Merkel Hits Out at Erdogan Amid Migration Spat at Greek Border
Angela Merkel hit out at Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, saying conducting policy at the expense of refugees is wrong.
(Bloomberg) -- Angela Merkel hit out at Recep Tayyip Erdogan, criticizing the Turkish president for conducting policy at the expense of refugees, amid tensions along the Greek border over uncontrolled migration flows.
While opening the possibility of additional German or European Union assistance for Turkey to deal with migrants, the German chancellor said Erdogan was making a mistake by putting the lives of civilians at risk. Her comments came as EU officials in Brussels struggled to come up with a response to Erdogan’s encouragement to people hosted in the country to seek refuge in Europe.
“I understand the Turkish government and President Erdogan that he expects more from Europe,” Merkel told reporters in Berlin. “However, I find it unacceptable that President Erdogan and his government is now not expressing this dissatisfaction to us, the EU, but taking it out on the backs of the refugees. That’s the wrong way.”
The rapidly evolving crisis came after Turkey told millions of migrants and asylum seekers hosted on its soil that it won’t stand in the way if they want to leave. As thousands of desperate people flocked toward the border, clashes erupted with Greek security forces seeking to hold them back over the past five days.
Merkel said she would continue to speak with Turkish counterparts in an effort to resolve the situation and would offer bilateral support if a deal couldn’t be reached on the EU level. Meanwhile, the EU’s crisis response mechanism decided to continue engaging Turkish authorities in an effort to uphold a 2016 accord that stemmed the flow of migrants in exchange for financial assistance, according to the minutes of a meeting in Brussels on Monday, seen by Bloomberg.
“The period of single-sided sacrifice has come to an end,” Erdogan said in televised remarks on Monday. “The number of people who are headed towards Europe since the moment we opened our borders has reached hundreds of thousands. This figure will soon reach millions.”
Bloomberg reporters on both sides of the border between Greece and Turkey can’t confirm Erdogan’s claim that hundreds of thousands of people have left the country. The International Organization for Migration has also given much lower figures of people stranded in no-man’s land between Greece and Turkey.
Erdogan’s threat that he will essentially stop applying his accord with the EU to prevent migration flows came after he unsuccessfully sought the bloc’s backing for his military campaign in Syria. The EU has yet to come up with a response, prompting Erdogan to proclaim that Turkey is unable to host any more people fleeing a clampdown from Syria’s regime.
The Greek government said that it has stopped more than 24,000 from trying to cross its borders between Saturday and Monday, and arrested 183 who made it. On Sunday, Athens invoked an emergency clause of European treaties, seeking extra EU assistance, and suspended accepting asylum applications, in a move the UN’s refugee agency said has no legal basis.
The EU’s border control agency agreed to deploy officers from across the bloc to help Greek security forces, while the heads of EU’s main institutions will visit the country’s frontier with Turkey on Tuesday, ahead of an extraordinary meeting of foreign affairs ministers later in the week.
--With assistance from Sotiris Nikas, Paul Tugwell and Onur Ant.
To contact the reporters on this story: Arne Delfs in Berlin at adelfs@bloomberg.net;Patrick Donahue in Berlin at pdonahue1@bloomberg.net;Nikos Chrysoloras in Brussels at nchrysoloras@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Chad Thomas at cthomas16@bloomberg.net, Richard Bravo, Nikos Chrysoloras
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