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EU
'sells soul' in migrant deportation deal with Turkey
Summit will
propose rapid deportation of migrants to Turkey, and sealing of
Balkans, to halt flows of migrants
By Matthew
Holehouse, Brussels and Melanie Hall, Berlin6:36PM GMT 06 Mar 2016
European leaders
stand accused of “selling their soul” as they hope to secure a
deal with Turkey on Monday for the “large scale and rapid”
deportation of migrants.
David Cameron will
join his counterparts in Brussels to push Ahmet Davutoglu, the
Turkish prime minister, to end the perilous migrant sea crossings to
Greece and accept the removal of tens of thousands of refugees
gathered in the country.
Dimitris
Avramapoulos, the EU’s migration commissioner, said Greece, already
struggling with a buildup of 30,000 migrants, was expected to receive
"another 100,000" by the end of March.
Leaders will discuss
a strategy to contain the crisis in Greece. In the past fortnight the
flow of migrants northwards has fallen to just a few hundred a day
due to the effective sealing of the Greek-Macedonian border.
The country will now
be flooded with aid, while police and asylum officials will be
deployed from across Europe in the hope of relocating to other
European countries or deporting to Turkey the migrants that remain.
A draft statement
prepared for the leaders, circulated among ambassadors in Brussels on
Sunday, declares: “Irregular flows of migrants along the western
Balkans route are coming to an end; this route is now closed. The EU
will stand by Greece in this difficult moment and will do its utmost
to help manage the situation that has arisen as a consequence of this
development.”
The text warns
leaders must "stay vigilant” to the risk of new routes opening
up.
The EU’s
relocation scheme has so far failed, moving just a few hundred
migrants out of a target of 160,000. Officials say the open route
through the Balkans discouraged refugees from taking part in the
scheme that intends to fly those eligible for asylum to new homes
around the bloc. Alexis Tsipras, the Greek premier, will on Monday
call for the scheme to be stepped up immediately and in large numbers
to ease the burden.
Macedonia on Sunday
tightened the grip on Greece further by only allowing Iraqis and
Syrians through its border if they are from a city considered to be
at war. It means that a migrant from, for example, Aleppo will be
allowed through but one from Damascus or Baghdad will not.
It also emerged that
Macedonia, which aspires to EU membership, had sent EU states
requests for fortifying the border on March 1 that included equipment
to build a further 300km of fencing and a camp for 400 people. The
shopping list also details police crowd control equipment including
acoustic weapons, pepper spray, tasers, and grenades that project
rubber balls.
Milos Zeman, the
Czech president, suggested that EU leaders could “could kill two
birds with one stone" by allowing Greece to pay down its vast
debts by hosting detention centres on its soil.
Another 18 people
drowned on Sunday after their boat sank on the crossing from Greece
to Turkey. Despite Turkish pledges to patrol the coast, still up to
3000 people a day make the journey on rubber vessels and numbers are
expected to surge as the weather improves.
Under a deal
sketched out with Turkey last year, its accession process to the EU
would be re-energised and €3 billion (£2.3 billion) in aid awarded
in exchange for curbing the migrant flow.
But it comes amid a
new assault on civil society. On Friday police raided the offices of
Zaman, a top-selling newspaper critical of the government.
Sunday’s edition
featured a story about Recep Tayyip Erdogan's planned reception to
mark International Women's Day and the president's visit to the site
of a bridge being built across Istanbul's Bosphorus Strait. It
contained no coverage of the protests by the newspapers’ supporters
which were dispersed by tear gas and water cannon.
Guy Verhofstadt, the
leader of the European Parliament’s liberal bloc, said:
“Outsourcing our problems to Turkey is naive. We should not sell
our soul for a deal with a country simply because we are incapable of
dealing with our problems and implementing a real European solution."
"Again we
continue to accept empty promises such as the returning of all
non-Syrian migrants reaching Greek islands back to Turkey. In other
words, we are accepting a deal to return migrants to a country which
imprisons journalists, attacks civil liberties, and with a highly
worrying human rights situation".
Wolfgang Schauble,
the German finance minister, played down the chances of a Turkish
accession. "It will be a long time before we reach the end of
negotiations with Turkey," he told the BBC's Andrew Marr. "This
is a question for the coming years, it is not a worry at the present
time."
Johannes Hahn, the
EU's enlargement commissioner, wrote on Twitter: “Extremely worried
about latest developments on Zaman newspaper which jeopardises
progress made by Turkey in other areas.”
He added that human
rights are “not negotiable” for prospective EU members.
Turkey was declared
eligible to join the EU in 1997 and started accession negotiations in
2005, but the continuing dispute over human rights issues have
repeatedly delayed talks.
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What’s
behind EU-Turkey alliance of convenience
Ankara
refuses to be Europe’s ‘junkyard’ for migrants, but eagerly
wants Merkel’s support.
By ROY GUTMAN
3/6/16, 11:59 AM CET Updated 3/6/16, 9:27 PM CET
http://www.politico.eu/article/turkey-europe-eu-merkel-alliance-migration-crisis-russia-no-fly-zone/
ANKARA, Turkey —
With an increasingly authoritarian president cracking down on critics
at home and pursuing Kurdish militants in southern Turkey and across
the borders in Syria and Iraq, Turkey is a risky partner for Europe
in its quest to stop illegal migration.
Just hours after
European Council President Donald Tusk was closing in on a deal with
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on cooperation Friday, Turkish riot
police stormed the offices of Zaman, the country’s biggest
opposition newspaper, and installed trustees who’ll soon shut it
down.
The EU gave Ankara a
slap on the wrist on Saturday, and EU leaders have otherwise been
conspicuously silent as Erdoğan has lashed out at independent media.
Europe sees Turkey
as its savior in the refugee crisis. It needs Erdoğan to stop
migrants from taking off from Turkey’s shores in flimsy dinghies to
reach Greece.
The
unspoken quid pro quo: Ankara takes back migrants, Europe goes easy
on Turkey’s human rights violations
Erdoğan needs
Europe, too. By lending it a helping hand in time of need, Turkey
hopes to win a friend in the West, now that its other NATO ally, the
U.S., appears to be walking away from Turkish security concerns about
the war in Syria.
“Turkey has no
more friends, and the EU has no more hope,” says Murat Erdoğan (no
relationship to the president), an assistant professor at the
Hacettepe University in the Turkish capital, who directs the
Migration and Politics Research Center. “Because of that we may get
more cooperation,” Erdoğan said.
EU pushes on open
door in Ankara
The engagement of
convenience between the EU and Turkey could be sealed on Monday at
the European Council meeting in Brussels. Turkish Prime Minister
Ahmet Davutoğlu will pledge cooperation in solving the crisis the EU
is increasingly seeing as an existential threat, with relatively
modest demands in return.
The deal between the
EU and Turkey shaping up now is built on understandings German
Chancellor Angela Merkel reached with Davutoğlu and Erdoğan. It
calls for Turkey to step up police and coast guard operations to stop
the nightly smuggling flotilla, which even in the dead of winter
ferried nearly 2,000 people a day, and to accept the return of a
great many more migrants who cross illegally into Greece.
The EU will give €3
billion for education and employment-related projects to help give
the 2.7 million registered Syrian refugees in Turkey more reason to
stay here. Turkey’s condition was that the EU will fast-track plans
to drop visa requirements for Turks traveling to the EU, to take
effect as early as this autumn.
There’s also an
unspoken quid pro quo — that Europe go easy on Turkey’s human
rights violations. “They will lower their criticism on human rights
and freedom of the press,” said Erdoğan, the university professor.
“It will have a negative affect on Turkish society.”
Europe is desperate.
But so is Turkey.
There are 2.7
million Syrians registered as refugees in Turkey plus hundreds of
thousands who roam around the country without any papers. Thousands a
day make their way to the Turkish coast to cross the Aegean Sea to
Greece and onward to make their way along the Balkans to Germany,
even though the borders are shutting down.
While nearly
everyone has praised Turkey’s hospitality for hosting so many
refugees, Turkey and the U.S. no longer agree on a strategy to end
the war in Syria. Their relationship is under severe strain.
Turkey vehemently
opposes the U.S. decision to back a controversial Kurdish militia to
fight the Islamic State extremists in Syria. Ankara was miffed that
the U.S. negotiated directly with Russia a ceasefire in Syria. Adding
to its anxiety, is Washington’s silence as Moscow mounts airstrikes
in Syria, even in violation of the ceasefire.
So even as the EU is
raising its demands on Turkey, they are pushing on an open door.
During a recent tour
of countries on the Balkan route, Tusk was unusually loud and
abundantly clear: To “all potential economic migrants: Do not come
to Europe,” he said. And Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, whose
country holds the rotating EU presidency, calls for a near-complete
stop. “We need to bring it back to a level from which we can see
zero,” he said Friday.
Turkey agrees with
the broad sentiment. Appearing alongside Tusk in Ankara on Friday,
Prime Minister Davutoğlu called human smuggling a “crime against
humanity.”
No ‘magic wands’
Where EU leaders
err, Davutoğlu is sure to tell them in Brussels on Monday, is in
their time frame: They expect that Turkey can stop people on the move
just by snapping its fingers.
It is “out of the
question to immediately stop the flow of migrants,” foreign
ministry spokesman Tanju Bilgiç told reporters here. “There’s no
magic wand in our hands.”
It is very likely
that this crisis has no immediate resolution, experts say.
“We are at the
beginning of the crisis,” Professor Erdoğan said. “People will
be coming for years. They come from very bad circumstances. They risk
their lives and those of their children. They will try to go to
Europe, and we need cooperation with Europe.”
‘This
is a golden opportunity for Turkey to save Greece, to reinforce
Turkish-German friendship, to be a real voice for refugees’
The measures Turkey
is to adopt are more short-term fixes to help ease the EU’s
political crisis, not solve it. The migration crisis has split the
Continent apart, particularly after southeast European countries
fenced off their once-open borders or introduced caps on asylum
requests, putting enormous pressure on Greece.
Turkey has acted to
assist its historic protagonist across the Aegean, not to improve
relationship with Athens but to get closer once again to Germany.
Merkel is desperately trying to save austerity-hit Greece from
collapsing under the refugee burden.
“This is a golden
opportunity for Turkey to save Greece, to reinforce Turkish-German
friendship, to be a strong actor, to be a real voice for refugees,”
said Metin Çorabatır, president of the Asylum and Migration
Research Center, an Ankara think tank. “But this needs a vision.”
Turkey is pressing
ahead with its demands to the EU, hoping Germany could push some of
them through.
Besides visa free
status for its population of some 80 million, Turkey will seek a
resumption of EU accession talks. However, no one here expects an
early conclusion to negotiations that stalled decades ago. Turks see
their future in Europe, not the Middle East, but they realize they
may never overcome the reservations of Greece, Cyprus, Germany and
France to Turkish accession.
Caught by surprise
One reason for the
lack of a migration strategy, Turkish officials say, is that mass
migration by dinghy developed into a major crisis last year when no
one expected a mass exodus of Syrians and many Iraqis, Afghanis and
others joining them on the journey to Europe. “Nobody had foreseen
this crisis,” said a senior Turkish official, who asked not to be
named since he was not authorized to speak on the record to foreign
media. “If they had been, strategies would have been made in
advance.”
Turkey has already
taken significant steps to alleviate the suffering of refugees in its
country, giving some Syrians a legal status that will enable them to
work legally. But other steps it has taken are more controversial,
including closing its borders to those recently fleeing Aleppo and
other besieged cities in the north, leaving tens of thousands
stranded at the border.
Frustrated
by America’s position on Syria, Ankara seeks European allies.
War rages on in
Syria, with daily Russian airstrikes and Assad regime forces shelling
of civilian targets despite the ceasefire that is to remain in effect
for another week. Turkey has all but closed its major border
crossings. Were Turkey to reopen its border, Professor Erdoğan
predicts that 1.5 million Syrians would cross into Turkey.
Earlier this year,
Ankara introduced visa requirements for Syrians, Iraqis and Libyans.
Turkey also has
committed publicly to complete accords to return illegal economic
emigrants to 14 countries from South Asia to North Africa, whose
nationals now comprise half the number of migrants landing on Greek
shores, according to an EU report issued Friday.
Tusk said that a
“fast and large scale mechanism” to ship back illegal migrants
from Greece might be “the most promising method” because it would
“effectively break the business model of the smugglers.”
But Turkey doesn’t
want to be the “junkyard of these immigrants,” the senior Turkish
official said in an interview. Such agreements “are good in theory,
but I doubt (they work) in practice.” No one wants to make
agreements with Turkey “because they have to get their own people
back.”
Turkish dilemma
Should this approach
fail, Turkey may have no choice but to broaden visa requirements, a
step it is loathe to take because of its impact on tourism, a major
source of national income.
The Turkish police
and coast guard have also stepped up their activities to halt the
outbound dinghies. According to the EU’s latest update on joint
efforts to curb illegal migration, Turkish authorities in the course
of February arrested some 600 smugglers and their accomplices.
Yet 56,335 migrants
crossed the Aegean in February, or 1,942 per day, the report issued
Friday said. This is well below the November peak of 214,792 or 5,146
a day.
What officials here
are hoping for is to reduce the numbers to fewer than 1,000 a day.
They hope that Germany and other north European states will then
organize direct transfers of Syrian refugees by air from Turkey,
making the dangerous sea journeys all the more unattractive.
The strong rhetoric
now being used by EU and Turkish officials masks the uncertainty
about what measures will work. It also underlines the inability of
both parties to do anything about the root cause for the flight of
Syrians, who comprise half those attempting to seek safety in Europe:
to stop the war.
The Assad regime has
used all available means to kill its political opponents, whom it
uniformly labels as terrorists. Turkey has consistently advocated for
a no-fly zone over Syria, which the Obama administration has
consistently rejected.
Since September 30,
after Russia began its airstrikes against U.S.-backed moderate rebels
and the U.S. confined itself to the sidelines, Turkey has said it
won’t intervene unilaterally in Syria to set up the no-fly zone,
and the EU has little capacity to act without the U.S..
Merkel in
mid-February endorsed Turkey’s repeated calls to set up a safe area
inside Syria but she conditioned her support on approval by the U.N.
Security Council, where Russia wields the veto.
Habertürk, a
moderate pro-government daily, reported that Merkel will support
Turkish concerns about the Kurdish People’s Protection Units
militia (YPG), which Turkey views as a terrorist offshoot of the
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The Obama administration, however,
sees it as a close ally in the battle against ISIL extremists in
Syria.
Donald Tusk wants
Turkey to break the people smugglers’ business model.
What isn’t clear
is the extent to which EU leaders will endorse Turkey’s strong
condemnation of the Assad regime as the ultimate cause for the
refugee crisis. “Neither Turkey nor European Union is responsible
for the Syrian crisis,” Davutoğlu said as he stood alongside Tusk
in Ankara.
“Those who are
responsible for the Syrian crisis are the [Assad] regime oppressing
its nationals, and terrorist organizations … and some international
actors that support this regime and those who support these terror
organizations,” Davutoğlu said.
Tusk refrained from
assigning blame. “We agree that the refugee flows still remain far
too high and that further action is needed. It is for Turkey to
decide how best to achieve such a reduction,” Tusk said.
Authors:
Roy Gutman
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