Turkey has an enduring tradition of humanitarian aid emanating from its history and culture. Helping countries in difficult times due to natural disasters, war, poverty and social clashes is considered as a humanitarian duty and an important element in achieving stable international community. Today, Turkey helps those in need all over the world in many different countries regardless of their race, religion or gender.

As a part of its entrepreneurial and humanitarian foreign policy, Turkey’s humanitarian assistance has been diversified and significantly increased in recent years. In 2017, according to the Global Humanitarian Assistance Report, Turkey was the biggest donor country worldwide with its $8 billion humanitarian assistance.

Turkey also ranks first when the ratio of official humanitarian assistance to national income is taken into consideration, which is 0.85 per cent. In this respect, Turkey well deserves the title of ‘most generous country in the world’.

Furthermore, Turkey has the largest refugee population in the world. We have been pursuing an ‘open door policy’ for Syrians fleeing from violence in their country within the framework of obligations stemming from international humanitarian law.

We have been strictly implementing the principle of non-refoulement and continue to provide temporary protection to Syrians, without discrimination and in accordance with the international law. The total number of Syrians in Turkey surpassed 3.5 million this year.

In addition to the humanitarian assistance efforts of the government and Turkish Red Crescent Society, particularly in Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Mozambique, Colombia, Myanmar, Palestine, Libya, Yemen and Syria, the numerous Turkish NGOs are also active in conducting humanitarian operations across the world.

The international community should increase humanitarian efforts in a more concerted and equitable way

Our humanitarian contributions are not confined to bilateral assistance projects. We aim to further increase our contribution to various international organisations. In order to assist further and to offer guidance to the UN’s humanitarian efforts, Turkey became a member of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Donor Support Group, which brings together leading humanitarian donors.

In line with its active role in the humanitarian action, Turkey hosted the first World Humanitarian Summit in İstanbul on May 23 and 24, 2016. The meeting served as a unique platform for the global community to address the alarming challenges of the humanitarian system and announce commitments for sustainable solutions to improve the lives of millions of crisis-affected people.

Development-oriented humanitarian assistance constitutes to be the core of Turkey’s policies in its humanitarian response. Given the complexity of present crises, the humanitarian-development nexus needs to be strengthened to increase the resilience and capacity of recipient actors to respond to humanitarian crises themselves.

Humanitarian crises are triggered as the negative impact of insufficient development, environmental issues, conflicts, poverty and lack of infrastructure. In many cases in sub-Saharan Africa, there exists a vicious circle entangling these countries.

This vicious circle is hard to break because there is a huge problem on the development side. Such vicious circles might risk even triggering conflicts leading to refugee crises as well.    

To break such vicious circles, there is need to intervene with various tools. At the first stage, Turkey intervenes at the request of the host country with humanitarian aids for emergency humanitarian relief and continues with development projects to support resilience, in tandem or simultaneously, as appropriate.

The combined use of humanitarian and development tools, which is the key of the Turkish humanitarian policy, turns out to be cost-effective for donors in the longer run as affected countries become more resilient, increasing their level of development, thanks to development aids on basic infrastructure, human and institutional capacity-building. Development assistance would also reduce their need of humanitarian aids in future.

Today, helping people affected by crises and disasters has become a global concern and providing aid to those in need requires a global effort. In this framework, Turkey believes the international community should increase humanitarian efforts in a more concerted and equitable way accordingly.

Başak Türkoğlu is Ambassador of Turkey to Malta.

This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece

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