Shrouded by acrid smoke, a young Afghan crouches sorting waste he has pulled from the trash bins of Istanbul, anxious that Turkey will soon strip him of even this subsistence.
“I start at eight in the morning and finish at eight at night,” said Issam Raffur, who has spent four of his 20 years in Turkey.
“It is very hard and poorly paid, but I have no choice,” he shrugged, smoke billowing from a fire barely warming his makeshift sorting centre on a soggy winter day.
Considered the poorest of Turkey’s poor, Afghans have joined Kurds, the Laz, Roma and other ethnic minorities and undocumented migrants in doing work others snub.
For less than $10 a day, they roam the streets of Istanbul, a megalopolis of nearly 16 million people straining under the weight of a currency crisis and a flood of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and other conflict-riven states.
Diving headfirst into dumpsters, they dig up plastic bottles, glass and other waste they then sort and sell in bulk — a self-organised, unregulated business that keeps the city clean, and men such as Issam fed.
But as public sentiment turns against migrants and other foreigners in Turkey, the state-appointed prefecture of Istanbul has declared this work bad for “the environment and public health”.—Agencies
