Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is travelling to Brussels for emergency talks, as the EU considers taking in 1,500 child refugees stuck in increasingly dangerous and overcrowded camps in Greece.
The presidents of the European commission and council, Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel, will meet Erdoğan on Monday, just over a week after he opened Turkey’s frontiers to thousands of people seeking to pass into the EU.
With conditions on the border and in Greek refugee camps becoming increasingly desperate, the German government said on Monday the EU was considering taking in up to 1,500 unaccompanied migrant children.
“A humanitarian solution is being negotiated at the European level for a coalition of the willing to take in these children,” the government said.
A crisis has unfolded on the borders between Turkey and its EU neighbours, Greece and Bulgaria, since Erdoğan announced he would be “opening the doors” for refugees fleeing Idlib province, the final rebel stronghold in Syria.
Erdoğan has repeatedly criticised the EU’s lack of burden sharing, claiming Turkey can no longer cope with the numbers of people that are seeking asylum.
The result of Erdoğan’s policy has been a gathering of tens of thousands of people on the border with Greece where they have clashed with Greek police firing teargas and using plastic bullets.
Vigilante groups have started intimidating people at the border. Last week it was reported that locals on the island of Lesbos had blocked a dinghy full of people travelling from Turkey from disembarking, including a pregnant woman and children.
Before his talks in Brussels, Erdoğan stirred the crisis by giving a speech in Istanbul calling on the Greek government to “open the gates” itself to allow migrants and refugees to move on to the rest of Europe.
“I hope I will return from Belgium with different outcomes,” Erdoğan said on Sunday. “Hey Greece, I appeal to you … open the gates as well and be free of this burden. Let them go to other European countries.”
After the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, Josep Borrell, a former Spanish foreign minister, met Erdoğan in Ankara on Wednesday last week, he promised an additional €170m in aid for vulnerable groups in Syria.
But on Friday, Europe’s foreign ministers refused to accede to Turkish demands for more financial aid under a 2016 migration deal in which Brussels initially agreed to provide €6bn in return for curbs on migration flows.
Over the weekend, Johannes Hahn, the EU budget commissioner, suggested Erdoğan was using the crisis to distract from his weakened position at home.
“It’s the standard reflex in response to all this: you seek an external opponent,” Hahn told the Austrian newspaper Der Standard. “Of course [the flow of refugees] is being steered.”
On Monday, a former close Erdoğan ally became the latest to register a new political organisation to challenge the ruling AKP, saying Turkey needed a “fresh start”.
Ali Babacan, 52, a former deputy prime minister, quit the AKP last July over “deep differences” about its direction.
Last December, another one-time ally, the former prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, established the Future party to rival the AKP.
source https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/09/turkey-erdogan-holds-talks-with-eu-leaders-over-border-opening
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