100,000 ILLEGAL ARMENIAN RESIDENTS IN TURKEY?
Tert.am
13:35 ~U 01.02.10
There are 170,000 Armenians living in Turkey, of which 100,000 are
illegal immigrants from Armenia, said Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan on Turkey’s public TV station.
"Of those Armenians, around 70,000 are our citizens; the rest are
illegal residents. We turn a blind eye to all that because we don’t
want to create tension. That means that those people have come to
our country prompted by need. We have also spoken with them; they
have asked different things of us," said Erdogan, adding, "We don’t
see positve approaches in response to the steps that we’ve taken. We
opened up our air space, reconstructed Aghtamar’s Sourp Khatch [Holy
Cross Armenian] church. We have accepted this many Armenian as illegal
residents; however, no one’s speaking of all this."
It’s not the first time that the Turkish PM has referred to illegal
Armenian residents living in Turkey: recently, he had said that "There
are 40,000 Armenians [from Armenia] living in Turkey illegally. We are
not deporting them. However if there’s a need, we’ll send them back.
But we don’t consider that to be humane."
Later, ruling Justice and Development Party MP and Turkey’s Grand
National Assembly EU Integration Committee Chair Yasar Yakis announced
that the number of illegal residents from Armenia was closer to
70,000 and repeated Erdogan’s "if there’s a need, we’ll send them
back" rhetoric.
In 2009, Turkish daily Radical published an interesting study on
the number of illegal residents from Armenia living in Turkey. Alin
Ozinyan, who was administering the Eurasia Foundation project,
studied official records of Armenian citizens entering Turkey from
2000-2008 and found that 6,000 of those Armenian citizens didn’t
return to Armenia – Ozinyan figures the number of illegal residents
from Armenia living in Turkey is 12,000 at most.
Furthermore, in December 2009, RA Ministry of Territorial
Administration’s Migration Agency Director Gagik Yeganyan announced
that over the last 8 years, there have been 294,000 individuals
from Armenia who have entered Turkey, of which 288,000 returned to
Armenia; that is, during those years, there has been, all in all,
6,000 individuals who did not return to Armenia.