April 04, 2016•Update: April 05, 2016
ANKARA
Turkish Red Crescent has improved so much and become so strong in the last 13 years that today everybody admires it enviously, Turkish premier has said.
In remarks made during Turkish Red Crescent’s ordinary general assembly at the ATO Congresium in the Turkish capital Ankara Monday, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said: "Red Crescent means affection, because people who cannot feel affection for the ones created by God, who cannot look into the eyes of a child with affection and who cannot hold the hand of a suffering person under earthquake debris with affection [they] cannot also be a member of the Red Crescent."
Davutoglu also said that Turkish Red Crescent was different from other similar organizations.
"Red Crescent means conscience because being conscientious requires responding to other people with the voice of only your conscience.
“Being conscientious is not to ask the identity, religion, ethnicity, country or gender of a person to whom you extend your [helping] hand. It is being able to treat everybody the same, woman, child, Turkish, Arab, Kurdish, Westerner, Easterner or European, without discriminating against any of them," he said.
Davutoglu said the Turkish Red Crescent did not ask people about their religion when Syrians and Iraqis sought shelter in Turkey or when the organization went to Somalia, Haiti and Japan.
Recalling Turkish Red Crescent’s 2020 vision goals, Davutoglu hoped Turkish Red Crescent would get the presidency of International Federation of the Red Cross in 2017.
He also recalled the Gulf War when the organization barely had the capacity to provide shelter to 500,000 Kurdish people from Iraq, while now in the new Turkey, they can now host nearly three million refugees.
