Rodos-Marmaris – Sosyalist Enternasyonal Göç Komitesi Toplantısı (İng.)

CHP Genel Başkan Yardımcısı Sn. Onur Öymen’in Marmaris’teki Socialist Enternasyonal Toplantısında Yaptığı Konuşma
25 Ekim 2006

Öymen: First of all I would like to thank to our Greek friends for their excellent hospitality.
I would also tell you that this meeting is in essence unique or one of the very rare meetings of Socialist International since it’s organized in two friendly countries at the same time. So I would like to thank the Turkish and Greek colleagues who generated this idea months ago. I would extend our thanks to Secretary General Luis Ayala and his colleagues for the excellent organization, professional organization of the meeting and for the contributions they’ve made so far.
What we remember from yesterday’s meeting? There were extremely interesting contributions starting with George Papandreou’s statement, Deniz Baykal’s statement and the contributions of other colleagues, technical experts. What I remember from all what has been said was that migrants are human beings. This means that they have to be treated as human beings. How can we think them as human beings? It requires a very close cooperation among relevant states. It is a phenomenon that we cannot escape. As Mr. Baykal said yesterday if there are 191 million refugees all over the world, it’s a real social problem that we have to address very seriously. So our authorities should cooperate very closely to each other. For instance if we have to repatriate some illegal migrants their country of origin we have to treat them in a human way. We have to cooperate with the security authorities of the relevant countries, and we have to deliver them without harming their personal security and their well-beings.
Second, if we accept them in our countries, if we grant a permit to stay and to work we should be sure that they are treated equally with the rest of the population. We know by our own experience that sometimes the terrorists present themselves as innocent, political refugees. Sometimes they organize economic refugees and they present them as political refugees. So the result is that among the migrant population in Europe and in other countries we have a lot of unexpected violent people, terrorists, or innocent people economic migrants presented as political refugees. For instance, when I was ambassador in Germany, I remember that those economic refugees, after being registered and legalized in Germany, they were coming to us and asking a passport. We asked, how come you are refugees? How can you ask passport? They said we came as economic refugees we have nothing to do with politics, please give us a passport. We want to go home and visit our families. So we were giving 5 thousand passports a year to economic refugees that were presented as political refugees. So we have to be extremely careful in studying their case, and we should, by all means avoid giving them a political status in case we discover that they are terrorists or organized people.
So, as regards to education we have also serious problems not only for the Turks but also for the Greeks, for the Moroccans, for those who are coming from different countries to developed Western European Countries. As a matter of fact the lack of knowledge creates problems from the very beginning. In case they do not go to kindergartens in the beginning, they never start to the primary schools at the same level with the local children of that country. Then the result is that most of the time they were considered as if there were some mental problems in following the course. In Germany, for instance, 30 thousand Turkish children are going to “zonderschule.” Zonderschule are schools designed for children having mental problems. Very few of them have real mental problems, most of them are there because they do not have enough German language knowledge to follow the courses. But once they learn the German, then you see that they can follow the courses very easily.
So those are some elements of thought that I wanted to share with you in the field of education. In the field of politics we also have problems. In some European countries, migrants have the right to vote in the local elections, like in Holland, like Norway, like in England. In a number of European countries they have the right to vote in the local elections, in others they do not. So there is no unified European legislation on the political rights of migrants. In the same country, for instance, they are sometimes allowed to vote in the national elections at home, but other people, other nationalities are not allowed. For instance, if you are a Croatian citizen in Germany you can vote in Croatian elections; but if you are a Turkish citizen, you cannot vote in the Turkish elections unless you travel all the way Turkey during the election time. You see, those are the problems that we have to address. In Socialist International we believe that we have to work together to find out the real problem areas and make suggestions.
How come that unemployment among foreigner residents is more than the double of the countries of origin? I mean the local citizens. What is the problem? Why is it so? We have to focus on all these issues.
I believe that countries like Turkey and Greece, which are both emigration and immigration countries should cooperate more closely. We are extremely happy that we have excellent relations with PASOK. Our leaders had an excellent meeting yesterday after our Socialist International Committee meeting and we have a big advantage of having Luis Ayala as our Secretary General, who understands these matters very well. In case you need more concrete information we are ready to provide this information.
Thank you very much.