Istanbul, the capital of humanity

A formation called the International Humanitarian Forum, whose members include people from every part of the world and of every religion, yesterday declared Istanbul the Capital of Humanity at a press conference it held. Istanbul was of course deemed worthy of the title as a representative of Turkey. The Forum is one with participants from Britain, the US, Canada, Europe and the Gulf countries, New Zealand and Australia.

Looking at UN humanitarian aid indices, and at criteria determined on the basis of objective benchmarks that examine countries' activities in humanitarian aid and policy, they operate as a kind of

"humanity measurement and rating organization."

According to these objective criteria, over the past six years, though it is not the richest country in the world, Turkey has been identified as the country that provides the most humanitarian aid in the world relative to its gross national product.

With 3 million, it is the country hosting the most refugees in the world,

but more important than that are the quality it displays in the 25 camps it has opened for these refugees and the humane attitude it displays in general. The refugees, who feel at home, encounter this hospitality not only from the state but also from the people.

The people of Turkey see those who come not as refugees but as guests or muhajirs, and regard the possibility of rising to the level of the Ansar in comparison with them as an opportunity.

In accepting these refugees, Turkey never acts selectively as other countries do.

Without regard to religion, language, color, education level and profession, it looks only at the quality of being oppressed and victimized. Unfortunately, even when other countries have had to share the humanitarian burden in this process, by acting selectively in all these areas and taking the best-educated human resources, they both ease their consciences and brush off their responsibilities in this matter.

Turkey has no role in the countries the refugees come from, in the crises, mostly political in nature, that led to this wave of asylum.

Although those who caused the migrations take no responsibility, Turkey does not hold back from shouldering this responsibility,

because there is a humanitarian situation at hand whose treatment cannot be postponed.

Moreover, it strives for the most humane resolution of the crises in these countries and for the creation on the spot of an environment in which no one will have to flee their country. Turkey does this in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Myanmar, in Somalia, in Libya, in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Egypt.

Turkey does not only help those who take refuge in its own country; it tries to reach humanitarian crisis regions all over the world both with state institutions such as AFAD, Kızılay, TİKA and the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, each of which has become a brand, and with civil organizations such as İHH, Doctors Worldwide and Deniz Feneri. In this respect Turkey, both as a state and as a people, together carries the honor of this leadership in humanitarian aid. It is determined that, within six years, Turkish aid of roughly 2 billion dollars has reached around a hundred countries. In the same period, all the UN's aid reaching Syrian refugees was only 418 million dollars.

The student scholarships that Turkey gives to students from many countries, particularly through the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities or through other channels, are also among the data on which the forum that declared Turkey the center of humanity based itself.

Turkey is not doing this only today. In fact, throughout history Turkey has always repeated this role.

In 1492, when the Jews fleeing Spain were seeking a safe refuge, Istanbul opened its gates

and offered them the means to live perhaps the most comfortable and secure lives of their history, lasting for centuries. Anatolia, particularly in the Ottoman period, was a homeland to which people from every part of the world flowed and settled.

Much is said, as a cause for pride, about our world being a global world.

Unfortunately, those who speak much of this world having become globalized, and who benefit most from its global character, in no way agree to shoulder the responsibilities that globalization has given rise to.

Yet not going to bed full while one's neighbor is hungry is a humane responsibility placed on all of us, and

globalization has also changed the nature of neighborliness, made it unique.

Since today we live in a global world that we take pride in and benefit from in every way, every hunger, every human drama experienced in the remotest corner of the world (though by the nature of the global world there is no remote corner) places a responsibility on us. Most of all, it places it on those who have globalized more, on those who profit most from the global world.

Unfortunately, those who profit most from the global world are also themselves the perpetrators or causes of all the hunger, all the wars and humanitarian crises that are experienced.

In this case, those who shoulder responsibility in this matter, so that humanitarian aid or policy is not left in the lurch, acquire a wholly different value. Turkey, with the responsibility it has shouldered, is in fact saving humanity.

The forum, whose leadership was undertaken by Yemeni Nabil Ghanim, who last year was again the head of the "Thank You Turkey Platform," Anas Altikriti, head of the Cordoba Foundation based in London, Kuwaiti human rights activist Fatima Ayed Al Rashidi, and Mithat Ibrahim of Kirkuk, will draw attention to this side of Turkey on international platforms over the next five months with a series of events such as meetings, tournaments, exhibitions and conferences. They will hold the finale with a major event they will organize in Istanbul in August.

When the forum members visited Kadir Topbaş as the mayor of Istanbul, the Capital of Humanity, and heard from him of the countless humanitarian aid works that even the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality alone has undertaken in many parts of the world, the impression that humanitarian aid and policy have become a social culture and character for Turkey was reinforced a little more.