Aylan Kurdi

When I first saw the picture, I had to cry: a lifeless child in a red shirt and dark shorts, washed up on a beach a few kilometers from where I live in Bodrum. Aylan Kurdi drowned, together with his brother Galib and their mother Rehan, when the small rubber boat that was supposed to take them to Kos capsized.
We all know this was not the first time Syrian refugees had been killed on their way to Europe. Before this point, more than 2,500 had not made it, and we saw their bodies drifting in the water.
But the picture of Aylan is different. I am not even sure why it has such a huge impact. Is it the feeling of impotence when confronted with the Syrian tragedy and the human suffering it has caused? Is it because the small, innocent boy personalizes all the unknown, faceless victims we have only heard about? Or is it because we all have children or nieces and nephews that we want to protect against such a horrible end?
According to many, the photo of Aylan on a Turkish beach could become one of these rare iconic pictures that change the perception of millions and lead to a real change in policy, like the shocking Vietnamese “napalm girl” from 1972, the starving child in South Sudan from 1993 or the tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib from 2004.
We can already observe the immediate effects of Aylan's picture in Europe: Under pressure from public opinion and the tabloid press, British Prime Minister David Cameron announced that his country will do more to accommodate Syrian refugees. In many European countries, volunteers are lining up to offer help to NGOs and local authorities that are trying to cope with the new arrivals. Empathy with the fate of the hundreds of thousands of other Syrian refugees across Europe trying to reach Germany or another safe destination has definitely grown.
But you do not have to be a cynic to be cautious when assessing the real impact on Europe's refugee and migration policy in the long run. Despite all the public outcry and grief over Aylan's picture, a new plan to redistribute 160,000 asylum seekers that have arrived in Greece, Italy and Hungary among all EU member states is not a done deal yet because of deep divisions inside the EU. For the moment, nobody has come up with a new diplomatic initiative to remove the source of this catastrophe, the civil war waged by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
In the meantime, there is a deplorable tendency in Turkey to blame all the suffering of the Syrian refugees on Europe. Not surprisingly, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did not waste the opportunity to bash the West and accuse European countries of turning the Mediterranean into a grave, saying, “Drowned in the sea were not only refugees, but also our humanity and our values.” Erdoğan definitely has a point about the EU's failings, and his tirade about the West's insensitivity expressed the same objections raised by many Europeans against their political leaders.
What Erdoğan did not mention is Turkey's own role in the refugee drama. True, Turkey has been extremely hospitable to Syrian refugees. But Turkey is not an innocent and helpless bystander to the current tragedies. If Turkey wanted to stop Syrian refugees from getting into ramshackle boats, it could. But it does not. Yes, the Turkish coast guard saves them when things go wrong, but why do the Turkish police not stop them from leaving on these life-threatening journeys?
It is not only Europeans who make it so difficult to get out of Turkey in a safe way. The reason why Aylan's father decided to take the risk is because his sister in Canada could not manage to have their brother Mohammed accepted as an asylum seeker. The Canadian authorities rejected the Kurdi family's application because Turkey did not recognize them as refugees and also did not want to give them an exit visa. Why does Turkey stick to this old, worn-out policy that prevents Syrian refugees from taking a plane to leave the country and forces them to get into unsafe rubber boats?
Preventing more Aylans is an urgent responsibility to be shared among all countries involved, including Turkey. Nobody should use Aylan's picture to show that he is morally better than others.

JOOST LAGENDIJK (Cihan/Today's Zaman)