It’s ‘a shame of humanity’
Syrians reflect on deaths of boys, unwillingness of West to help them
BODRUM, Turkey — At the little Kumbahce Mosque in this town, dozens of Syrian refugees wait anxiously for smugglers to call and tell them when they can finally catch a ride to the dinghies that will take them, they hope, to Greece and beyond.
This summer, thousands of Syrian refugees crossed the Aegean every month between Bodrum and nearby Greek islands. Sometimes the refugees at the mosque talk about the dangers back home, in Syria. But today, everybody is talking about the danger in the water and why Western countries won’t bring them to dry land safely.
Have they seen the picture of the dead Syrian child? The one of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old boy whose body washed ashore on a nearby beach this week?
When the Citizen asks them this question, the group falls silent and parts: some step to the left, some to the right. They reveal the gates of the mosque, onto which they’ve fastened the front cover of Thursday’s Hurriyet newspaper. Tonight, refugees will sleep outside the gates, on the ground under a picture of the drowned Syrian boy in the town that he, his brother and his mother died trying to leave.
Abdulmenemem Alsatouf, a 36-year-old whose family owned a grocery store in Syria, stands solemnly beside it, pointing. A couple of teenagers hold out iPhones — they’ll soon try to use those phones to navigate the churning sea, but right now only the photo of Alan Kurdi is on their screens.
When asked if they heard reports that some Kurdi family members had hoped to go to Canada, the group starts shouting. They’ve heard, all right. A few say that they don’t like Canada anymore, not after what happened to the family. Others say that they always did like Canada, and expected that it would take more refugees in. What does it say about Canada, Australia and other European nations, they wonder, that they won’t accept mothers and children left to die in the waters nearby?
Less than 10 steps away, Imam Fatih Simsek has an answer. It’s a “shame for Canada,” he says, but more than that, he says, it’s “a shame of humanity.
“If everybody helped, other countries, these people would not live on the street,” he says. But the imam thinks he knows why the help isn’t coming.
“The people who are not hungry cannot understand the people who are hungry.”
Imam Simsek used to be hungry himself. The son of a farmer in eastern Turkey, he grew up with “no city, no money, nothing,” he says. He lets refugees use the toilets after prayers, even though he thinks he’s not supposed to, and lets their children sit on rugs that he bought for them under a tarp that he slung for them, even though locals sometimes call the police to complain about all the people milling about his mosque.
Even though many refugees are angry with Western nations, some of those in Bodrum still want to live there. But the mosque isn’t providing enough. Nor is Turkey.
Abdulmenemem Alsatouf approaches, holding out a message he’d typed earlier on his phone: “Sir, can we provide the travel request from Turkey to Canada through the Canadian embassy.”
It’s a desperate message, from a man too desperate to understand that a journalist can’t make that happen. Probably no one can.
The call to prayer sounds out. The imam has disappeared back inside the mosque, along with many of the refugees.
But not everyone follows. Two blocks away, at a corner store that stocks life-jackets next to bags of potato chips and swim trunks, a Syrian family fits a small boy for an orange vest. The life-jackets used to cost $20, but they were badly made, so now the store sells only the $40 variety, because too many people drowned in the cheaper ones.
The little boy’s parents would say only that they were hoping to leave tonight.
“The people who are not hungry cannot understand the people who are hungry.
FATIH SIMSEK IMAM OF KUMBAHCE MOSQUE IN BODRUM, TURKEY