Turkey: Cradle of Refugees
A meme underscores an essential truth about Turkey
War has broken out in Gaza and its neighboring environs this week. There is worldwide outrage at the ferocity of the attacks by Hamas terrorists.
Throughout the summer here in Turkey, there has been a steady stream of reports on armed Israeli incursions into Gazan and West Bank cities, of illegal settlements, and of Jewish settlers behaving badly towards both Palestinians and Christian pilgrims. People are shocked, of course, by the bloodshed, but the retaliation was no surprise.
On day four of the conflict the above meme appeared on Twitter. It reveals a distinct truth about the nation of Turkey, a willingness to accept refugees that is unparalleled and that goes back centuries.
And while I don’t think that Turkey will be asked to take in Palestinian refugees from Gaza, I am saddened by the tepid response of Egypt to the expected wave of refugees. And while I’m at it, let’s point out the Greek navy’s policy of pushing migrant ships into Turkish waters and pray that they never intentionally sink another migrant ship again.
Refugees continue to pour into Turkey from Afghanistan, and many Syrian refugees remain from the ongoing civil war in that country. Turkey hosts 3.6 million Syrians, or roughtly 1,000 times as many as Germany, which saw a surge in rightwing populism after an influx of migrants in 2015.
This has been a theme of the nation for more than 200 years. Beginning in 1804, which featured a Serbian revolt, the Ottoman Empire faced reversals on many fronts: aggression from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the west and the Russian Empire in the north. It also faced nationalist revolts in Greece and the Balkans and later — with the instigation of foreign powers — in Armenia and Arabia.
With each stunning reversal on the battlefield, Muslim residents of those lands faced expulsion or ethnic cleansing. And those residents ventured to Ottoman lands. From Crimea, from Bulgaria, from Bosnia and Albania they came. From Circassia and Crimea. From Greece.
And that’s not including the thousands of Jews who moved to Ottoman lands in the middle ages after their expulsion from Spain. The sultan at the time, Beyazid II, said of the refugees: “He who has impoverished his country has enriched mine.” There remains a Jewish community in Izmir to this very day which traces its roots back to Spain and whose members still speak a form of Spanish.
The 19th century was a century of migration for America, which called itself the “mother of exiles,” by the end. But Turkey is the modern mother of exiles. No other country is close.
