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Friday, February 14, 2014

NY Times praises Turkey's "refugee camps"


Words fail me.  NY Times is praising Turkey for the way they have constructed the refugee camps and the maintenance of same at a high standard not before seen in refugee camps. First and above all, if Turkey had not interfered in  their neighbour's internal affairs, there would not be the question of the ongoing civil war and that would have not given rise to the question of refugees camps ... whether they be  "perfect" or "imperfect." The NY Times has a twisted look on the state of the world.

According to NY Times, Turkey has accept only "minor international donations" and the rest of the expenditure in building the camps and the maintenance of it, is footed by the country.  I don't believe it.  

Mac McClelland writing at NYTimes:
....How to Build a Perfect Refugee Camp  
.......Many of the world’s displaced live in conditions striking for their wretchedness, but what is startling about Kilis is how little it resembles the refugee camp of our imagination. It is orderly, incongruously so. Residents scan a card with their fingerprints for entry, before they pass through metal detectors and run whatever items they’re carrying through an X-ray machine. Inside, it’s stark: 2,053 identical containers spread out in neat rows. No tents. None of the smells — rotting garbage, raw sewage — usually associated with human crush and lack of infrastructure.....

.........On April 29, 2011, 263 Syrians crossed into Turkey, fleeing civil war at home. Within 24 hours, the Turkish government set up an emergency tent camp for them in southern Hatay Province. In less than three years, it was operating 22 camps serving 210,000 refugees, mostly in provinces along its roughly 500-mile-long border with Syria. Kilis, opened in 2012, was one of six container camps meant to offer a better standard of shelter to incoming refugees. When I visited last October, the camp was full, and a group of squatters outside waited for placement........

....At the next school over, class was in session. You could hear children reciting and clapping; from the window, several waved. Two thousand two hundred and twenty-five students attend school here, in sex-segregated classes per the Syrians’ request. One Syrian teacher admitted that this refugee-camp school is nicer than the public schools at home.
“It’s the nicest refugee camp in the world!” a Polish diplomat staying at my hotel crowed when I mentioned the place to him the next day. Standing with him was an Italian official; he nodded vehemently in agreement.....

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