Ankara: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to send the millions of refugees in Turkey to EU member states, as NATO pledged to deploy ships to the Aegean Sea to ease the migrant crisis.
Erdogan stepped up his denunciations of Western policy on migrants in a speech in Ankara, confirming he had threatened EU leaders at a summit meeting in November that Turkey could say “goodbye” to the refugees.
Alarm is growing in EU capitals that thousands of migrants are still crossing the Aegean daily from Turkey after over a million made the perilous journey last year.
NATO has agreed to send a naval group to the Aegean to crack down on people-smugglers feeding the influx of migrants, while Greece is considering sending anyone picked up in the waters back to Turkey.
Turkey, already home to some three million refugees, is also under EU and UN pressure to take in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing regime advances in the Aleppo region. Erdogan said Turkey had every right to turf the refugees out of the country if it so wished.
“We do not have the word ‘idiot’ written on our foreheads. We will be patient but we will do what we have to. Don’t think that the planes and the buses are there for nothing,” Erdogan said.
Greek website euro2day.gr had reported that Erdogan made the threat to EU Commission president Jean Claude Juncker in November, quoting him as saying: “We can open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria anytime and put the refugees on buses.”
“I am proud of what I said. We have defended the rights of Turkey and the refugees. And we told them (the Europeans): ‘Sorry, we will open the doors and say ‘goodbye’ to the migrants’,” Erdogan said in his speech Thursday.
Turkey is already hosting 2.5 million refugees from Syria’s civil war and hundreds of thousands from Iraq and is increasingly bitter it has been left to shoulder the burden. The EU has agreed to give Ankara three billion euros (USD 3.3 billion) in financial aid for the refugees, but the funds have yet to be handed over two-and-a-half months after they were agreed.
Erdogan said Turkey had already spent some USD 9 billion on hosting refugees and lashed out at the UN for pressing it to let in tens of thousands of Syrians fleeing fighting in Aleppo massed on its border.
