Afghan Migration and an Unmanaged Crisis

There is an influx of asylum seekers into our country, and neither the government nor the opposition is making solution-oriented statements about it. While the citizen in the street is meeting the issue with an emotional reaction, those who should take responsibility prefer to stay out of sight.

In place of politicians who produce no policy, some crowds that have made it their creed to act on cheap nationalist rhetoric are showing emotional, harsh, hurtful and exaggerated verbal or physical reactions to people (call them asylum seekers, migrants or refugees, as you like) who have left their homelands in a controlled or uncontrolled way and reached our land.

How did it come about that a society that never stops talking about Yunus’s humanism and Mevlana’s tolerance treats people who have taken refuge in its country (whatever the reason) with hate speech? Did we not love the created for the sake of the Creator? What became of our embracing spirit of “come, whoever you are, come again”? Were we not the nation that so loved to boast of Turkish hospitality and indulge in bombast? What has happened to us, why are we spewing hatred in the streets and on social media, making heaven and earth ring with slogans like “I don’t want refugees in my country, get out and go back to your country”?

If masses are subjected to so much pressure that they cannot escape the corner they have been pushed into, the resulting pressure leads to fractures and overflow. The asylum seekers’ requests for refuge and shelter, innocent in their own eyes, are seen by the local population as a suspicious and “dangerous” movement to be warded off as soon as possible. The state mechanism must get involved as soon as possible with a social policy that will balance the concerns and wishes of both sides. This intervention, of course, must not take a criminal form. It must take place within a reasonable, rational framework set out under the understanding of the social state, and within national and international migration law.

The government, which has in its recent past the example of 10 years of Syrian asylum seekers, is behaving as if it had no experience at all. Is this a conscious crisis management policy? Or the product of an indifference born of negligence?

The social problems sprouting day by day do not of course stem only from the attitudes of the refugees or only from those of our protesting citizens. The political administration that should bring this population under control is, so to speak, dodging the fight.

It is a fact that we have long had a problem of “failing to manage” the mobilisation of the masses. When it comes to bringing mass movements under control, we have so far been unable to create a harmonious and continuous policy between local administrators and the central government. This also stems partly from the fact that the legal and administrative legislation has not clearly drawn the limits of the action plan to be implemented. Of course, for the public, the regulatory side of the issue means nothing.

But there is also this: The citizen in the street has to pay the bill (whether or not aware of what is going on) for every weakness local or central administrators show in managing and controlling mass movements. Neither local nor central administrators have, or should have, the right to present the people with such a bill.