to tighten security and integrate Syrians into the community.

"We do have programmes, including a quota system, so that 10 percent of schools can be filled by Syrians. This helps us to bring them together to know each other ... The government is also protecting Turkish and Syrian workers; 10 percent of spaces in Turkish factories must be given to Syrian workers," Sahin said.

Corabatir cited other successes over the past five years, noting that in the long-term, "there are social interactions which will have positive cultural impacts. Gaziantep University started to open departments with an Arabic curriculum. These and similar developments bring the Arab and Turkish cultures closer to each other."

Throughout Turkey, there are nearly three million Syrian refugees, with the country hosting the largest number of refugees anywhere in the world last year, noted Selin Unal, a spokeswoman for the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, in Turkey.

Syrians in Turkey have been given "temporary protection" by the government, which legalises their stay and enables them to benefit from assistance, medical care and access to education and jobs, Unal told Al Jazeera.

"Given that some 90 percent of the Syrian refugee population lives outside of the camps alongside the host community, support for the host communities is imperative, as in some cases, refugees outnumber the host population, putting pressure on local resources," she said. "In sectors including education, livelihoods and health, both the host community and refugees need more help."

Back inside Qasr al-Omaraq, Yousef says that he will soon be looking to sell his cafe business and return to Manbij, which was liberated from ISIL in August. He lost three relatives during the course of the conflict, but his old restaurant is now back in his family's hands.

"Life is less expensive [in Syria]," he says, noting that a kilo of yogurt costs three time as much in Gaziantep as in Manbij, and electricity six times as much. "I want to go back."

Yousef is not alone. Many Syrians remain intent on returning to their home towns and villages once safety is restored – and whenever Syria's civil war reaches its end, Gaziantep is sure to face another major demographic and cultural shift.

In the meantime, Corabatir says that the city's attempts at refugee accommodation have yielded mixed results. While the problems plaguing Syrians both in the city and in refugee camps – including child labour, forced marriages and human trafficking – are overwhelming, Corabatir believes that the biggest challenge lies in their "temporary" status.

"They are considered as a population which will return to their homes. But it is now the sixth year of the crisis. They cannot see their future," he said, noting that in the absence of an official integration scheme, "the Syrian refugees have tried hard and suffered a lot to survive in the city ... They have contributed to the economy of the city, but they remain in the margins of society."