The Western world's conscience performance

The washed-up body of Aylan Kurdî has, in one way or another, brought the Syrian crisis back onto the agenda around the world. In the Syrian crisis, which has continued for more than four years, the Assad regime's human rights violations, the crimes against humanity it has committed, and the massacres on the scale of genocide it has undertaken have not sufficiently attracted the attention of the Western world, which saw itself as outside this human tragedy.

A lifeless child's body washing up on the shores of Bodrum suddenly revived with it a discourse of morality and responsibility. But this is a crippled discourse, full of comedy and inconsistency.

Because for a long time Europeans had been debating a refugee crisis that could arise from Syria. Syrians drowning while trying to land on the Greek islands or Italy, practices in Hungary or Austria that trampled human dignity, heaps of bodies like Aylan's kept drowning in the cold waters of the Mediterranean. In contrast, this innocent body washed ashore at a time when Greece, Bulgaria or the other EU countries bordering Eastern Europe were debating various proposed measures, including electric fences.

That is, in the days when its killers were discussing how not to let him land, and, even if he landed, how to send him straight back...

The innocent child named Aylan Kurdî seems to have been perceived all at once as an opportunity that absolves the conscience of the Westerners. Although they themselves hold the greatest share in the tragedy that has occurred, the reactions given to the incident are brazen reactions that take on no responsibility. On the occasion of this incident, Westerners showed how much the expression "Oriental cunning," which they produced with Orientalist motives, is a trait that turns back on themselves.

For example, the NYTimes, at precisely this moment, wrote that Germany was warmly welcoming Syrian refugees. The development behind this report was that Germany would accept 8000 refugees, which it had announced months earlier.

In its world news section the Times writes that Turkey is receiving Kurdish refugees coldly, while on its front page it writes that Britain is opening its arms to Syrian refugees. It is of course a bitterly comic piece of news. Because the number of refugees accepted by Britain, which is alleged to have opened its arms to refugees, is only and merely 187. The number of refugees Turkey, which the Times criticizes, has accepted from Kobani alone is 200 thousand. And the total number of refugees who have crossed from Syria into Turkey is around 2 million. We can only take off our hats to this brazenness that manages to make 187 look bigger than 2 million.

Those who, though today's future was clear from yesterday, kept silent about the Assad regime's massacres, who sought a middle way, continue to suppose that the fire will not reach them, or that they will somehow prevent it from reaching them. The clearest indicator of this is that, instead of treating the matter as the result of the massacres of a bloody-handed dictator, they prefer to treat it as a refugee crisis in which simple and tight measures must be taken. And in this preference, instead of criticizing themselves, they continue to put Muslims, and more specifically Arabs, on the target board.

One of the crystallized examples of this approach was put forward by Michael Ignatieff. In his article titled "The refugee crisis is not Europe's crisis," by writing that Canada accepted 1074 Syrians, Australia, at the other end of the world, more than 2200 Syrians, and Brazil around 2000 refugees, whereas the Gulf countries accepted no Syrian refugees at all, Ignatieff both hides the Western contribution to the unresolvability of the Syrian crisis and says that the problem again originates from within the Middle East itself.

What Ignatieff and those who think like him are trying to say is, in fact, how consistent the policy they have followed from the very beginning has been. From the beginning of the Syrian crisis, the EU and the Western world insisted that this problem did not directly concern them, did not threaten their areas of vital interest, and had to be resolved by regional actors. The point reached shows that the reason the human drama in Syria has worsened and spread is not that the opportunities given to regional actors were not made use of, but, on the contrary, that local actors were treated merely as instruments of a war conducted by proxy on others' behalf.

To assess the matter within the limits of a refugee crisis; to point to only Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries as responsible for it; and moreover to belittle and ignore the efforts of the regional countries that host more than 4 million refugees, and above all the efforts of Turkey, which has peacefully hosted 2 million Syrian refugees, are instructive examples of with what skill the excessive pressure on conscience produced by the process has been grounded.

For the common feature of the texts full of flattering embellishments for the conscience of Europeans and the Western world is that they use none of the statistics that would turn this charade of conscience they are playing over Syria into a comedy.

As of September 4, the number of displaced people inside Syria is estimated at 7.6 million. Together with Syrians holding refugee status, this figure exceeds 11 million. And the most painful thing is the estimate that 50% of child refugees are children who have lost everything, that is, their mother and father.

With this picture in front of us, it is impossible to reduce a human drama brought back onto the agenda with Aylan Kurdî to the refugee question. The refugee question can only be treated as an output of this crisis. The solution is not to look for ways of keeping refugees away from themselves but to be rid of the Assad regime that has turned Syria into a swamp. Any step taken outside this solution will be unable to go beyond being a new dimension of "Western cunning" and will continue to impose unresolvability.