Adding insult to injury: Paying Turkey for a problem that she had a big hand in creating!




By Tocqueville*

The upcoming EU-Turkey summit regarding the Syrian refugee (decided long before the downing of a Russian bomber over Syria) risks adding insult to injury.

Everyone realizes by now that Turkey has been giving more support to ISIS and other Islamic fundamentalist-terrorist groups than all other countries combined. Thus her role in creating the Syrian refugee crisis has been paramount. No one leaves their home, unless he is forced to by far superior forces, and this is precisely what Turkey has been bringing to bear in the Syrian crisis by giving passage, medical care, arms, ammunition and other war materiel, to all who have been willing to fight the legal government of Syria, no matter how authoritarian this government was (the irony is that some of Turkey’s partners in this affair, e.g. Saudi Arabia are as authoritarian a regime as they come, so this comes down to a Sunni version of Islam obliterating any other version such as Shiiti-Alewite etc, to say nothing of sheer genocidal elimination of Christians from ancestral lands which they have inhabited for ca. 2 millenia).

When the new SYRIZA government in Greece unwisely thought that it would be showing its humanitarian face to the world by allowing a free flow of any refugees from anywhere (be they coming from war zones or from poverty-stricken places), Turkey got the opportunity it had been pressing for, after amassing over two million refugees, mostly from Syria, the latter as explained above of her own making. The western coast of Turkey became the place of a horrible slave trade (over two thousand Euros per head, thus the potential for billions of euros in the making, for passage to the nearby Greek island on the Easter Aegean Sea). Refugees seemed to be coming by all sorts of makeshift boats and conveniently so many of them would rupture and sink in mid-journey causing deaths of children and adults alike, betting on the humanitarian feelings of the Western public. It is impossible for any refugees to cross over 1000 km of a police state such as Turkey, without the collusion of refugee smugglers with the Turkish authorities (e.g. a few days ago when the French team from FRONTEX was visiting Turkey, miraculously all signs of this slave trade disappeared from the western coasts of Turkey and no refugees came over to the nearby Greek islands!).

If the European Union is willing to accept refugees from a war zone, it must make a few humanitarian and common sense principles plain to Turkey as well as anyone else trying to profit from human suffering:

  1. Refugees must be registered in Turkey, first and foremost, a police state that can record and prosecute whoever issues a defamatory statement for the country’s President on twitter or other social media!
  2. Turkey herself, as well as all other states wishing to get EU refugee benefits, should cease aiding and abetting in any manner or form ISIS as well as all other terrorist groups!
  3. The EU should add as a pre-condition, (besides all conditions set thus far by France and The Republic of Cyprus) to any discussion on future Turkish membership in the EU, a definite improvement on the matter of civil liberties and human rights as measured by the elimination of the deep state (i.e. stopping of all “disappearences” of political opponents of the government as well as their murder). Is it an accident that the head of the Diarbakir Bar Association was murdered yesterday as he was speaking in front of a camera? Or that two respected journalists of Jumhurriet that had revealed the linkage between the country’s secret services in huge supplies of war materiel to jihaddists in Syria? There are more journalists in jail in Turkey than in any other country in the world! The eminent professor Cengiz Aktar had noted over a month ago that if the EU does not concentrate on human rights of Turkish citizens in her dealings with Turkey over the Syrian refugee problem, pretty soon she will have plenty of Turkish citizens seeking political asylum from Erdogan’s Turkey. There are appeals from several human rights organizations from within and outside the country to the same effect.
  4. No country can afford to stand without defending her borders. Likewise the EU should declare her external borders inviolable (self-evident) and beef up border patrols both on her eastern and southern borders. The Southern and Eastern European EU states should have so demanded, if anything in order to stop this inhuman slave trade chain, of which ISIS is but a very important link. In fact, there can be no better answer to ISIS barbarous attacks in Paris than a demand that the slave trade exploiting refugees  under ISIS and Turkey’s auspices (they must be raking millions from the practice) stop.

Last, a friendly note to EU Council President Jean-Claude Junker: Turks habitually humiliate whomever they do not like, and flattery is no way to earn Turkish respect. Throughout their history Turks have only respected power1, a sad commentary on any efforts to improve human rights in that country (the murders of Hrandt Dink and so many other human rights advocates by young teenagers as operatives of the deep state, is a never ending theme in Turkey). Bargaining obligations from previous agreements is a never ending game for Turkey and the West has generally been gullible enough to exhibit a short memory where toughness was required.

After all, we are talking about literally millions of human lives here, brought to ruin by the destruction of their homeland in Syria, effected by ISIS with plenty of Turkish help, as so many American generals are now pointing out.

1Frank Weber,  The Evasive Neutral: Germany, Britain and the Quest for a Turkish Alliance in the Second World War. Pp. ix, 244. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979.

* Tocqueville is a citizen of Greece and a follower of what is best in the British, French and US liberal traditions.

Hellasjournal - Newsletter


%d bloggers like this: