Angela Merkel has promised to take refugees directly from Turkey into Europe and called for Nato patrols in the Aegean on her second visit to Ankara in three months as she desperately tried to enlist Turkey’s help in easing the refugee crisis, the biggest threat to her power at home and the stability of the European Union.
Under a deal struck in haste last October, the EU and Turkey agreed an action plan, with Ankara pledging to halt the flow of hundreds of thousands of Syrians and others across the Aegean into the EU in return for a minimum of €3bn (£2.3bn), a reopening of its stalled bid to join the EU, and the lifting of visa requirements for Turks travelling to Europe.
Since then the EU-Turkey pact has made little progress, adding urgency to Merkel’s talks on Monday with the Turkish president, Recep Tayipp Erdoğan and prime minister, Ahmed Davutoğlu.
The sense of urgency was heightened by the assaults on Aleppo by the Syrian regime and Russia, sending tens of thousands of displaced people towards the Turkish border and with the deaths of at least another 27 people, including 11 children, risking the short voyage to Greek islands from the Turkish coast.
Merkel called for Nato patrols to curtail the hazardous sea crossings and blamed Vladimir Putin for worsening the refugee crisis by bombing Syria.
That Erdoğan is confident he holds all the cards in the negotiation with the EU is evident from the diplomatic record of a meeting in November with EU leaders in which the president dismissed the offer of €3bn, threatened to put thousands of refugees on busses to Europe from Turkey and warned that 15,000 migrants could wash up dead on Greek shores.
The four-page record of a meeting between Erdoğan and Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk, the presidents of the European commission and the European council, in the Turkish resort of Antalya in November, paints a picture of an EU prostrate before a Turkish leader who treats their offers, pleas, and arguments with derision.
“We really want a deal with you,” Tusk told Erdoğan, according to the leak of the note to the Greek financial media, euro2day.gr. “So how will you deal with refugees if you don’t get a deal? Kill the refugees?” Erdoğan responded.
He asked whether the EU was offering Turkey €3bn a year, or the same figure over two years. When told the latter, he said: “We can open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria anytime and put the refugees on buses.”
Merkel has since confirmed that the €3bn is a down payment for Turkey with more money to follow. European commission spokeswoman Mina Andreeva said on Monday that the €3bn, only agreed finally last week by the EU, was merely an “initial” payment.
Juncker admitted to Erdoğan that the EU delayed publication of a highly critical report on the state of democracy in Turkey until after elections in early November to favour the president’s governing AK party. Erdoğan dismissed the report as an “insult”.
Erdoğan complained about the lack of summits between Turkey and the EU. A full summit was staged in Brussels a fortnight later.
Erdoğan also said that Merkel had promised to take “quotas” of refugees directly from Turkey to Europe but that she had not specified figures and that nothing had come of the promise.
Merkel reiterated the pledge on Monday in Ankara, repeating arguments, unpopular elsewhere in the EU, that “legal” channels have to be opened up for refugees and migrants coming to Europe. This is also Juncker’s aim, but it is rejected by several EU countries.
Merkel has accepted the resistance and is pursuing a scheme where those countries who want to take part can share in the distribution of refugees resettled directly from Turkey.
The Dutch are pushing the plan strongly, but the condition for the direct resettlement of 200,000-300,000 people a year is that Turkey commits to letting no others leave for Greece and takes back migrants who have crossed to Greece, a proposal riddled with political, legal and humanitarian problems for the Europeans.
Merkel was on Monday the first western leader to woo Erdoğan in his new presidential palace in Ankara, a widely mocked exercise in over-the-top opulence that cost a reported $600m (£415m) to build.
