Noble Turkey

"DAESH (As Arab countries refer to ISIS) is a terrorist organization, which is against our national interests. We are hosting more than 1.6-million refugees and we have spent $5-billion U.S. to do it. Some 220,000 of them are in 22 camps, but our pace of response to build the camps isn't keeping up and we haven't received that much international response so far. We've received less than $250-million in the last four years from international contacts, which is nothing."
"It's really close to the border [Aleppo]. If it falls, it will make for a much more difficult situation. They say there are two to three million people who live in and around the city. To save their lives, the destination is north; it's Turkey."
Turkish Ambassador to Canada Selcuk Unal

/Ahmed Deeb/Al Jazeera

'We assist the Syrians to enter Turkey and give them help as much as we can,' a Turkish policeman said.

According to the Ambassador, Turkey also aids refugees in Syrian camps, providing humanitarian assistance at the Turkey-Syria border. But Turkey is in urgent need, he stresses, of humanitarian aid from others and for other countries to agree to take some of the Syrian refugees for resettlement. "We have told the Canadian authorities that we welcome what they have done so far. We are asking for more bilateral aid and more resettlement", he said in an interview.

He plans as well, said the new ambassador to Canada in his first posting abroad, to work with the Turkish community within Canada, about 650,000 in number. His intention is to reconnect with the diaspora, to increase relations with these expatriates and the country from whence they came. To aid in his mission his embassy is preparing to install two new consulates to augment the Toronto consulate; to open one in Vancouver and another in Montreal.

He was asked during the interview why it is that Turkey has the reputation of being the worst country in the world for journalists, arrested and imprisoned, stifling freedom of speech and the news media. Quite simply, Turkey is misunderstood, and the international group of journalists which has slammed Turkey's record is completely off base. Jailed journalists in Turkey are in jail not because of their profession but for other "activities".

Those fall under a range of categories as for example: "forgery, unauthorized possession of explosives, throwing Molotov cocktails, homicide with a gun, injury with a gun, bomb attacks against police stations, bank robbery", along with a host of other perfectly good reasons why a democratic country must stifle the work of journalists who run the risk of incarceration for criticizing the human rights record of an extremist Islamist state.

But, as he attests on his honour, some of the journalists detained don't even have press cards. But they do, from the amazing list of activities above, engage in some surprising action. None of those arrested has been prosecuted "on account of journalism activities, expressing thoughts and opinions", so we and the rest of the international community stand corrected. And someone should really do something about the incorrect listing of Turkey as a threat to free speech and journalistic integrity.

Perhaps the interviewer should have mentioned that there is a general impression, supported by reality, that Turkey has encouraged fanatical Sunni jihadists to enter Syria from Turkey to flail against the atrocities inflicted against Sunni Syrians by the Shiite regime. Question as well why it is that a large, well-funded and mechanized military such as Turkey's hasn't formed an alliance with other Middle East countries of similar persuasion to halt the atrocities leading to mass migration of refugees?

And why it is that refugees, if the Middle East refuses to act as policeman in their own bailiwick, are not absorbed by their neighbours, where their culture, heritage and religion is matched by unwelcoming Arab nations. And why it is, if Turkey is so pressed for financial assistance to accommodate the influx of refugees, that its oil-rich neighbours like Saudi Arabia and Qatar to name a few, haven't released funds for that purpose?