The world in the Syria test

The Assad regime today possesses none of the conditions of legitimacy that a state must have. If we accept the definition of the state as the power that holds the monopoly on the use of legitimate violence, in Syria at present there is an environment in which whoever takes up arms can use violence. The Assad regime is now only one of these forces.

If the legitimacy of the state is the consent of its people, nearly more than half of the Syrian people have been forced to leave their homeland to flee Assad's tyranny. The state's most important function is to protect the lives, honor, minds and property of its people, yet in Syria the greatest threat to the life, honor, chastity and mind of the people is Assad himself. There is no limit or count to the aggression and savagery he has shown against his own people. The number of people killed in his war against his own people, which has continued for three years, has exceeded 200 thousand.

The number of people who have been forced to flee from Syria to Turkey alone is approaching one million. In Lebanon and Jordan there are also at least 2.5 million Syrian refugees, so when others are counted as well, at least 4 million of the country's people have now been forced to flee abroad.

When refugees flee abroad, the first thing they take with them is the legitimacy of their state. The presence of this many refugees from Syria, whose population was only 22 million to begin with, is already the best indicator that there is no longer a legitimate government in the country. Despite the presence of this many refugees, to view the matter any longer as nothing more than a struggle between Assad and other equal parties means nothing other than conscienceless complicity in this tyranny.

The world at first greeted these migrations, each of which is a separate drama, with great displays of sensitivity. Over time, however, as both the numbers grew and the duration lengthened, it began to grow accustomed to what was happening. Events that, perceived one by one, could each provoke a complete uprising of conscience stop appealing to any human feeling once they reach large figures.

Of course, this is only the psychological dimension of whether sensitivity forms or not. Unfortunately, the matter has a much closer relation with the hypocrisy the world has displayed in looking at the Syrian question, and with heedlessness and betrayal in a difficult trial.

The world is of course going through a great trial in this process, and this trial reveals everyone's caliber. Unfortunately, the Syrians who are brutally killed every day are of no concern to the world. The sensitivity shown on the matter is far, far behind the interest displayed these days in Turkey toward the Gezi protests. It is hard to say that the drama experienced by the Syrian guests in Turkey, whose number is also approaching one million, receives in the media the attention it deserves.

The messages we received during the announcements of the workshop titled "The World in the Syrian Trial," which we have been holding for three days in Şanlıurfa as the AK Parti Foreign Relations Department, show what kind of Gezi some people's humanity has gone on. The messages of the maddened ones saying "come to Turkey's agenda, come to Gezi" truly astonish one about the level to which a person can sink.

We are not even inviting the interest of those who set out to set all of Istanbul ablaze together with its trees for the sake of one tree to take an interest in the drama of the people who are dying, being killed in Syria, and forced to take refuge in Turkey in desperation. Let us say let them see to whatever state they are in, but what of their despotism in imposing their own perverse agenda on all of Turkey and the world? Never mind their accusing the Prime Minister of dictatorship; in fact this accusatory language reflects their own inner world, the inhuman despotism in that world. Their real role models in their inner world are Assad and Sisi, and their anger at Erdoğan comes from this spiritual mismatch.

From the fetishistic interest shown toward Gezi, no advanced democratic or liberating message whatsoever emerges, either for the people of Turkey or for the world.

Whereas Turkey under Erdoğan's leadership is perhaps the only country that has come out of the Syrian trial successfully. It does not even call the Syrians in the container cities refugees but guests, and by trying to host them in the best way it salvages the humanity's bottomed-out honor.

The affection and enthusiasm of the Syrians in the container city in Harran, which we visited at the end of the workshop, for Prime Minister Erdoğan and Turkey are, in a word, worth seeing. Both the quality of the camps and the appreciative attitude of those staying there show how so much bottomed-out humanity can rise to the highest levels at the same time. One witnesses the lowest levels humanity can fall to and the highest levels it can rise to in such times.

Exactly at such a moment, I thought about the meaning of these camps, which salvage the honor of humanity, suddenly coming onto the agenda with a prostitution report. What a great injustice. Where there are 1 million refugees, anything can happen. Even if they were not refugees, in a city of 1 million every kind of flaw, crime and incident occurs. If overshadowing the excellent environment Turkey has provided for the Syrian guests with such a report does not aim to acquit the consciences of certain people blackened by that insensitivity, what is its relevance?