News & Comment
Turkey Barters with Europe over the Lives of Muslim Refugees

News

On Tuesday, 8th March, it was announced that the European Union (EU) had reached an agreement with Turkey on a proposal to try to stem the flow of Syrian and other refugees into Europe. During the refugee crisis summit in Brussels, the Turkish Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu requested 6 billion Euros from European states as well as visa-free travel into Europe for Turkish nationals and acceleration of talks on its EU membership in exchange for Turkey taking stronger action to prevent refugees leaving its shores towards Europe as well as re-admitting thousands of refugees who had crossed the Aegean Sea to Greece. European states are currently tightening their borders to prevent a further influx of refugees into their countries. 14,000 desperate Syrian, Afghan, Iraqi and other Muslim men, women, children and babies having fled the horrors of war in their lands are now stranded at the closed Macedonia border in freezing temperatures and rains, with little food, and poor medical care and sanitation. The medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said European leaders had "lost track of reality".

Comment

Brussels has become a market place for states to trade off the rights of individuals who are amongst the most helpless and vulnerable people of the world. In their desperate rush to deport terrorized and traumatized refugees from their lands for the sake of political and national interests, European states have shown that they are more than willing to contravene their own international and European conventions and trample over their own ‘human rights’ laws which they claimed gave them moral superiority on the world arena. According to international and European law, the collective expulsion of refugees seeking asylum to a third country is illegal as it is a violation of the UN’s 1951 Convention on Refugees, the European Convention on Human Rights, and other international agreements.

Furthermore, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, stated that deportation could leave Syrian refugees unprotected and at risk of being sent back to a war-zone. One writer in The Guardian wrote, “Europe gives money but only cares about one thing: keeping refugees out.” Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel who once welcomed refugees to the country has shown that her good will has diminished in line with her plummeting poll ratings.

Meanwhile, the capitalist, nationalistic Turkish government is essentially using the desperate plight of refugees as a bargaining chip to advance its political ambitions in Europe. It seems that the heart-breaking scenes in Greece and Europe of Muslims with their young children sleeping out in the open air with little or no protection from the freezing elements of winter and drenched by the heavy rains, or the death of over 4000 people in the Mediterranean Sea, including women and children, from perilous journeys taken to escape their abysmal living conditions in Turkey in the hope of a better life, is not enough for Turkey’s politicians to return these refugees unconditionally to the country and provide them with proper sanctuary, basic rights, and a dignified life to prevent hundreds fleeing its shores every day. Rather, in the manner of true capitalist opportunism, it seeks political kick-backs from European states in return for doing what is a basic Islamic obligation of providing refuge to persecuted and oppressed Muslims.

This whole refugee crisis has exposed to the world the true ugly, inhumane face of democracy, secularism, capitalism, and nationalism which the systems of the West, Turkey and other states in the Muslim world are built upon. It has revealed the true nature of governments who talk the talk of human rights to justify invading, bombing, and colonising other lands but are more than willing to discard the rights of the oppressed for the sake of gaining political popularity amongst their electorate. It has highlighted systems that place populism over principles. It has demonstrated the destructive fall-out of nationalism which strips individuals of their humanity and clouds their eyes and hardens their hearts to human suffering. And it has shown that the ‘nation-state’ idea is a flawed, out-of-date concept that is unable to deal with modern-day problems, and the root cause of desperate refugees being callously shifted from one country to another or just left abandoned in between states for weeks, if not months, with no regard for the human suffering this causes.

The abysmal inhumane manner by which the refugee crisis has been handled reflects a world order that is in tatters. This is because it is a world order dominated by the capitalist secular system and its corrosive values which have demonstrated an utter disregard for the sanctity of human life and dignity and have proven incapable of solving this crisis as well as a plethora of other political, economic, and social problems afflicting the world. Under this current world-order, no state is willing to take responsibility for the safety and welfare of the persecuted and oppressed due to selfish political and economic interests. Surely all this emphasizes the urgent need for the birth of a new world-order dominated by a system which rejects the materialistic and nationalistic approach to handling human problems and that truly serves the needs of humanity in a purely altruistic, unconditional and uncompromising manner – setting the international standards for other states to aspire to.

This system is nothing other than the Khilafah "Caliphate" (Caliphate) that rules according to the Laws of The Creator (swt) Who alone is capable of defining a political model that truly cares for and serves the needs of human beings. It is a state which was known the world over for its generosity and humanitarianism; a state that opened its borders without limits to the oppressed – Muslim and non-Muslim – providing them protection, a good life and full rights of citizenship as Commanded by Allah (swt). It is therefore a system that is truly the need of these desperate times!

(وَمَآ أَرۡسَلۡنَـٰكَ إِلَّا رَحۡمَةً۬ لِّلۡعَـٰلَمِينَ)

“And We have not sent you (O Muhammad) except as a mercy to the world.” [Al-Anbiya: 107]

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Dr. Nazreen Nawaz
Director of the Women’s Section in the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir