Vice PM: Turkey not obliged to host Syrian refugees

By Azernews

By Gunay Hasanova

The European Union will have to deal with the Syrian refugee flow in case of failure to apply a visa-free regime with Turkey, Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey Numan Kurtulmus said during a visit to province Konya.

He emphasized that Turkey is not obliged to host Syrian refugees.

“The European Union should make its position clear and precise on the accession of Turkey to the Union,” he added.

The Heads of State and the EU Member States' governments agreed with Turkey upon a joint plan to combat the migration crisis in mid-March. The program is focusing on the return of illegal immigrants arriving from Greece to the territory of Turkey and accepting legal Syrian refugees in Turkey by the EU based principle of "one for one".

Today, there are roughly three million Syrian refugees in the territory of Turkey. Approximately 300,000 of them live in the camps and the rest are scattered over the Turkish provinces. Only Istanbul is host to 40,000 refugees from Syria.

What's more, only 200 Syrians have so far been resettled from Turkish refugee camps to Europe, far fewer than envisioned by Turkey, which is currently home to more than three million displaced people.

Turkey has a long waited for its EU membership, while each application to accede to the European Union was frustrating for the government. Turkey, holding a status of an associate member at the Economic Community -- the predecessor of the EU since 1963 -- made an official application for entry on April 14, 1987.

The European Commission has proposed in May that the European Parliament and EU Council will lift visa restrictions for citizens of Turkey if Ankara fulfills the remaining conditions for abolishing visa entries until the end of June.

The list of pre-conditions included measures to prevent corruption, negotiations on an operational agreement with Europol (the EU police office), providing judicial cooperation with all EU member states, as well as the revision of the legislation on the fight against terrorism.

However, since the July 15 coup attempt, relations between Ankara and Brussels have fallen to a low as Turkish politicians lament the EU’s muted response to the attempted takeover and EU leaders criticize Turkey over widespread arrests and job suspensions in its wake.