Uzay Bulut | Gatestone Institute
- Professional criminals convince parents that their daughters are going to a better life in Turkey. The parents are given 2000-5000 Turkish liras ($700-$1700) as a “bride price” — an enormous sum for a poor Syrian family.
- “Girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen are referred to as pistachios, those between seventeen and twenty are called cherries, twenty to twenty-two are apples, and anyone older is a watermelon.” — From a report on Turkey, by End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT).
- Many Muslims have difficulty with, or even an aversion to, assimilating into the Western culture. Many seem to have the aim of importing to Europe the culture of intimidation, rape and abuse from which they fled.
- Although the desperate victims are their Muslim sisters and brothers, wealthy Arab states do not take in refugees. The people in this area know too well that asylum seekers would bring with them problems, both social and economic. For many Muslim men such as wealthy, aging Saudis, it is easier to buy Syrian children from Turkey, Syria or Jordan as cheap sex slaves.
“There is a risk of young asylum seekers disappearing from accommodation centres and becoming vulnerable to traffickers. “It is feared that reports from the UN-run Zaatari refugee camp for Syrians in Jordan are equally true for camps in Turkey: aging men from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states take advantage of the Syrian crisis in order to purchase cheap teenage brides. “Evidence indicates that child trafficking is also happening between Syria and Turkey by established ‘matchmakers’ who traffic non-refugee girls from Syria who have been pre-ordered by age. Girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen are referred to as pistachios, those between seventeen and twenty are called cherries, twenty to twenty-two are apples, and anyone older is a watermelon.”Apparently, 85% of Syrian refugees live outside refugee camps and therefore cannot even be monitored by an international agency. Many refugee women in Turkey, according to the lawyer and vice-president of the Human Rights Association of Turkey (IHD), Eren Keskin, are forced to engage in prostitution outside, and even in, refugee camps built by the Turkish Prime Minister’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD). “There are markets of prostitution in Antep. Those are all state-controlled places. Hundreds of refugees – women and children – are sold to men much older than they are,” said Keskin. “We found that women are forced into prostitution because they want to buy bread for their children.” Keskin said that they have received many complaints of rape, sexual assault, and physical violence from refugees in the camps in the provinces of Hatay and Antep. “Despite all our attempts to enter those camps, the officials have not allowed us to.” Officials at AFAD, however, have strongly denied the allegations. “We provide refugees with education and health care. It is sad that after all the devoted work that AFAD has done to take care of refugees for the last five years, such baseless and unjust accusations are directed at us,” a representative of AFAD told Gatestone. “The number of refugees in Turkey has reached to 2.8 million. Turkey has twenty-six accommodation centers in which about three hundred thousand refugees live. Those centers are regularly monitored by the UN; some UN officials are based in them.” “Many refugees could have been provided with jobs suited to their training or skills,” Cansu Turan, a social worker with the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (TIHV), told Gatestone. “But none of them was asked about former jobs or educational background when they Turkish officials registered them. Therefore, they can work only informally and under the hardest conditions just to survive. This also paves the way for their sexual exploitation. “The most important question is why the refugee camps are not open to civil monitoring. Entry to refugee camps is not allowed. The camps are not transparent. There are many allegations as to what is happening in them. We are therefore worried about what they are hiding from us.” “At our public centers where we provide support for refugees,” Sema Genel Karaosmanoglu, the Executive Director of the Support to Life organization in Turkey told Gatestone, “we have encountered persons who have been victims of trafficking, sexual, and gender-based violence. “There is still no entry to the camps, and there is no transparency as entry is only possible after getting permission from relevant government institutions. But we have been able to gain access to those camps administered by municipalities in the provinces of Diyarbakir, Batman, and Suruc, Urfa.” A representative at AFAD, however, told Gatestone that “the accommodation centers are transparent. If organizations would like to enter those places, they apply to us and we evaluate their applications. Thousands of media outlets have so far entered the accommodation centers to film and explore the life in them.” “The number of current refugees is already too high,” said the lawyer Abdulhalim Yilmaz, the head of the Refugee Commission of MAZLUMDER. “But many Arab states including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have not taken in a single Syrian refugee so far. And there are tens of thousands of refugees waiting at the borders of Turkey.” If these women and children knew what was possibly awaiting them in Turkey, they would never set foot in Turkey. This is the inevitable outcome when a certain culture – the Islamic culture – does not have the least regard for women’s rights. Instead, it is a culture of rape, slavery, abuse and discrimination that often exploits even the most vulnerable. The horror is that this is the country – Turkey – that the EU is entrusting to “solve” the serious problem of refugees and immigrants. The international community needs to protect Syrians, to cordon off parts of the country so that more people will not want to leave their homes and become refugees, or asylum seekers in other countries. Perhaps many Syrians would return to their homes. The West has always opened its arms to many beleaguered individuals from Muslim countries – such as the Afghan student and journalist, Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, 25, who was beaten, taken to prison, and sentenced to death in 2007 for downloading a report on women’s rights from the internet and for questioning Islam. It was Sweden and Norway that helped Kambaksh to flee Afghanistan in 2009 by helping him get access to a Swedish government plane. Kambaksh is now understood to be in the U.S. Several European countries, however, have become the victims of the rapes, murders and other crimes committed by the very people who have entered the continent as refugees, asylum seekers, or immigrants. Europe is going through a security problem as seen in the terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussels and Cologne, among others. Many Muslims have difficulty with, or even an aversion to, assimilating into the Western culture. Many seem to have the aim of importing to Europe the culture of intimidation, rape and abuse from which they fled. It would be more just and realistic if Muslim countries that share the same linguistic and religious background as Syrian refugees and that are preferably more civilized and humanitarian than Turkey could take at least some of the responsibility for their Muslim brothers and sisters. Although the desperate victims are their Muslim sisters and brothers, wealthy Arab states do not take in refugees. We have not seen any demonstrations with signs that read “Refugees Welcome!” People know that asylum seekers would bring with them problems, both social and economic. For many Muslim men such as wealthy, aging Saudis, it is easier to buy Syrian children from Turkey, Syria or Jordan as cheap sex slaves. Women and girls are not, to many, human beings who deserve to be treated humanely. They are only sex objects whose lives and dignity have no value. Syrians are there to abuse and exploit. The only way they can think of helping women is to “marry” them.
Uzay Bulut born and raised a Muslim is a Turkish journalist from the Middle East.Source: GATESTONE]]>
