Turkey set to deport Somali restaurant owner despite legal residence in the country

Turkey set to deport Somali restaurant owner despite legal residence in the country
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Mohamed Isse Abdullah is detained in a repatriation center and faces prosecution that would possibly end up with death sentence, if sent back to Somali

Turkish security forces on Tuesday detained Mohamed Isse Abdullah, a Somali restaurant owner in capital Ankara for deportation, despite having a residence permit in the country, Stockholm Center For Freedom (SCF) said.

According to SCF, Abdullah had been receiving pressure from the local police to close his restaurant lately. In July, the police whitewashed the sign of his business named “Saab” for displaying colors used by Kurdish militants that Ankara deems to be terrorists, SCF said.

Abdullah is currently detained at a repatriation center and the police closed the restaurant and pulled down its sign, SCF said.

He is facing prosecution that would possibly end up with death sentence, if sent back to Somali, according to his lawyers, who appealed the deportation decision to the Constitutional Court.

Animosity towards migrants and refugees in Turkey have escalated in recent years, as they are blamed for the country’s economic and social woes. Turkey hosts around four million refugees, mainly Syrians who fled the war in their country. Turkish media also targets migrants and refugees by hate speech frequently.

Pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) deputy Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu called on authorities on Tuesday for reversing the deportation decision, saying that deporting Abdullah would pose a risk to his life.

According to Mustafa Yeneroglu, a lawmaker from the opposition Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA), Somali migrants living in the region face an institutional racism led by some members of the law enforcement.

Local police officers have been harassing the restaurant owners and customers by carrying out random raids within the past year, Yeneroglu said in May via social media. 

Yeneroglu listed aforementioned harassments such as “arbitrary calls, arbitrary detentions, pressure to shut down businesses, shouting in the restaurants, intimidation of customers, pressure on property owners for terminating the leases and forcing the change of business names.”

“What they're going through is an embarrassment for my country,” he said. 

Yeneroglu said that the pressure against the Somali migrants began after the Sözcü newspaper targeted them in April last year, saying that the “center of the capital city had become Somalia.”