What kind of bond is there between Kılıçdaroğlu and Assad?

Ignorance is something that can be taught. Through education, through indoctrination, ignorant values and beliefs are transmitted to other people. Although it seems very paradoxical, education does not always instill positive values; sometimes it works by transmitting the ignorant assumptions that exist in society to people and to generations. That is why the feeling that "education does not remove ignorance; on the contrary, it sometimes reinforces it even more" arises from time to time. In some cases, the detection of certain racist, discriminatory, selfish, ethnocentric and even anti-democratic attitudes and values alongside a rise in the level of education seems like a paradox, but it is not. Those who think that education confers a privilege on a person also begin to adopt, through education, the emotional attitudes of seeing themselves as superior to other people, and the education they receive takes them even further, miles further, from wisdom.

Still, when it comes to spreading negative values, politicians bear greater responsibilities. Racism is the most ignorant attitude of humanity. Imagining or claiming superiority by comparing oneself with others, if it remained a kind of individual ignorance, would be relatively easy to guard against. But when a politician turns it into a political discourse, it takes on an extremely dangerous form.

Kılıçdaroğlu's so-called "social democratic" party should actually be providing him with a significant philosophical-intellectual equipment against racism. We say should, because the greatest claim of social democratic parties in the world is that they are against racism. Indeed, producing politics that defend refugees against anti-refugee discourses everywhere is also an essential mission of social democratic parties.

But in Türkiye, unfortunately, Kılıçdaroğlu has turned his party into a center that produces racist discourse and attitudes over refugees. He promises to solve the Syrian migrant problem by sending the Syrians to their countries. He is not even aware that this promise ultimately serves an enmity toward Syrians, a racism.

Of course we cannot expect someone who has fallen into an ignorance like racism to know where he fell from. Yes, an anti-refugee discourse, even if it comes out with the claim that it will solve the refugee problem in another way, serves a discourse of enmity toward Syrians and gets you to find yourself at the bottom of the pit of racism.

If you ask about what he says regarding Syrian refugees, it has nothing to do with racism. He is only saying that he will fix the situation in Syria so that the Syrians can return to their homes comfortably, and that once he fixes it there will be no problem left for the Syrians here to return to their homes. Fine, but how can Kılıçdaroğlu persuade the murderer Assad to make a change that would make all of the 12-14 million people the Syrian regime has driven out of the country trust this regime? What kind of self-confidence is this. Is there some very special hierarchical relationship between them and Assad that nobody knows about?

If there is, let him not wait to come to power, let him get Assad to release the hundreds of thousands of unregistered, unaccounted-for innocent people he is currently keeping under constant, systematic torture in his prisons.

Does Assad's continuing his current oppression depend on a change of political power in Türkiye? Why do all of the 12 million displaced Syrians not take refuge in Türkiye, but some in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Germany and other parts of Europe, or inside Syria in regions outside the control of the regime, under the control of the USA or Türkiye?

Kılıçdaroğlu is either very detached from the realm of reality, or he is calculating to harvest votes by deliberately distorting facts and inciting society. He thus sinks into the muddiest place to harvest votes: he feeds racism by inciting anti-refugee sentiment.

In fact, Türkiye had been stating the solution to stop the flow of refugees from the beginning, and when no one listened, it actually stepped in and applied its solution. The solution is either the departure of Assad, who has completely lost the trust of the Syrian people and produces no feeling in people other than fear and terror, or, if this cannot be done, the creation of a safe zone inside Syria for those fleeing his death machine. Had this been done earlier, there would not have been such an influx of migrants from Syria either to Türkiye or to Europe. From the moment Türkiye began to put it partly into practice after 2016 through the Euphrates Shield, Olive Branch and Peace Spring operations, it has kept in Syria at least 6 million more Syrians who would have forced the door to migration.

Türkiye's solution to the refugee problem has already been put into practice in the form of stopping the waves of refugees. But there is no conscience that will agree to send refugees back to a place where, when they return to their countries, nothing but death awaits them. The consciences of those who say this, who pursue its politics, who produce its discourse, have evidently dried up.

In the report published this year on 8 March, International Women's Day, by the Organization for Human Rights for Syria, it is recorded that, as determined as of that day, nearly 10 thousand women in Syrian dungeons are held as hostages merely on the grounds that a relative of theirs is an opponent and wanted. Aside from the tortures these women have been particularly subjected to, there are countless reports about abuses that make one ashamed of one's humanity.

At present there are hundreds of thousands of people who have entered Syrian dungeons and from whom no news has been or can be received. Those who want to guess what may have happened to those who entered can recall the archive of 55 thousand photographs of 11 thousand detainees killed under torture, brought out 6 years ago by a regime soldier with the code name "Caesar." Can you imagine what kind of torture 11 thousand people, whose corpses were left skin and bone, went through before being sent on this journey of death? Moreover, these are only the massacres of detainees whose photographs happened to leak out up to 2016. There are hundreds of thousands of people from whom no news was heard after being taken into custody, and their stories are the nightmare of the individual lives of each of the millions of people who fled Syria, as a direct life experience. Now Kılıçdaroğlu, with his rhetoric, hopes for political profit from reviving this nightmare.