Those who made people migrate and those who take responsibility for migration

The Global Refugee Forum, held yesterday at the UN Geneva Office under Turkey's co-chairmanship, was the first meeting on the road to implementing the "Global Compact on Refugees" that the UN adopted in New York in December 2018.

In fact, the forum was launched largely on Turkey's initiative and leadership, and the great majority of the participating countries consisted of countries suffering from this problem. It is quite clear that EU countries suffer from the refugee problem. In the end, refugees from all over the world head for one of the EU countries in order to find and build a better, safer life. The EU has in fact set certain rules binding member states on the admission of refugees. But not all member states comply with these rules in the same way, and some countries do not comply at all. Germany, the Union's driving member, is, it must be appreciated, a country that tries to comply most consistently with the rules set by the EU in this regard. The number of refugees admitted from Syria alone so far has exceeded 1 million, and moreover it makes maximum effort to comply with the Union's rules and criteria on the admission of these refugees, the meeting of their needs, the guarantee of non-refoulement and their integration into society.

While President Erdoğan said at the forum that the existence of more than 260 million migrants, more than 71 million displaced persons and nearly 25 million refugees must be accepted as a problem that no one in the world today can remain indifferent to, he explained that Turkey is among the foremost of all the world's countries in fulfilling the responsibility arising from this common human problem.

In fact, both while listening to Erdoğan's speech and while looking at the profiles and records of the countries participating in this forum, I noticed that something has badly escaped attention in both the diagnosis of the problem and the approach to its solution. It is this: all the countries participating in this forum are countries trying to cope with migration problems caused by other countries.

The countries that are actually responsible for this migration, that cause population movements because of the climates of instability they have created in their own countries or in the countries they have fought in, take no interest in the problem of migration and refugees, and displaced people do not even seem to be of any concern to them.

We do not see Russia, Iran and the USA, who are responsible for the humanitarian crisis and the massacres in Syria today, dealing in any way with the refugee problems that have by now become a matter for all humanity. Yet the massacres they have carried out against the civilian population for the sake of gaining influence on Syrian soil, and the instability they have plunged the country into, cause more and more people to be uprooted from their homes every day, but they take no interest in the humanitarian problems this produces. Moreover, each of these countries is among those that show the greatest resistance to migration that might come to them from Syria or other countries. The humanitarian problems they have produced occupy Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and EU countries, and they will not even agree to take responsibility in the international solution of such a problem.

In the same way, the migration produced by the war they entered into in Afghanistan, for one reason or another, is an event caused by Russia in its first stage and by the USA in its last. Yet while this problem has been occupying Pakistan for years, neither Russia nor the USA takes any interest in solving it.

Let us set aside the massacres and deaths caused by the occupation that the USA and Britain undertook in Iraq; hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted from their homes from there too. The problems of these people affected not the occupiers but, in the first degree, again Turkey and EU countries. We see neither the USA nor Britain dealing with the problems of the people forced to migrate from Iraq.

While the operations that Saudi Arabia and BAE are carrying out in Yemen make the country unlivable for Yemenis, hundreds of thousands of people are being forced to leave their country from there too, and this does not concern these two countries at all. Of course, another party responsible for the war in Yemen, Iran, which sees the country as an area for the spread of its own influence, has likewise remained utterly indifferent to the refugee problem, which is a fact.

A serious number of political refugees has arisen because of the bloody coup in Egypt and the despotism established after it. Although SA and BAE, which supported this coup, clearly have a responsibility arising from this, they do not even acknowledge the existence of this problem.

To this list you may also add Israel, which caused the Palestinian migration; Russia, SA, BAE and France, which by supporting the crimes of the putschist Haftar in Libya caused waves of migration in the country; Myanmar, which caused the Arakan migration; and India, which caused the Kashmir migration.

Looking at this picture as a whole, there are countries in the world that make people migrate through their shows of force and expansionist policies, and there are also countries that try, or have to try, to cope with the humanitarian problems this migration produces. What is interesting is that these countries are generally separated from one another without meddling in each other's affairs. This too is an international distribution in the world.

Yet the radical solution to the problem of involuntary migration and refugees is possible only if some countries give up their unjust policies of expansion. The policies that cause migration have no sanctions, and moreover those who cause people to migrate are richer and more powerful than the other countries.

Once they accept the existence of the problem, they are also more capable of solving it. But in order for them to accept it, a strong bloc that has reached this awareness must first form in front of them, one that will make them feel its cost and make them pay for it.