By Dasha Afanasieva
ISTANBUL, Turkey, July 26 (Reuters) - Muna Awwal wants to goto school. But she needs to go to work.
Muna says she is 10 years old. Nine, corrects her father,Mahmud, as they sit in the family's second-floor flat inIstanbul's textile district.
Muna and her family arrived in Turkey from Syria in 2013.For the past few weeks she has helped her father and 13-year-oldbrother Muhamed in a basement they rent, making cheap tops,dresses and T-shirts for other textile suppliers. Her fatherMahmud says some of the clothes are sold in Europe.
The family comes from the city of Aleppo and fled fightingin May 2013, he said. He shoos his children out of the room andsettles on the carpeted floor. Now, he says, he relies on threeof his five children to get by.
The Awwal family's situation is not unusual. It adds toquestions about how safe Turkey is for families fleeing war.
"It's not normal at all to make my child work - with me orwith anyone else," Mahmud Awwal said in June. "It's not good.But we have no other choice. It's very common here in Turkey."
Over a few days in April and May, Reuters met 13 Syrianchildren in three Turkish cities who said they have jobs makingclothes or shoes, even though Turkey bans children under 15 fromworking. Another four who were older than 15 said they worked upto 15 hours a day, six days a week, despite a law that saysthose up to 17 can only work 40 hours weekly. Dozens morechildren who were working were unwilling to talk.
In March, Brussels and Ankara agreed a deal that allowsEurope to send back to Turkey migrants who came through thecountry on their way to Europe. Brussels has pledged up to 6billion euros ($6.6 billion) to help migrants and refugees, andthe deal states that when people are returned, they will be"protected in accordance with the relevant internationalstandards."
The European Union says Turkey is a safe country: In April,European Council President Donald Tusk called Turkey "the bestexample in the entire world of how to treat refugees."
The United States is not so sure. Turkey's "efforts toprotect the growing and highly vulnerable refugee and migrantcommunities in the country remain inadequate," the StateDepartment said in a July report.
And rights groups say Turkey is far from safe. Groups suchas Amnesty International have documented Syrians being shot atby Turkish border guards as they try to cross into Turkey,living in squalor, or deported back into the fighting. And theynote Syrian children, who are often unable to get to school inother frontier countries such as Lebanon, are part of the labourforce.
Turkey houses more refugees than anywhere in the world: 2.73million of them Syrians by the last count, more than half ofwhom are under 18. Ankara says it has spent more than $10billion helping refugees. It doesn't recognise them as refugees,but at least on paper it does offer protection, including freeeducation and basic healthcare, to those who register. Thegovernment has denied sending back any Syrians against theirwill and says no refugees have been shot at. President TayyipErdogan has said some Syrians may even win Turkish citizenship.
But the country is struggling to accommodate all those extrapeople, only 10 percent of whom are housed in camps. In May, theeducation ministry said some 665,000 Syrian children living inTurkey - a majority of school-age Syrians in the country - werenot in school. Among 6 to 11 year-olds who live outside camps,Turkey's Disaster and Emergency Management Authority has said,fewer than 15 percent are in school.
No one can estimate how many work instead. Of around 125Syrian households in Istanbul surveyed by Turkish charitySupport to Life earlier this year, one in four households withchildren said at least one child could not go to school becausethe family depended on their pay. Half of those children workedin textiles.
Stephanie Gee, a fellow at Human Rights Watch, says Europeis "woefully ignoring" the problem of protecting children:"Unless Turkey can ensure that Syrian kids go to school, I thinkthe whole question of effective protection is moot."
The European Commission declined to comment. An EU sourcesaid that the EU executive has "systematically pointed to thecritical phenomenon of child labour" and urged Turkey to adoptmeasures to prevent it. Europe has committed tens of millions ofeuros to help get more Syrian children into schools.
An official in the office of Turkish President Erdogan saidit's the West that should do more. Europe has accepted justaround 850 Syrians for legal resettlement under the EU deal, and31 Syrians have voluntarily returned to Turkey.
"Turkey is safer for refugees than any other country," hesaid. "Rights groups should use their time and energy to tellother governments to follow suit instead of downplaying ourefforts."
CHILDREN AT WORK
Children have long been part of Turkey's labour force. In2012, the last year for which data was available, Ankara saidalmost one million Turkish children aged between 6 and 17worked. Many of them help make clothing, textiles or shoes,industries that contribute $40 billion a year to Turkey'seconomy and employ 2.5 million people - more than half of themas casual labour, according to unions.
Turkey exports $17 billion in clothing and shoes a year,most of it to Europe, especially Germany.
The country had been addressing its child labour problem inclothing over the past few years, according to Lotte Schuurman,communications officer at the Fairwear Foundation, which worksto improve working conditions. "But with the coming of theSyrian refugees it's increased again."
Syrians, and especially Syrian children, are undercuttingpay. In the southern city of Gaziantep, near the border withSyria, a 30-year-old Turk who gave his name as Selim said heused to earn 450 lira ($155) a week as a worker, but afterSyrians came he set up his own business.
He hired children to carry fabrics, bring tea, and stack upcut-out fabric. He now pays each child about $50 a week. "In thepast, Turkish children worked here but now it's only Syrians,"Selim said at the back of his workshop. "Turkish children did itas an apprenticeship but the Syrian children do it only formoney."
Syrians say they earn between half and a third of the goingrate for the same work done by Turks. Children are even cheaper.
On balance, cheap refugee workers are more of a bonus than aburden for Turkey, said economist Harun Ozturkler of the CentreFor Middle Eastern Strategic Studies in Ankara. They boostprofits, which lead to new investment. There are already signs,according to Ozturkler and the World Bank, that some Turkishworkers are shifting to better paid jobs. Last year, the economygrew by 4 percent.
When Syrians arrive, they are supposed to register at theirlocal police station and receive a temporary protection cardallowing them to stay. Many people Reuters spoke to said theyhad not been able to register, partly because the going rate fora bribe is nearly $70, more than they can pay. The presidencyofficial said there were no problems with registration and nofee was charged, but there may be delays in areas of highdemand.
Until this year, Syrians were not entitled to work permits,so they worked informally. Ankara started to issue permits inJanuary, but a government official said only a few people havequalified, because workers either need to be self-employed orobtain the support of their boss to apply.
In Istanbul in April, a group of teenage boys spilled out ofa tall, red-brick factory wheeling a massive metal cage full ofrubbish towards a row of bins. The boys said they were notregistered with the government.
The boys said they earned around $85 a week working throughthe night cleaning and boxing up shoes. "The boss is as nice asyou can get," said Juma, 17. "When we are working until themorning he comes and cracks a joke or gives us some sandwiches.Other times, if we have an order which needs to be done fast, heshouts at us."
The youngest of them, Bashar, was 14 and had a wisp of amoustache. He arrived after fleeing Aleppo in early April, hesaid. His father took him to the border and paid a smuggler $300to take Bashar across alone.
On the way, he said Turkish border guards shot at him. Humanrights groups say dozens of people fleeing Syria have beeninjured, allegedly by border guards keen to help cap the numberof new arrivals in Turkey. The presidency official denied theseclaims and Reuters was unable to independently confirm them.
Bashar said he planned to send half his pay to his family -father, mother, two sisters and two brothers. "They cannot workin Aleppo," he said. "They had to shut their shop."
CONFLICT TEXTILES?
The boys said the shoes at their factory are labelled forDeFacto, Turkey's second largest apparel company with outlets in11 countries, including Kazakhstan, Iraq and Russia. They saidthey did not know the name of the company they worked for.DeFacto said that using refugees as an illegal labour source istotally unacceptable. When undocumented workers are found in itssupply chain, it said, it gives producers a chance to stop usingthem. If children are found, the relationship is severedimmediately.
Other multinational companies have found find Syrianchildren working for their suppliers. Firms including Esprit,Next and H&M said in a survey conducted earlier this year by NGOthe Business and Human Rights Centre they had found Syrianchildren making clothes for them in recent years and acted tofix the situation. To avoid cutting off all income for thefamilies, some say they try to arrange to combine work andschooling.
Next and H&M told Reuters they had not found any moreSyrians since. Esprit said it recently found more unregisteredSyrian adults - but not children - at a supplier factory.
A spiderweb of subcontractors is one reason for the lack ofestimates on how many Syrian refugee children are working in thetextiles trades.
Western brands employ auditors and use barcode technology tocheck where their products are made, but it's hard to checkeverywhere. Sweatshop bosses and local entrepreneurs say thatoften the auditors come by appointment. That makes it easy tohide children, they add.
And some sweatshops are in places where there is fighting.
Much of the mainly Kurdish southeast has been unstable sincea ceasefire collapsed in summer 2015, resulting in hundreds ofcivilian deaths and 24-hour curfews. Border towns in the south,where many Syrians live and which have been shaken by violenceincluding rocket fire from Islamic State militants, have lots ofclothing workshops.
One district, Batman in the southeast, boasted in a 2014publication it was "cheaper than China." Esprit said one of itssuppliers had suggested shifting some production to thesoutheast; Esprit declined, "due to the risk of sendingemployees into a zone of instability." Activists say fightinghas made it harder to audit in the south and southeast.
SHARED MIDDLEMAN
The Awwal family lives and works in Zeytinburnu, anindustrial district of multi-storey concrete apartment blocks inIstanbul. Textile workshops and outlets sit at street level. InAwwal's basement, Muna helps carry fabric between the seamsters.Her brother Muhamed works on the machines. The children work11-hour days, Mahmud Awwal said; he doesn't pay them.
Awwal got his temporary protection card soon after hearrived in 2013, he said. At first, he sub-contracted work froma Turkish man and tried to send the children to school. But hecould not sign them up because he did not have papers to provewhere he lived. The school told Awwal to bring a local officialto vouch for him, but he could not persuade anyone to come.
Then the Turkish worker short-changed him. His 13-year-old,Muhamed, started work at another sweatshop for about $60 a week,but some weeks the boy's boss would halve his pay. So Awwal tookon his own son and tried to stick with fellow Syrians. Hisbusiness is not registered, and neither are his workers.
His eldest son, Mustafa, who is now 15, found a job with aKurd called Dogan. When there are enough orders to work everyday, the boy's $100-a-week wage covers the family rent.
Dogan also helped Awwal, introducing him to a middleman, "sonow we are both doing different orders for the same brands."
If there are enough orders, Awwal and his children makeabout $800 a month from the family workshop. The clothes theymake include T-shirt dresses for a local store. He showed areporter a picture of a top with a poor quality Adidas labelwhich he said he couldn't read. A spokesman for Adidas said thelabels were clearly counterfeit.
A Turkish government official said: "Relevant ministrieshave already been working on this issue, and have punished theslightest abuse."($1 = 0.9109 euros)
(Additional reporting by Gabriela Baczynska in Brussels, OrhanCoskun in Ankara, Donny Kwok in Hong Kong, Himanshu Ojha andJames Davey in London, Anna Ringstrom in Stockholm, Umit Bektasin Gaziantep; Edited by Sara Ledwith)
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