"Not a millimetre of retreat from the Ansar politics"

Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu has announced, in a clear statement, that the humane policy Turkey has long applied toward migrants, which has won the admiration of the whole world, has not been changed and will not be changed by certain "inappropriate and contrary" images that have emerged recently.

Repeating the clear stance our esteemed President set out in recent days, Mr. Soylu said: "We can never evolve into an understanding that has swerved a centimeter, a millimeter, from the idea of Ansar and Muhajir."

This idea guarantees that no one who has been compelled to take refuge in Turkey because of unsafe conditions in his country will be forcibly sent back to it. We thank Mr. Soylu for this statement.

But what happened last week that those images emerged, under the name of "peace" operations in Istanbul, which virtually made all the Syrian muhajirs live nightmares?

In checks carried out suddenly and without any prior preparation, people who did not have their identity papers on them, who had been living in Istanbul for years, who perhaps had set up their businesses, whose children and mothers were waiting for them at home, were hurriedly loaded onto buses and sent to Idlib or to the places where they were registered.

The image these deportations gave has most strikingly reminded us that the migrant policy, which is one of the best stories Turkey could tell the world today, still does not rest on a strong or even minimal legal foundation. This is in fact a very grave situation, and it has emerged that, however deep the philosophy and however delicate the humane sensitivity on which it rests, our migrant policy can be easily affected by day-to-day political conjuncture, and that this philosophy has not adequately protected those who should have basic human rights.

Thank God, these grave situations that emerged reached our esteemed minister's attention and, from there, his just conscience at once, and he made the necessary intervention. Otherwise Turkey would have written with its own hands, throughout its entire history, a very grave picture to be ashamed of.

Now we have a new opportunity to put our hand on our conscience again and think. Turkey must bring its own humane policy, which has won great admiration in the world, to a more institutionalized standard that can at the same time be presented to the world as a model. It must also build the legal foundation for this. Having first shown, on the point of humane policy, a sacrifice above even all the legal levels in the world, it must not fall into the contradiction of one day, under the effect of the political conjuncture, falling far behind even the ordinary migrant law of the world.

However others do it, however little it may suit this, there are rights that world migrant law provides to migrants. From the very beginning Turkey treated the people who fled the massacre in Syria and took refuge in Turkey as "guests, beyond refugees," and in effect provided more means and morale than refugee law guarantees. With this morale, the oppressed Syrians saw a warmth and hospitality that no other refugee experience has had. For each of them this became a consolation, if not complete then to some degree, for the dead relatives they left behind, whom it is in fact impossible to forget, and for their ruined homes.

Because, under the international migrant conventions to which it is a party, Turkey does not regard migration coming from the east as falling within asylum, the Syrians cannot have the internationally recognized law of refugees in their capacity as refugees. Turkey has endowed the Syrian Muhajirs with their own particular legal rights under the status of "Temporary Protection," but it is essential that these, too, be applied in a continuity that deviates in no way from consistency.

The Ansar-Muhajir brotherhood is truly a most respectable sensitivity, but it is essential that it also be grounded in a law that protects people in every circumstance.

To establish an order, of course, we must remember that Turkey has a state order and ensure that the migration that comes is not random. It is impossible not to agree with these words of Mr. Soylu: "In this respect we have to establish this order. Establishing this order is also in favor of our brothers whom we host today in the spirit of Ansar and Muhajir. If we do not ensure it, this will become unmanageable."

Absolutely correct, provided that we do not forget that there is also another sociological order formed by some neglected practices of this order over the past few years, and that intervening in it in such a hurry may lead to a bleeding that cannot be stopped.

Of course, the fact that this very problem was seen and 30 days were given shows that common sense has prevailed for now.

But now these 30 days must be granted not only to the Syrians but also to the institutions that will carry out the implementation in this matter.

1. What can be done to prevent these images from appearing again?

2. How right is it to put forward Idlib as a deportation destination as if it were a safe zone? It is still a place where, every day, the bombardment of the tyrant Assad and some terrorist groups continue to roam, abducting and threatening people.

3. Of course, more sociological and scientific assessments are also needed on the drawbacks of sending people to the provinces where they are registered, outside Istanbul. What will be the gain and the loss of forcibly sending people who have set up businesses in Istanbul, taken jobs and secured the ability to work within legal limits, to Anatolian cities where they cannot make a living? Let us discuss this too.

"JUST AS THEY THEMSELVES DO NOT SPEND, THEY DO NOT WANT YOU TO SPEND EITHER"

Meanwhile, al-Arabiya and the well-known Arab media will all but put on bells and dance, saying "Turkey's migrant policy has gone bankrupt." It does not seem enough that they themselves have not so far accepted even a single Syrian as a refugee; they also have a disposition that wants Turkey to go bankrupt in humane policy. Exactly as our Exalted Book depicts it: "Just as they themselves do not spend, they do not want you to spend either." Because your spending exposes their stinginess, their faults, their crimes.

They have even stooped to the cheapness of presenting words that I had conveyed, at a meeting organized by Arab communities in Turkey, as belonging to their own like-minded people here as if they were mine, and of launching them as "U-turn from Yasin Aktay." "Some ignorant people in Turkey have an approach that says 'the Syrians are stealing our jobs'": you can guess what kind of cherry-picking they did from my words. The joy they display through the distortion they produced by attributing the quoted part of the sentence to my person will stick in their throats.

Turkey, in the clear words of our esteemed President and our esteemed Interior Minister: "will not swerve a centimeter, a millimeter, from the idea of Ansar and Muhajir." As it does so, it will continue to throw in your faces, before the whole world, the shame of what you have not done.