What are the Syrians supposedly doing in Turkey?

The cruelest, bloodiest and most unprincipled international settling of accounts of recent years took place on Syrian soil. The fact that many countries settled their scores with one another on Syrian soil, and at the price of the blood, lives and homeland of the Syrian people, produced an extremely tragic situation.

But those who conducted their settling of scores without hesitating to shed the Syrian people's blood generously have kept just as far away from paying the humanitarian bill produced by this settling of scores, and they continue to keep away.

The countries that, 104 years ago, as if no other people had suffered a bloody nose, as if tens of millions of people had not died in that war and tens of millions had not been uprooted from their homes and homelands, still keep on chanting dirges for the sufferings of the Anatolian Armenians, who had a total population of 1.5 million, and that show the officiousness of sending Turkey a bill today from these dirges, are blind and deaf to Syria, where 22 million people are exposed to far heavier conditions.

Worse still, many of them are the perpetrators, the cause or the accomplices of these sufferings in Syria. With so many crimes committed by their own hands lying in plain view, how, and what treatment, will they apply to which sick conscience by going back to 1915?

Today's balance sheet is that 12 million Syrians have been driven from their homes and homeland, more than one million people have died, millions have been wounded, and that there are tens of thousands of people currently going through severe torture in Assad's dungeons or whose fate is unknown. The reason this last figure is not higher is that those who are imprisoned do not live long anyway, and that it is known these days that prison is a way of killing for the regime.

Although Turkey was not the cause of what has happened in Syria, it has been the only country that did not hesitate at all to shoulder the humanitarian responsibility that the humanitarian situation emerging there placed upon it, and that did so in a way that sets an example for all humanity.

Let us not deprive Lebanon and Jordan of their due either. They too did not shirk this responsibility within their means. Indeed, when we look proportionally at their own populations, the number of Syrian refugees in both countries may even be considered much greater than in Turkey. As many as 14 percent of its population, that is 1 million 400 thousand Syrians, have gone to Jordan, whose population is 10 million. In Lebanon this rate reaches 16 percent. Although in numerical terms more than three times as many Syrians have come to Turkey as to each of them, the effect of this has undoubtedly been easier to compensate within a developed economy of 81 million.

Be that as it may, charging the bill of this humanitarian catastrophe, whose responsible parties are the countries waging proxy wars, to these countries is a great injustice added to the war itself. The sole reason behind all the activities put forward so far by AB or ABD to pay the humanitarian bill of this war has not been any humanitarian sensitivity but has been aimed at preventing the migration that might flow from there to their countries. Were it not for the possibility of such migration, they do not look as though they would stir a hair.

Yet Turkey looked at the matter from an entirely humanitarian angle, and whatever anyone says, this made Turkey shine like a star all over the world. Turkey made a serious difference all over the world with this approach, and the so-called social democrat, leftist CHP members, who do not notice this difference in Turkey, or who even if they notice it do not appreciate it, continue to shame us with the xenophobia they display. They are awakening the fitna that is awakened.

The most typical discourse of the ignorance of xenophobia is that it attributes the cause of unrelated problems that always occur to people regarded as foreigners. Saying that whatever economic or political problem there is in Turkey is caused by the Syrians is in fact only a way of blaming the AK Parti and President Erdoğan, who accepted and helped them.

In any case, to attack in this way the aspect of us that is the most to be proud of, on behalf of Turkey, all over the world, to kick away an opportunity for goodness once one has found it, is something like heedlessness and misguidance after goodness.

Meanwhile, a report by UTESAV titled "Syrian Asylum Seekers and the Turkish Economy - Discussing an Effect in the Light of Universal Experience" was published in recent days. Prof. Dr. Bekir Berat Özipek, who wrote the report, has produced a comprehensive study that addresses all the perceptions concerning the Syrians in Turkey and in particular questions and demolishes the approaches that see them as a burden on the economy.

The report demonstrates with figures that, contrary to what is known, the Syrians do not lie around after coming to Turkey continuously receiving unlimited aid from the state. The Syrians also work and make a serious contribution to the economy.

In 2014 alone, 4,500 businessmen, Syrian businessmen, made a business investment of 1.22 billion liras. In 2015 the Syrians came first among foreign investors, after the Germans, at 25.21 percent of foreign asylum-seeker investors. There are now 6,000 Syrian companies with 3.5 billion dollars of investment. According to a new study, 90 percent of the Syrians work with their own means and carry on with their lives.

Because the Syrians are now muhajirs, they are much more dynamic and full of the desire and energy to hold on, and because they have the courage to take risks and the entrepreneurship peculiar to the muhajir character, they bring the dynamism the Turkish economy needs. Moreover they do this despite the existing legislation on the employment of foreigners, which defies reason. Let no one have any doubt that when this legislation changes a little, the Syrians' contribution to the economy will increase exponentially.

It is not for nothing that it is said the muhajir comes with his provision and his blessing. Neither they nor we would of course have wanted them to come in this way. But what is done is done, and if this has befallen them, a person has the opportunity to regard it as a trial and to respond to the trial in the best way. An opportunity to show one's quality, to turn what has happened into an advantage, and to show the nobility of the Ansar...

While there is this opportunity to show this nobility, let those who want to play the tight-fisted, nobility-lacking, ungenerous, blessing-less miser go on playing. It is known how this game ends.