For Iranian Christian refugees, limbo in Turkey can lead to danger
Esmaeil Falahati is no stranger to police raids. Plainclothes intelligence agents arrested the Muslim convert to Christianity in 2015 while he was leading a house-church service in Iran in the garden of a fellow believer. The agents flattened to the ground the home’s owner and put a gun to his throat. They arrested Esmaeil and five others, searching his home and seizing his Bibles and other belongings.
For five years now, Esmaeil has lived as a refugee with his family in Turkey. They have settled into a residential apartment building in an ancient city outside Ankara. But they thought of it as a safe haven, not where Esmaeil expected to be arrested again by security officers.
Turkey throughout the winter months has been under a strict coronavirus lockdown, with dusk-to-dawn curfews nationwide, plus restrictions by age: Older residents are permitted outdoors only during morning hours, while those under age 20 may be outdoors in specified afternoon hours. Only grocery stores and essential businesses have been allowed to open with limits on public transport and gatherings.
Esmaeil, a 41-year-old who is part of a Farsi-speaking church operated by the International Protestant Church of Ankara, was spending most of his time at home with his family when immigration officers summoned him to appear before them and bring his family on 25 January.
When he showed up at the immigration office with his wife Sara and two children—a 12-year-old son and six-year-old daughter—security officers arrested the whole family on the spot. The officers told Esmaeil his family would be deported. Esmaeil protested. He’d received no deportation letter, and he knew the sudden roundup was against Turkish law and international treaties.
After two hours of wrangling and paperwork, the officers transported the family to one of dozens of migrant detention centres scattered throughout Turkey. Esmaeil’s children perhaps comprehended more from the tense discussion than their parents because they know Turkish better, and they began to cry. They were entering a camp for deportation processing, to be sent back to Iran, where their father would likely face more time in prison, or maybe even death.
THE TURKISH government is the reluctant but opportunistic caretaker to the largest concentration of refugees in the world. More than 3.6 million people fleeing their own countries in search of asylum now live within Turkey’s borders. Esmaeil’s case shows how the fates of individual asylum-seekers—often Christians—have become subject to Turkish officials sometimes unsympathetic with their plight. More broadly, cases like his illustrate the repercussions of the United States and European Union largely closing their borders to refugees seeking safe harbour.
The rise of Islamic terror groups, wars in neighbouring countries, and a strategic location straddling Asia and Europe all make Turkey a likely first stopping point to seek asylum. That’s particularly true for fleeing Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, North Africans, and Iranians like Esmaeil.
After Iranian agents arrested Esmaeil in 2015, officials charged him and others attending the garden service with “propaganda against the regime” and disrupting public security. Authorities sent him to Evin Prison, the well-known compound for political prisoners outside Tehran. For 33 days they held him in solitary confinement in Ward 209, a shadow ward within Evin that Iran’s intelligence ministry runs off the books, where many Christians have been jailed and many have disappeared. After a month, though, Esmaeil went free after posting bail set at $25,000. He and his family, along with other relatives, fled the country after his interrogators told him he would be harmed “in an irreversible way”. After he departed, the Revolutionary Court in Tehran sentenced Esmaeil “for taking action against national security”, a sentence that still hangs over him.
Reaching Turkey, Esmaeil followed the formal guidelines to request asylum for his family through the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). But in 2018 the agency turned over all refugee vetting to Turkish immigration authorities. The processing, say lawyers and advocates I spoke to, has been uneven and opaque ever since.
Local officers now handling cases like his look unfavourably on a Muslim convert to Christianity. His filings to be resettled in another country had gone nowhere, until he received notice he might be deported.
En route to the camp, Esmaeil phoned relatives and friends who work in Turkey, asking them to pray for his family. At the detention centre, the family went through processing, including health checkups at the camp’s hospital. Then officials served Esmaeil and his wife deportation papers. They told them to sign the papers, which they did. Esmaeil explained they signed the documents to show they were challenging the deportation, and feared they could be deported without documents if they refused. Still, they worried a forced departure was imminent. The children, he said, were distraught, afraid of being separated from their parents.
The next thing that happened, Esmaeil told me, was “a miracle”. An argument broke out among the officers about what to do with the family. When it ended, they ordered Esmaeil, with his stack of papers in hand, to take his family and return to his home in Turkey.
“Being released so soon was good news for all of us,” said Salih Efe, the lawyer representing Esmaeil in filing an appeal to the deportation orders. But his file “was closed based on some strange procedural rules”. The appeals process stops imminent removal.
The family’s release has not ended their ordeal. Esmaeil continues to work with the community of Iranian Christians living in Ankara and elsewhere through the International Protestant Church. Every day, the prospect of being sent back to Iran weighs on him. His travels now even inside Turkey are restricted and monitored. He has to report to authorities regularly, and if he is stopped without identity papers, officials could deport him immediately.
“There are many refugees in Turkey who face a similar situation,” Esmaeil told me by phone, “A lot of refugees have called to say, ‘We are all afraid. If they are treating you this way, then how might they treat us?’”