EU visitors at Syria line to push deal with Turks

Greek police patrol Friday at a train station that has become a makeshift camp for about 54,000 migrants stranded at the northern Greek border crossing of Idomeni.
Greek police patrol Friday at a train station that has become a makeshift camp for about 54,000 migrants stranded at the northern Greek border crossing of Idomeni.

BRUSSELS -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel and top European Union officials plan to travel close to Turkey's border with Syria in hopes of promoting a month-old agreement to manage a refugee crisis that has left hundreds of thousands stranded on the migrant trail to Europe.

Today's trip to the Turkish border city of Gaziantep, which is expected to include a visit to a refugee camp, occurs over questions over the legality of the March 20 agreement between the EU and Turkey to start deporting back to Turkey any migrants who do not qualify for asylum in Greece.

The EU has pledged up to $6.8 billion in aid to Turkey over the next four years to ease conditions and create opportunities for the estimated 2.7 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey.

But a month after the agreement was signed, few EU experts have arrived in the field, and many EU nations are dragging their heels on accepting more asylum seekers. Diplomatic tussles loom over Turkey's demands for visa-free EU travel for Turkish citizens.

To persuade European and Turkish citizens of the deal's merits, Merkel, EU Council President Donald Tusk, EU Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans and Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu plan to gather in Gaziantep across the border from the Syrian cities of Aleppo and Kobane, epicenters for years of civil war that have abated since a shaky February cease-fire agreement.

The U.N. refugee agency, rights groups and EU lawmakers have criticized the EU-Turkey migrant deal over the legal and moral implications of expelling people from EU member Greece back to Turkey, a country that many consider unsafe on security and human-rights grounds.

The 47-nation Council of Europe, a human-rights body that is not part of the EU, passed a resolution Wednesday criticizing the EU-Turkey deal for what it called "several serious human rights issues."

Not far from Gaziantep, Turkish authorities have been expelling about 100 Syrians almost daily for the past three months back to their war-ravaged homeland, according to rights group Amnesty International. Ankara insists that it does not deport Syrians and also rejects reports that border guards have opened fire at Syrians seeking entry into Turkey.

"There is no photo-op that can obscure the deep flaws in the EU-Turkey deal," said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International's director for Europe and Central Asia.

He said Merkel should seek "cast-iron guarantees that Turkish authorities will stop sending refugees back to their countries of origin."

Only about 10 percent of Turkey's refugees are sheltered in camps. The rest primarily fend for themselves in towns and cities.

The European Commission says the number of migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey has slowed dramatically from more than 50,000 in February to about 7,000 over the past 30 days. But Greece, currently home to 54,000 stranded migrants seeking to travel deeper into Europe, faces unrelenting pressure as the long-promised relocation of asylum seekers from Greece to other EU countries moves pitifully slowly.

Since last month's pact, 325 migrants in Greece have been returned to Turkey, only two of them Syrians. In the other direction, 103 Syrians have been delivered from Turkey to Europe.

The EU's border agency Frontex requested 1,550 reinforcements a month ago to help police the deal, but so far just 340 officers and experts have been deployed. The EU's asylum agency requested almost 900 officers and interpreters, but only 130 have been sent.

On Friday, foreign ministers of Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and Macedonia said they will work to improve coordination along southern Europe's migrant trail.

"Still today, activists, NGOs and human smugglers are cooperating across borders in an easier manner than state institutions do," Macedonian Foreign Minister Nikola Poposki said following the two-day talks in Thessaloniki.

"I think that one of the messages we are sending from this meeting is that we are going to coordinate our efforts, we are going to try to avoid having solutions that are going to be at the expense of only one country," Poposki added. "We have to send a message that [the] road to the Balkans, for the migrants, is not going to see the same evolution as it has seen at 2015."

More than a million refugees and other migrants, who arrived on the Greek islands in smugglers' boats from Turkey, passed through Greece to Macedonia and other countries on the western Balkan corridor since the beginning of 2015, on their way north.

But the route closed this year, as a crackdown by Austrian authorities had a domino effect all the way to Macedonia's border with Greece, leaving more than 50,000 people stranded on the Greek side -- including about 10,000 at the closed border crossing of Idomeni.

The border closure, and repeated efforts by migrants on the Greek side to force their way into Macedonia, prompted tension between the two governments: Macedonia accused Greece of doing nothing to stop the attempts, and Greece complained of heavy-handed Macedonian police tactics. The two neighbors have been at odds for decades over Macedonia's official name, which Athens says should be altered to imply no claims on the neighboring Greek province of Macedonia.

"Foreign policy must overcome problems, and solve them through negotiations," Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias said. The four neighbors agreed that special action is needed in responding to vulnerable groups of migrants, such as unaccompanied minors, and to work together more closely on fighting human trafficking.

Information for this article was contributed by Suzan Fraser and staff members of The Associated Press.

A Section on 04/23/2016

Upcoming Events