Turkey A Migrant Way Station

Outside was a steep, garbage-cluttered alley in a weary Istanbul slum, and beyond was a world their family members encounter only with great caution because they are Iraqi immigrants, living illegally in Turkey for almost two years.

"We live by chances," said Faraj, the 52-year-old father, who left his job as a public health bureaucrat in Basra, Iraq, taking his wife and four children on a risky flight to begin anew in another country.

Turkey was not their final destination. They are stranded here, too poor to pay smugglers to carry them to Europe, barely able to feed themselves. But they are determined not to return to Iraq, where they fear the wrath of the government.

Fleeing hunger, oppression

Families like this form a wave of illegal immigrants sweeping into Turkey, hoping to land eventually in Europe or North America. Some are fleeing religious and political oppression in Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan. More often they are trying to escape hunger in the wide belt of despair stretching from the Arab world to the Indian subcontinent to Africa.

Their increasing presence has wrought problems for financially strapped Turks and for the Europeans who are appalled at the illegal flow of humanity knocking at their doors.

Faraj, despite his family's lot, considers himself lucky. He knows Iraqis, mostly fellow Christians, who drowned aboard smugglers' rusted old ships, or who survived only to slip into severe depression triggered by their inability to move on from Turkey.

Almost weekly, Turkish officials report snaring smugglers or rescuing abandoned immigrants. Earlier this summer, Turkish police found 65 Iraqis hidden in secret compartments of a truck loaded with sand and pebbles. Hundreds of other illegal immigrants have landed on beaches in Italy, France and Greece in recent months.

The desperate come to Turkey because it is the geographic link between the east and west, north and south. On the east, its lonely mountainous stretches are ideal for smugglers. On the west, its border with Greece tempts would-be immigrants dreaming of work within the European Community. Turkey's lengthy shorelines invite illegal immigrants hoping to evade policed borders.

For those who have money, safe passage is offered by smugglers who say they can arrange a fake passport and a flight to Switzerland for $7,000, according to Yunus Sen, an investigating reporter for NTV, an Istanbul television station. For those without much money, a smuggler will offer to lead them across the Greek border on foot for $500, he said.

Turkish officials say they caught 94,000 illegal immigrants last year, more than twice as many as the year before. The number of illegal immigrants stranded in Turkey or passing through is estimated at about 1 million.

The smugglers, from an increasing number of countries, are learning to use more sophisticated strategies, said Adam Arkadash, head of the Ankara-based Association for Solidarity with Asylum Seekers and Migrants.

"It is not only Turks who are doing the smuggling, but Albanians, Afghanis and Iranians," he said. Many smugglers learned their skills from drug dealing, he said, but find it more satisfying to deal in illegal immigrants because the money is good and the laws against human trafficking in most nations are few and penalties are not as stiff.

Istanbul, an ancient city layered with the remnants of nations swept up in the Ottoman Empire, is a magnet for those heading West to find a better life, and the massive, rambling city is an easy place to hide.

Many migrants spend their days at dingy hotels in low-income neighborhoods such as Aksaray, waiting for the smugglers to arrange their next move.

A tall, sickly Nigerian who showed up recently at an underground office that assists such immigrants is one of them. He had gone to Georgia in the former Soviet Union several years ago in search of work and then ended up in Turkey, looking for a better life. But he hadn't worked in months. Now he was sick with hepatitis, he said, and had no money for medicine.

Those who run the modest effort to help such immigrants said they have seen more of them who are sick, including some with AIDS. They asked that their group not be identified to avoid problems with Turkish officials.

In Van, a large city in eastern Turkey, Ferda Cemaloglu runs a shelter for 22 women and children who have crossed Turkey's borders. Some are Afghanis who fled because they want to educate their daughters--something they say Afghanistan's Taliban rulers will not allow.

Depression common

Many who cannot find room in the shelter live in houses made of mud, three or four crammed to a room. As they wait for the Turkish government to process their asylum requests or for smugglers to get them elsewhere, many lapse into deep depression, Cemaloglu said. Desperate for money and barred from working legally in Turkey, the immigrants often send their young children to work discreetly, she added.

In nearly all cases, Turkey grants temporary asylum only to immigrants who do not come from Europe, Turkish officials said. Then it falls upon the United Nations to find a country for those who can show they are fleeing wars or religious, ethnic or political persecution.

But only a few qualify as refugees, said officials with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Ankara. Of 5,610 people who applied last year, fewer than 50 percent received such status, agency figures show.

Faraj, the Iraqi who fled with his family to Istanbul, already has been turned down as a refugee. But he is reapplying. He said he decided to leave Iraq after his wife said her boss at a government agency tried to rape her.

Meanwhile, his family lives in an Istanbul slum on the equivalent of $120 a month, which his wife and 21-year-old son earn from temporary jobs.

Faraj has searched for work but has found little, blaming his age. He has washed dishes without getting paid at a restaurant, thinking it might win him a job. It didn't.

"I am tired. I am exhausted. It's hard to find hope. But I am patient," Faraj said. "Before I came here, I thought that the UN would take care of us. But I didn't think it would take this long."