Tens, hundreds or thousands of people have fled the Syrian city of Jisr Al-Shughur to Hatay (the Turkish name for the Province of Alexandretta, which until the recent past had been considered to have been usurped). On Sunday, one of those displaced Syrians sits at the entrance of the refugee tent set up for them by the Turkish Red Crescent only a few hundred meters from their homeland. He sees a Turkish citizen who lives in the village outside of which the camp is located going to a magical place, the polling station where is decided who will rule Turkey in the coming years. The Syrian refugee has fled his village. It does not matter much whether he fled as a result of fear from “fanatic armed gangs” wreaking havoc among citizens, or from the convoy of tanks and Special Forces that will bomb the area. He fled from death. The Turkish citizen is going to the polling station in a climate of reassurance, trust and calm. He voted for those he sees fit to rule his country. And he chose in complete freedom between different and opposing ideas and between competing personalities, some of them in power and some in the opposition. And he fully trusts that his vote in the ballot box will have its impact without fraud or falsification. The Syrian refugee, having fled from Jisr Al-Shughur to Hatay, wonders why the Turkish citizen was able to fully exercise his political right without being compelled or terrorized, while, when he thought of exercising such a right, “armed gangs” and convoys of tanks appeared and the threat of civil strife emerged. The Syrian refugee knows that the inhabitants of Hatay had been Syrian before the province was usurped, and that most of them are of Syrian descent and have relatives in Syria with whom they share much of their roots. They are, on both sides of the border, of a nearly equal level of social, cultural and economic development. Why can the inhabitants of Hatay today choose who will manage the affair of their country, and in fact have all capabilities placed at their disposal so that they may choose? Why must the inhabitants of Jisr Al-Shughur flee their country when they demand to have the same right to choose? The inhabitants of Hatay lived for decades without having the right to choose under the military junta that used to choose one of its members to rule the country, through violence, oppression and blood. Today, on the other hand, the right to choose has become a fundamental right no one can deny, since political pluralism is mandated by the constitution. Certainly Syrian refugees have realized that this is what distinguishes Hatay, where citizens can express themselves freely and confidently, from Jisr Al-Shughur, where demanding freedom such as this draws forth all of this violence – violence similar to that which Turkey experienced under the military junta. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan may have sought, for the necessities of his electoral campaign, to take advantage of popular feelings in Turkey. He thus began directing public criticism at the Syrian regime and exhorting it to reform. And he perhaps wants to take as much advantage as possible of this in order to ensure for his party two-thirds of the seats in the next parliament in order to introduce constitutional amendments that would permanently close the chapter of military rule. Yet for some in Damascus to consider that the motive of the leader of Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP – Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) is that of seeking to restore the glory of the Ottoman Empire, means not seizing the meaning of Syrian citizens being refugees among Turks who are today going to the ballot boxes, as takes place in the Western countries most established in the exercise of pluralistic democracy. In fact, such citizens will have the feeling that modern Turkey is living in its age, while they are still being subjected to practices that date back to the Ottoman Period, which ended about a century ago.
