President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Monday paid tribute to the contributions of the Turkish neighborhood in Germany, recognizing their position within the nation’s postwar financial reconstruction for the reason that Sixties.
“They helped build our country, they made it strong and they belong at the heart of our society,” he mentioned at the beginning of his three-day journey to Türkiye, referring to the just about 3 million individuals of Turkish descent residing in Germany right now.
“They are not people with a migrant background – Germany is a country with a migrant background.”
In 1961, the governments in Bonn – the West German capital on the time – and Ankara signed a labor recruitment settlement. According to the Foreign Ministry, round 876,000 individuals got here to Germany from Türkiye based mostly on that “guest worker” settlement.
The president arrived in Istanbul carrying a 60-kilogram (132-pound) kebab skewer, symbolizing the tales of Turkish migration to Germany. The proprietor of the Berlin store that supplied the kebab, Arif Keleş, and a number of other different visitors traveled on the airplane with the president.
Keleş’s grandfather was amongst those that had established themselves in Germany.
Steinmeier started his go to at Istanbul’s historic Sirkeci practice station, from the place many Turks departed for Germany. There, he was greeted by the Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu.
Steinmeier additionally held talks with businesspeople, artists, scientists and representatives of nonprofit organizations.
He is ready to fulfill President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Wednesday in Ankara.
In his speech on the practice station, Steinmeier recalled that the historical past of German-Turkish migration had two instructions. In the nineteenth century, poverty and unemployment had pushed craftsmen from Germany to Anatolia. And throughout the Nazi period, Türkiye turned a spot of refuge for a lot of German artists and intellectuals.
“While Germans helped to design and build the new capital Ankara in the 1930s, it was the ‘guest workers’ from Türkiye who helped to build up the economy of the young Federal Republic of Germany from the 1960s onward and who have now made a decisive contribution to our prosperity for four generations,” the president mentioned.
Steinmeier’s tour of the historic practice station was disrupted by a bunch of pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
The 50 or so women and men chanted slogans from a distance of slightly below 100 meters and displayed indicators with portraits of Steinmeier, Hitler and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The faces of Steinmeier and Netanyahu have been adorned with Hitler mustaches.
The German president was scheduled on Tuesday to go to the area affected by the devastating earthquakes in February 2023, through which greater than 53,000 individuals died in Turkish provinces in addition to a number of thousand in neighboring Syria.
At the time, the German authorities pledged 238 million euros ($254 million) in earthquake help to Türkiye and Syria.
Source: www.dailysabah.com
