Turkey’s migration authority said Friday it planned to deport 11 Syrian suspects recently arrested and charged with “inciting hatred” and “insulting Turkish people” by participating in social media videos in which they “provocatively” ate bananas.
“Deportation proceedings of [the] foreign nationals will be initiated following the completion of their judicial process,” Turkey’s Directorate General of Migration Management said in a press statement issued October 29.
Ankara announced the judicial proceedings this week after video footage emerged on social media starting October 17 showing Syrian residents of Turkey eating bananas “as a way of mocking anti-refugee sentiment in Turkey and the battered Turkish economy,” Al-Monitor, a Washington D.C.-based news site accused of pro-Syrian government and pro-Hezbollah bias, reported Thursday.
The banana-eating videos referenced an October 17 “street interview in Istanbul’s working-class Esenler district … [in which] a group of Turks vented their anger before cameras at both the Syrians under temporary protection in Turkey and the government’s migration policy,” Al-Monitor recalled.
“Accusing the Syrians in Turkey of living off state subsidies, a woman shouted, ‘Go back to your country and fight your own war,'” the news site detailed. “But the most widely circulated quote was that of a middle-aged man who shouted at a young Syrian woman, ‘I can’t eat bananas while you buy them by the kilo.'”
The Turkish man’s quote inspired Syrians living in Turkey, of whom there are nearly 4 million, to post videos of themselves eating bananas to social media in subsequent days.
“One [of the videos] showed a Syrian mimicking a Turkish family and dividing a single banana among several people as they ate on the floor, saying, ‘We are not Syrians but Turks, so we are forced to share a single banana,'” according to Al-Monitor.
The Twitter user “@ahmed-almadoor” posted a video showing “a monkey with a Turkish flag superimposed on it [that] steals a banana from a man. A post by the same user … showed the crescent in the Turkish flag replaced by a banana,” Al-Monitor detailed.
This video’s depiction of the Turkish national flag provoked the ire of Turkish mainstream media journalists. Fatih Altayli, a widely-read columnist for the Turkish newspaper Haberturk wrote in response to the video, “We can no longer tolerate these attacks that go as far as insulting our flag.”
Pleading for the Turkish government to denounce the action, he added, “Isn’t it time to say stop?”
Umit Ozdag, the leader of Turkey’s nationalist Victory Party (ZP), urged Turkey’s Interior Ministry this week to “take legal action and deport those who ‘insulted Turks'” through the banana-themed videos. ZP deputy chair Ugur Turhan “filed a complaint to the Istanbul prosecutor’s office on Tuesday, claiming that the videos violated Art. 300 of the Turkish penal code — on degrading national symbols including the flag — and said it was punishable, under Turkish law, by three years of imprisonment,” according to Al-Monitor.
More than 3.6 million Syrian refugees currently reside in Turkey, according to data published in June by the World Bank. Syrian nationals “constitute the vast majority of over 4 million refugees and asylum seekers currently living in [the] country, making Turkey the world’s largest host of refugees,” according to the financial institution.