Has the road of sound reason been blocked on the asylum-seeker issue?

The refugee question, it seems, will be one of the topics most scratched at on every occasion in the coming period. It looks very profitable politically. No one is concerned with what state the quality of the country and its level of human rights are reduced to by scratching at such a matter. The expectation that the state should send them away at once, without thinking about the consequences, can be voiced so easily.

The strange thing is that those who voice these words are generally also the ones who complain most about the state's growing authoritarianism. Those who naturally see themselves as the state's first-class citizens, and who would never want the state to stop treating them in that framework, can nevertheless demand that this same state treat the refugee differently, if necessary beyond the legal framework. The question does not occur to them: how can you guarantee how the state, whose unlawful or merciless treatment of others you yourself encourage, will treat you in the future? How will you expect law and good treatment from a state that you yourself expect to treat others outside the sphere of law? How can you hope that someone who has grown accustomed to showing his merciless and disrespectful face to others will be respectful and merciful to you?

Those who today complain that the state gives Syrians free health care do not see at all that this same state has, step by step since 2002, been giving them as citizens the best health care in the world, and at almost no cost at that. Moreover, this service is provided in the same way across the whole country, in every city, to people at every economic level. The performance it has shown in almost equalizing the difference between rich and poor in this respect is, on its own, a model that the AK Party governments can claim with pride. This model is of course not a randomly formed result; there is in it an attitude, a stance and a philosophy consciously adopted in favor of justice, equality and the social state. This service alone contains all the codes of how a state looks at human beings. This needs to be seen.

To feel disturbed that a portion of these services is also given to refugees, even though one receives services one would not have believed even if one had seen them in a dream before, is in itself a serious human problem.

Complaints such as "while we are left without medicine or treatment, free treatment and aid for the Syrians," or "while we wait in line for medicine and treatment, the Syrians come and take their medicine and treatment without queuing and leave," have nothing to do with reality. Just as the perception of "aid to Syrians while we are hungry" has nothing to do with reality. Neither is any citizen of the Republic of Türkiye deprived of treatment and medicine, nor do the Syrians really receive more privileged treatment than Turkish citizens, as is supposed. But these sentences are pronounced very easily.

And those who pronounce them this way are of course not the ones who really cannot get treatment or who are really going hungry. The existence of such people cannot be denied either, and there is no lack of units that hear and try to solve their problems separately. But an anger, a grudge is being incited, and politics is being made impossible with this language of anger, rancor and hatred. In the midst of that anger no one can explain anything to anyone, because no one is listening to anyone.

In an atmosphere where the refugee problem has been scratched to the point of bleeding, the matter of Afghan migrants suddenly came onto the agenda. Anti-refugee sentiment erupted still more noisily over some old footage belonging to some Afghans who had probably found their way into Türkiye through human smuggling.

It was said that Türkiye had agreed with the EU for 3 billion Euros on Afghan migrants and that this migration came about as a result of that, through an open-door policy. It is a claim that crumbles wherever you take hold of it, but no one is in a mood to listen to the facts of the matter. We have grown hoarse saying that Türkiye has had no talks or agreement whatsoever with any European official about Afghan migrants. Moreover, it is not true that there is currently a larger influx of Afghan migrants than in the past. The migration administration also demonstrates it in numbers: the recorded influx of migrants lately is, numerically, in decline compared with past times, not a rise.

Unlike the Syrians, Afghan refugees are travelers of hope who, if they go back, do not have a dictator waiting to kill or imprison them. Of course, the separate sociological dimensions of global justice (or injustice) in this journey of hope between developed and undeveloped countries can be debated separately. But from Türkiye's standpoint they are at least different from the Syrians.

Are many people not, unable to restrain themselves, saying that the Afghan refugees came as if in collusion with the Turkish state and as a result of the Taliban's expansion policy? If they are so deep in the matter that we cannot say they know neither the Taliban nor Türkiye, why are they doing this? Let us at least not hold back from repeating that the Taliban is not, like Che Guevara, after exporting revolution, but a structure that, with a thoroughly traditional mentality, has confined itself to the aim of merely liberating its own country from occupation. Moreover, the migrants who come have nothing, near or far, to do with the Taliban mentality anyway. Anyone close to the Taliban considers leaving his country to set out on a journey of hope to be treason against his homeland. Perhaps that is why it manages to prevail over everyone in Afghanistan. Because everyone else's resistance goes only so far. It continues its resistance to the very end, and neither NATO nor the USA nor anyone else can stand before it.

Meanwhile, to those who both complain about Afghan or Syrian migration and ask what business Türkiye has in Afghanistan or Syria, let us give a hint they can think over when they calm down a bit. To stop migration, sometimes you need to operate inside that country. Türkiye was able to fully stop the influx of refugees from Syria only with the safe zones it created through its operations in Syria, and even opened, in a real sense and without coercion, the way back for a certain number of refugees.

The same holds for Afghanistan, though of course by another route. Türkiye will stand in solidarity with its brothers in the country's reconstruction in Afghanistan, so that the country's production of migration can be prevented at its source.