President Erdogan’s plan to use Syrian refugees as a bargaining chip won’t work for much longer

Editorial: EU and US leaders will have to forcefully persuade the Turkish president that he has even more to lose from refusing to cooperate than he does from fomenting instability

Monday 02 March 2020 21:27 GMT
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President Erdogan’s diplomacy is difficult to fathom at the best of times, but he cannot make friends by turning them into enemies first. This is especially true of President Trump
President Erdogan’s diplomacy is difficult to fathom at the best of times, but he cannot make friends by turning them into enemies first. This is especially true of President Trump

In the few days since Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, suddenly declared that his country no longer had any intention of restricting the flow of mostly Syrian refugees to the Greek border and the European Union, some 10,000 have tried to make their way northwards towards something like safety and a new life.

The Greek authorities, panicking and unable to cope with the crisis, say that some 4,000 have been detected attempting to get across the 50-mile border between Greece (ie the EU) and Turkey. Many more will follow from Turkey’s squalid camps and beyond that serve as inadequate shelter for Syrian families caught up in merciless war. It was just the other day that Mr Erdogan declared he had “opened the gates” to the EU for the 4 million refugees currently living in Turkey.

Overwhelmingly they are refugees, who (prior to president Bashar al-Assads war on his own people, the establishment of Isis and the clumsy interventions of the Russians and others) had no wish to leave their homeland. Their cities have been reduced to rubble; they have no option but to escape the threat of death, withering by barrel bombs or starvation.

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