A football contest in Istanbul is putting the plight of African and Middle Eastern migrants there and in Izmir centre pitch, writes Nicholas Birch
WHEN SENEGAL meets the African All-Stars in the final of Istanbul's Africas Cup this Sunday, it will be the culmination of one of the world's strangest football competitions.
Played out over a month in a small stadium just down the road from the city's financial district, the football has been of high quality. But the teams are so poor only six were able to raise the €150 needed to pay for pitch and referees.
The players are almost all migrants, either professional footballers in their home countries brought by agents on false promises of fortune, or some of the countless thousands who pass through Turkey on their way to Europe.
Former midfield star for Ted Afrique, a one-time first division club in Guinea, Boubakar Bah is typical. Brought to Turkey by an agent three years ago on a one-way ticket, a tourist visa and the promise of a glittering career, he never even got a trial.
"My gullibility and that man cost me my career," the 24-year-old says. He has few illusions about the Africas Cup, which is now in its fifth year. "It's only really half a competition, but if you stop playing, that means you've stopped hoping," he says.
Sitting by a rubble-strewn concrete pitch in another Istanbul district where Nigerian footballers train every morning, 28-year-old competition organiser Donald Adekunle is more pragmatic.
"The loneliness is one of the worst things about being stranded here," he says. "Football is like a church: it brings people together." It also gives players a second chance to impress local selectors.
After last year's competition, clubs gave 15 footballers trials.
Trade in African footballers is widespread internationally. In France, there is even an NGO defending the rights of the players. In Turkey, neither the Football Federation nor the International Organisation for Migration admit to having heard of the phenomenon.
A defender who represented his national team last year, Adekunle coached the African All-Stars, a mix of Somali, Nigerian and Senegalese players, when they beat Tanzania in Sunday's semi-final.
Boubakar Bah was on the losing side.
The cosmopolitan teams are the result of a new Turkish policy of resettling registered asylum seekers in provincial towns to wait for their cases to be reviewed, a process that can take several years.
Dubbed the "satellite cities" project, it reflects the increasing prominence Turkey is giving to the issues of migration and asylum.
Istanbul is fuller than ever with Africans, as well as Iraqis, Iranians, Afghans and Sri Lankans fleeing their countries for economic or political reasons.
Once ignored by the local media, migrants began to attract attention following the shooting of Festus Okey, a Nigerian footballer, in a police station last August. The trial of a police officer for murder is ongoing.
This April, one registered refugee was among four people who drowned when police forced them into a fast-flowing river dividing Turkey and northern Iraq. Three other refugees were deported, in breach of international law.
"This is the first case of refoulement that I have encountered since I've been in Turkey, but I haven't been here long," says Michel Gaude, head of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Turkey.
Activists say illegal deportations are frequent.
The bodies of 14 migrants, found near Istanbul last week, suffocated to death inside a truck transporting them across Turkey, was just the latest sign of the dangers these people face as they struggle westwards.
But the tragic face of migration is nowhere clearer than on Turkey's Aegean coast, where migrants attempt to cross over to Greek islands, at points less than three nautical miles away.
Last December, in the worst recorded case yet, more than 30 died when the overloaded boat provided to them by smugglers capsized south of Izmir. A fisherman near the popular resort town of Bodrum, Metin Sezer saved 18 more from a similar fate this January.
"I was fishing at night off the point when I heard shouting," he says. "I turned the boat's lights on the water and saw my nets full of people."
In Basmane, a once-genteel district of central Izmir that acts as a meeting point for migrants planning the crossing, Zikriya Garipzade is fully aware of the risks.
A 39-year-old Afghan who was expelled from the UK last September after six years, Garipzade sold his shop in Kabul to pay the €3,500 smugglers demanded to transport him, his wife and two children from Iran to Izmir.
"The [British] court said there was no problem in Afghanistan," he says. "No problem in Afghanistan? Every day, gunmen came to my shop and stole my earnings. I would rather drown than go back."