“I would surrender my crown and surrender my throne but I would never surrender those seeking asylum in my state,'' said Ottoman emperor Sultan Abdul Mejid, who ruled between 1839 to 1861. This statement was a part of a photographic exhibition in Ottawa, called Safe Harbour Turkey, Restoring Hope, which told the story of Turkey extending asylum, through the ages, to millions facing persecution. The exhibition included Professor Albert Einstein's letter in September 1933 to Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk requesting asylum for 40 Jewish professors and doctors from Germany after the Nazis enacted a law forcibly retiring officials who were not Aryan. Ataturk agreed, and granted asylum to many more.
The exhibition was shown in Washington, New York and Ottawa. The exhibition did not claim that all those seeking shelter in Turkey found life easy. It merely recorded that Turkey had traditionally welcomed those fearing danger, including Jews from Spain, Portugal, Italy and Sicily and, more recently, those facing death from the Nazis.
In addition to admitting Jews who reached Turkey, Turkish diplomats such as Necdet Kent, Namil Kemal Yolga, Selahattin Ulkumen and Behic Erkin saved Jews by giving them Turkish visas. Historians say that 15,000 to 100,000 Jews may have been saved in this manner.
Inaugurating the exhibition at the University of Ottawa, Turkish Ambassador Selcuk Unal stated that through the ages Turks had accepted Jews, Crimean Tatars, Poles, Hungarians, Russians, White Russians, Estonians, Bulgarian Turks, Afghans, Bosnians, Kosovars, Macedonians, Iraqi Kurds and now Syrians.
Turkey hosts more than 1.6 million Syrian refugees and provides them food, shelter, healthcare and safety.
Ambassador Unal described the situation as a humanitarian crisis and said that 10 million people are in “desperate” need of assistance in Syria while Syrians in Turkey number 10 times more than those seeking refuge in all of Europe and North America. He said that Turkey is also providing millions of dollars in humanitarian aid to displaced Syrians near the border.
Unal told the Ottawa Citizen that Turkey had spent $5 billion to help the refugees while it has received less than $250 million from its international partners.” He said other countries should offer more humanitarian aid and accept more refugees to resettle.
Canada had said it would take 1,300 refugees in 2014. It just announced that it will accept another 10,000 Syrian refugees over three years and another 3,000 Iraqis this year.
Furio De Angelis, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees representative in Canada, lauded Turkey for its “enormous generosity for many decades and even centuries” to help refugees, but added that currently conflicts have forced more people from their homes worldwide than at any time in 20 years. “More than 51 million are displaced today around the world. If these people were in one country, this would be the 26th (largest) in the world by population,” he stated.
Persecution and conflict are the main causes of displacement, he said. “In 2012, every single day, some 23,000 people worldwide were forced from their homes by violence or war. In 2013, 32,000.”
De Angelis asserted that the Syrian conflict was “one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent history, with more than nine million displaced, of whom 3.2 million are refugees and 6.4 million are internally displaced persons.” He stated that the UNHCR is urging the international community to realize that this burden “is far too heavy to be borne by only the neighboring countries, and to put in place more robust measures of sharing this burden, including increased financial assistance and enhanced programs of resettlement or other forms of humanitarian admission.”
So far Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq have taken in 97 percent of Syria's refugees. The UNHCR has asked countries to help settle more than 100,000 Syrian refugees in the next two years. Twenty-six countries have agreed to help.
In addition to the crisis in Syria and Iraq, he continued, new conflicts in the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Ukraine and other places have caused “terrible human suffering and massive displacement.” He said that the UNHCR is also trying to manage past emergencies in Cote d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya and Yemen and it also has to support millions of refugees in protracted situations such as Afghanistan and Somalia.
He warned that the UNHCR is getting “closer to the limits of how much we can do, and we are clearly no longer able to do enough.” He said: “Everything we do depends on the support we receive from you, our partners: host countries and communities; donors; and operational partners.”
In the past Canada was generous both in accepting refugees to Canada and in providing economic help to those overseas. But with a conservative government, and budget deficits, it had moved away from its past moral leadership. With the latest announcements, however, it is showing that it is maintaining its traditions, though perhaps not with the enthusiasm that it displayed in the past.
— Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan is a retired Canadian journalist, civil servant and refugee judge.
