We must look at Turkey and the world from Gaziantep too

For those who incite people to a racism that has never in any period been compatible with the spirit of the Turkish people, to cheap heroism against the weak and helpless, times of economic hardship provide the most favorable murky weather. By presenting the asylum seeker as the cause of all economic hardship, they stir up broad unemployed or distressed segments. Yet to see that asylum seekers are neither directly nor indirectly the cause of any hardship being experienced, looking at places where the economy, industry and employment are comparatively far better gives a very different idea.

Gaziantep, for example, forms a very privileged, interesting model in Turkey in terms of industry, production and exports. It is a place where the actual unemployment rate is almost near zero. It is a city of ours that alone made 10 billion dollars in exports in 2021. Its exports increase day by day, and its share in the exports of quality industrial products likewise increases more every day. There are 470 thousand Syrians in this city, and it is understood that although all of them take part in employment in one way or another, they do not cause others' unemployment within the city.

Gaziantep, both for its industrial production and the diligence and productivity of its people, and also for its own particular ways of coping with social problems, has always seemed to me a place that revives hope and broadens horizons. In times when pessimism prevails, it helps to look at Turkey from Gaziantep too.

Yesterday I was in Gaziantep for the "Common Future Consultation Meeting" organized by the Metropolitan Municipality and the Bülbülzade Foundation. Gaziantep's industrial production, which alone meets five percent of Turkey's exports, develops further every day. Although it receives plenty of migration from the other cities of the same region where unemployment is very high, it manages to include all of this migration in employment and integrate it with the city. Recently it has integrated the migration coming from Syria into society with the same mechanisms, and moreover has treated them as a serious opportunity for the development of the city's industrial potential.

ASİAD, the businessmen's association founded by Syrian businessmen, has 125 members, all of whom also provide employment, and they recorded a total of 500 million dollars in exports within 2021. Gaziantep industrialists say that thanks to this, Gaziantep's shoe sector is heading toward becoming the world's number one in recent years. Gaziantep was already very good in the shoe sector before, but with the contribution of Syrian businessmen or workers it has made a serious leap on a world scale.

The creation of environments in which Syrians who wish can return, on the lands Turkey has made safe with three major operations, is being followed with interest. In these regions, whose financing is expected to come from the Gulf countries, it is planned to establish cities where one can live and produce, beyond the logic of merely a safe living camp. This truly constitutes the most reasonable option by which Syrians can return to their country in humane conditions.

Even so, even if they return, these people, by the time they have spent in Gaziantep and the commercial and industrial production processes they took part in, become part of Turkey's human capital. According to one study, 39 percent of Syrian entrepreneurs currently doing business plan to set up another business in Turkey, while 76 percent say they plan to keep their businesses in Turkey even if they were to return after the war in Syria ends.

Meanwhile, a Syrian businessman who spoke at the Common Future consultation meeting said he received with astonishment the words of some Turkish politicians that "since Assad has issued an amnesty, the Syrians no longer have an excuse not to return to their homes." "Can truly livable conditions in Syria come about through the so-called amnesty of someone like Assad, who used chemical weapons against his own people and still continues to massacre his people at every opportunity? Had this many people committed a crime that would be forgiven or deserve punishment, that they were subjected to massacres? In the dungeons of the same Assad there are still tens of thousands of people who, though they have committed no crime, have been held for years without question under the severest torture. There can be no trust at all, but if that word of amnesty had even an atom of credibility, shouldn't those prisoners have been released first?"

That no one listens to their voices, although so much is said about them, is in itself a serious humanitarian problem. Everyone has a plan in their head about them, but they are seen as the lifeless object of this plan and nothing is asked of them. Unfortunately, in the turmoil they have been caught in, no serious projection can be made regarding these people's human capital potential, their thoughts, their plans for the future. Yet we are living through a process in which such dialogue meetings will become more and more important.

Gaziantep shows this model development, recorded in the field of industry, in the field of culture as well. It is a subject that could be the topic of a longer consideration, but the existence in the city of a total of 25 museums, 13 of them opened by the municipality, gives the city's identity a tremendous historical and cultural depth.

The "25 December Panorama Museum," built by the Metropolitan Municipality and opened most recently, in recent days, with a visit by our President, reflects the struggle for liberation that made Antep "Gazi," and in terms of its understanding of museology has also taken a serious step up. With its magnificent panoramic configuration, in an hour or two you take a time-tunnel journey into the years of occupation and liberation of Gaziantep, which provided tremendous morale and motivation to the National Struggle too, and you almost live that history.

How much we need such journeys into history, as is known; whatever we are living through, we are not free of that history.