Weren't these the people who wanted asylum seekers sent back?

On the subject of asylum seekers, the picture that "the issue is not an asylum seeker issue but something else" is becoming ever clearer. The matter increasingly displays all the signs of an operation against Turkey.

For 10 years Turkey has been pursuing a migration policy that is a source of pride and an example to the whole world. This policy has formed a reference that will be regarded as a model in the history of world migration policies, and moreover it has been carried out through a joint participation of the people and the state that is itself a model. At the same time, it has never had, and cannot have, a policy such as encouraging asylum seeking.

As the name implies, an asylum seeker comes to seek refuge in desperation, with his life being chased by conditions that tear him from his homeland, his home, his country, his loved ones, his atmosphere. That is why asylum is a human right, and the fact that there should be no debate about it whatsoever is essentially a matter of human decency. Turkey's superiority, with its people and its nation, is that on this basic human right it has displayed an attitude that puts a gap even between itself and other countries, especially Europe.

ASYLUM IS NOT REQUESTED, IT BEFALLS ONE

General principles have been set so that there should be no debate anywhere in the world about the attitude you display when it befalls you. Unfortunately, these basic principles are forgotten where populist politics has no moral limit before it, and ignorant attitudes and views are presented as normal views with the appetite of a populist lust, and even try to suppress other views. What is normal begins to be found strange, even to be accused.

Opening the door to asylum seekers is not a choice but meeting a disaster that has befallen one, but this disaster of course has a management.

From the outset, Turkey tried to manage this disaster in the best way without deviating from humanitarian principles. Of course, the best management of asylum is trying to correct the conditions that cause the seeking of asylum, thus preventing asylum at its source. Preventing at the source is not closing the border and abandoning the asylum seeker to the mercy of his murderers, of the dehumanized vile criminals. That would clearly be being a partner in the crimes against humanity that cause asylum seeking. Turkey's strategy of preventing asylum at its source is to improve the conditions that force people to flee the source country. When it became clear that this was not possible as long as the Assad regime, which turned Syria into hell, existed, Turkey made the proposal to the international community, particularly to the European countries suffering from migration and to NATO, to create safe zones inside Syria.

PREVENTING MIGRATION AND SENDING BACK: NOT LIKE THAT, LIKE THIS

When, despite all its insistence, this proposal was not accepted, it implemented its own solution itself, and by carrying out three military operations one after another, it made a wide area safe. Had it not carried out these operations, the migration that had been regularly increasing toward Turkey until then would have continued and would probably have doubled by today. Whereas now 6 million Syrians live in those regions, and moreover about five hundred thousand people have also gone back to these regions from Turkey. This is what a strategy of preventing migration or sending migrants back looks like. If the opposition campaigning against refugees had even the slightest sincerity about the goal of "sending the Syrians back," it would see and support the government's management of this migration.

Yet on the very day that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan mentioned, in a program announced precisely within this framework, the plan of sending 1 million Syrians "within a program and voluntarily" to the safe zones that had been created, unprecedented campaigns were launched by all the anti-asylum-seeker circles, led by Kılıçdaroğlu. Questions like these inevitably occur to those who do not know them: Weren't they the ones who wanted the asylum seekers sent back? What is this kind of opposition, with this intensity, to a plan and program that speaks of sending asylum seekers back?

KILIÇDAROĞLU'S ONLY INSTRUMENT OF SOLUTION: DRUM AND ZURNA

Kılıçdaroğlu speaks of all the asylum seekers being sent back with drum and zurna within two years once they come to power, but he cannot present any plan for it. The plan he presents goes no further than meeting with Assad. The idea of meeting with this murderer, whose hands hold the blood of so many of their relatives, only reopens the wounds of these people whose hearts are already burning, and brings to their minds nothing but a new massacre carried out in cooperation with him. And on top of that, with drum and zurna. How, after this, will these people receive the sound of drum and zurna they hear here and there?

That the only concrete things remembered in the great opposition leader's solution to the management of asylum seekers are only "sending back" and "drum and zurna" should be enough as a disgrace.

For one thing, his own Istanbul provincial chair, by warning him very accurately that "sending back" is not that easy, reminded him that all the policy he made was nothing but empty populism. What he says he will do is both practically impossible, and attempting such a thing blindly would amount to a crime against humanity no less than genocide.

CAN KAFTANCIOĞLU REMIND THE CHP OF THE LEFT'S MIGRANT POLITICS?

This crime against humanity could perhaps be committed with ease by the chairman of a party hoping to grab a share from them. It may be in his nature. One expects anything from agents of influence who stage heroic shows against the weak, against asylum seekers, against people who have already suffered the thousand slaps of fate and taken refuge with us. Using nationalism as a screen, they are in the greatest betrayal of this nation. They have not the slightest shame in serving up fabricated images of migrant flows that other countries put forward as an operation against Turkey. Asylum seekers may bring both contributions and burdens to this country, but these agents of influence bring only harm.

Canan Kaftancıoğlu is someone who represents the left vein within the CHP most strongly, and while all left, social democratic politics in the world are in principle migrant- and asylum-seeker-friendly, it can hardly be possible that she has not felt uneasy that her own party has been dragged after these fascist politics.

WHY DOES SENDING 1 MILLION SYRIANS BACK WORRY THE FASCISTS?

In the end, the matter of sending back 1 million Syrians announced by the esteemed President, we will go into the details as they become clear later, is the most feasible, most realistic and most humane plan possible. Although no one is sent by force, by creating entirely attractive conditions, people will go of their own will, and moreover without being expelled again from the place where they have been guests for ten years, without being humiliated, remaining friends of this country, remaining in relation with it.

What do you object to in this? The burden on the budget? Let us at least reassure you of your concern on that point as well: it will place no burden whatsoever on the budget; on the contrary, it will also make a contribution overall.