The human dimension of migration

Migration is one of the inseparable processes of human existence and history. Human existence is not bound to the land by an absolute attachment. Indeed, a person's existence gains a genuinely existential quality largely by moving away from the land where he was born. That is why behind all the civilizations known in history there is a great wave of migration. Either an incoming wave of migration founded the civilization, with the culture, understanding, vision and energy it brought along; or an existing settled society builds a civilization by blending a horizon with what migrations, again from outside, bring. The first is of course the more widely valid in the world, but the second is not absent either.

At the stage of collapse of all civilizations there is also a tendency to close themselves off from the outside.

The established civilization becomes more preoccupied with its own security and, to ensure it, begins to build thick, insurmountable walls and dig trenches, especially against external elements that come to share its comfort, against waves of migrants.

The depth of the trenches and the height and strength of the walls show to the same degree how rotten the civilization has become and how indifferent it has grown toward other people in suffering.

At this stage the inhabitants of the civilization, having forgotten their own migrant origins, become increasingly merciless toward the people brought by waves of migration, evidently not regarding them as human

. They do not deem these people worthy of the standard of law and the comfort that they developed among their own citizens. Whether the people who come come to save their lives or in search of a better life, the situation does not change.

In civilizations that have reached this stage, protectionism, however high its level, does not help.

The cycle of history has begun to run once and for all.

Behind the dazzling splendor, a stench-ridden decay, a rottenness that breaks the nose, is rapidly gnawing at the civilization.

Turkey is actually, to a large extent, an internal-migration society

. The urbanization rate, which was at 25 percent in 1950, has now reached the 80s. But this migration developed largely in line with the basic sociological development formulated as the push of the countryside and the pull of the city.

Yet today the real factors bringing the phenomenon of migration to the agenda are forced migrations at the international level

. Waves of people washing up on our shores because of wars or civil wars around us. These waves constitute a great test for the world. In this test, perhaps only Turkey comes out with a clean face. Facing it, European countries are quite literally crumbling on human rights and human values, an area in which they had for some time left claim to no one else.

Moreover, the Western world is today the cause of most of the mass migrations taking place in the world.

In the wars in the Middle East, the peoples of the region are not fighting each other on their own behalf, they are fighting by proxy on behalf of Western countries. They fight with the weapons Western countries have put into their hands and push one another into migration.

In return, Western countries persistently avoid taking responsibility for the wars and sufferings they have caused

. Those who, as a result of the suffering they inflicted in Syria and the Middle East, set out for their countries, they see to it that they go to the bottom of the sea in place, or in the Mediterranean, without approaching their shores. Going even further, they try to ensure that these migrants either stay where they are, die in the massacres they are exposed to there, or at least stay in third countries like Turkey. Yet their national incomes are perhaps at least four times higher than the incomes of the people of Turkey.

Is moving so far from humanitarian politics as incomes rise a destiny? Not at all, but it is a cheap option, and EU countries covet this cheap option.

The more they covet it, the more they trample even the humanist values they have claimed until now.

Yet the migrants who come are first of all human beings, and none of them leaves his homeland willingly. Syrians in particular come to save their lives

. Those who cannot come die. The living witness to this is the deaths, which have surpassed at least 600 thousand. The conditions in their own country force them to migrate, and indeed Turkey showed, with the example of Jarablus, that when conditions improve they can return immediately. Today Jarablus, liberated from DAESH by Turkey, is filled with a return migration that exceeds its pre-crisis population. Jarablus is now ready to receive migration from other parts of Syria as well.

The first two sessions of the

I. International Migration and Security Conference

that the

Police Academy

began organizing in Antalya

were devoted to

The Humanitarian Dimension of Migration

. This is truly a choice to be congratulated, and the angle from which everyone facing the refugee problem approaches the subject in the first instance is none other than this.

German administrators were at least two generations late in realizing that the Turks who went to Germany as workers in the sixties were human beings. Even today a deep racism that guides the approach of Germany, which brings up the integration of the Turkish population in its country as a problem on every occasion, is still at work and can no longer even be concealed.

Prof. Talip Küçükcan

,

drew attention to the dimension of the defensive stance shown against these waves of migration that concerns Europeans' protection of their own identity

. Truly, this is a largely correct observation.

While Europe sells, even imposes, secularism and cosmopolitanism on other countries as a value, it builds its own identity entirely at a post-secular level.

At the conference, which took place under the chairmanship of

Police Academy President Prof. Dr. Yılmaz Çolak

and began with the opening speech of

Prof. Dr. Ruşen Keleş

, the doyen of the sociology of migration, in the sessions on the humanitarian dimension

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Yusuf Tekin, Dr. Mücahit Küçükyılmaz and Kızılay President Dr. Kerem Kınık, Dr. Dana Wagner, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Emel Topçu

presented horizon-opening papers. In the other sessions, which I could not attend in person, there were also presentations on the subject, each better than the last.

The problem we are experiencing undoubtedly has a dimension that concerns security as well. But this migration is a reality for today, and one must never refrain from carrying out its sociological, psychological, political, philosophical and historical evaluations through events of this kind.