They trusted Europe and froze to death

The half-naked, frozen bodies scattered here and there along the Greek border at İpsala are like make-up paint running down Europe's face. However you look at it, it is a situation that should make humanity ashamed, and even more, it seems a harbinger of greater disasters that will befall, in the world to come, those who watch these scenes with indifference.

Because seeking asylum is a calamity that can befall any human being. In fact, everyone who watches these scenes should try to imagine themselves in the place of those helpless corpses that have surrendered their souls.

Today no one can be sure that they will not fall into this situation tomorrow; the world has a thousand and one conditions. There are earthquakes, floods, wars, nuclear accidents, trade wars, tyranny, and so on and on. There is no guarantee of what the potential for natural or social disasters has written into a person's future. The basic fact that establishes refugee law is that anyone can become a refugee one day. No one is fully safe against becoming a refugee someday, among the thousand and one possible states of the world. Therefore the right to asylum is a universal right, and failing to respect it constitutes a crime against humanity.

The interesting thing is that those who do not admit refugees into their own homes themselves went through a very heavy experience of seeking refuge, yesterday, on the lands where they feel so secure today and the absolute owners of the property. Today these same people can be extremely jealous, extremely stingy, extremely insensitive toward other refugees taking shelter in the very harbor where their own ancestors took shelter. The past is evidently forgotten very quickly. Human memory is afflicted with forgetfulness. In the Second World War alone, what Europe went through contains more death, more slaughter, more suffering than what all of humanity throughout history has experienced. In this great war, in which nearly 50 million people died in total, most of the survivors too were uprooted from their homes and homelands. Systematic genocide was recorded for the first time in the annals of human history.

Truly, Europe also drew some lessons from what it lived through. Certain criteria were developed so that what happened in Europe would never happen again, not only in Europe but, if possible, anywhere in the world. Lest they be forgotten, even institutional measures were taken to apply these criteria. But all that memory is forgotten in the face of a few waves of refugees, and those measures are reduced to dust. The measures taken so that "genocide never happens again" were limited to the aim that "genocide never again be committed against the Jews alone." Europe remained blind and deaf to the massacres and "concentration camp" practices of the Zionists, who are protected by these measures, against the Palestinians. Thus it showed a complete inability to raise the sensitivity it displays because of what it lived through to a universal level.

Even so, the EU Criteria drawn from these bitter experiences are important criteria that nominally cannot be rejected. That they do not abide by them even though they wrote them for themselves is a separate fault, but it does not require rejecting those criteria. The asylum seekers pushed to their deaths at the Greek border push to their deaths both Europe's own principles and criteria and its whole claim to stand on the side of humanity.

Unfortunately, these deaths did not occur merely because the doors were not opened to them, because they were left outside to fend for themselves. That is, it is not a simple matter of insensitivity either. Contact was made with the asylum seekers, their clothes were taken off them, and they were sent to freeze to death in that cold. Indeed, we also frequently hear of cases in the Mediterranean in which asylum seekers' boats are punctured and they are condemned to drown in the cold waters together with their women and children.

The issue of asylum seekers pressing against the doors of developed countries for one reason or another has, in essence, been a problem ever since the world was founded. There has always been a flow of people from troubled regions to relatively untroubled regions, from poor regions to rich regions, from backward lands to developed lands. How this flow is received reveals the quality of a civilization.

The waves of people pressing against Europe's borders today are again waves caused by crises for which European countries themselves bear primary responsibility at the source. Of course it cannot escape its responsibility by closing its borders to that flow of people. It owes its comfort and its development in large part to its policies in those crisis regions that are the source of migration. Just as it cannot escape paying this debt, every tragedy that occurs because of the obstacles it has laid along the migration routes is written into Europe's ledger of sins.

Türkiye, although it has no role or responsibility in the formation of these crises, has so far shown a more humane approach toward asylum seekers than all European countries combined. It has shown an openness that pushed its own strength and its capacity to receive asylum seekers to the limit, but this is not a burden that one country alone can bear. It is inevitable that Europe remember its historical responsibility in this matter and share this burden.

Unfortunately, even in Türkiye there are those who, faced with the human responsibility that asylum seekers inevitably remind us of, cling to a thousand and one nonsensical arguments and point the way out of humanity. While ignorantly instilling racism in people along this path, with dangerous provocations against asylum seekers they incite a racism that has never in any age been compatible with the spirit of the Turkish people, and a cheap heroism against weak and helpless people. By presenting the asylum seeker as the cause of all economic hardships, they provoke broad unemployed or struggling segments. The burning to death of three asylum seekers in İzmir, or the attempted lynchings at asylum seekers' homes in Ankara, are a serious warning of what such incitement can lead to.

Yet the asylum seekers are not the direct or indirect cause of any of the difficulties these people are experiencing. But the propaganda about this is very bewitching, very seductive, and just as dangerous.

As a form of jahiliyya, many are drawn to the earliest path out of humanity. And the callers (dā'īs) who summon people to this path have set their hearts on the most immoral means of gain there can be in politics.