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Turkey: Erdogan sends thousands of refugees back to the EU

“The buses came on Friday and we drove late into the night,” said Dunya, who comes from Syria. “It was pretty tiring,” said the mother of five on the phone. “But now we’re luckily in Izmir.” The 30-year-old widow now hopes to take a boat across the Mediterranean to Greece from the Turkish port. “Anyway, we were told it wasn’t a problem.”

Dunya is one of the approximately 2,000 refugees that the Turkish authorities removed from the internment camp in Osmaniye at the weekend. The city near the border with Syria was one of the places that the curfew imposed by the government in Ankara was excluded. From Osmaniye to Izmir it is 1100 kilometers and at least 13 hours by bus.

“Before we started, the soldiers asked us whether we wanted to go to Europe or back to the places where we are registered,” Dunya told WELT. “But in the end there was no choice, everyone had to go to Izmir.” Other buses also brought refugees further north.

At least that’s what videos on Twitter suggest. They show dozens of young men in Kücukkuyu, a popular resort with sandy beaches, usually smugglers’ boats to the nearby one greek island of lesbos leak.

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Camp on Greek islands – – – – –

The Turkey is about to stage a second refugee crisis – during the corona epidemic that has hit the country so hard. Around 1200 people have already died from the viral disease, almost 60,000 are infected, and the number of infections is increasing rapidly.

At the end of February, Ankara had attracted more than 20,000 refugees with the promise of open borders with Greece and thus with the EU. For a month they tried again and again to cross the Evros border river, often supported by the Turkish army. But Greece kept its border tight.

At the end of March, Turkish soldiers burned down the tent camps and transported the remaining refugees to internment camps. According to the Turkish Ministry of the Interior, it was a preventive measure against the coronavirus outbreak. Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu threatened: “When the corona epidemic is over, we will not prevent migrants from returning to the Turkish-Greek border.”

“Erdogan wants to extort more money”

The epidemic is far from over, but the Interior Minister now seems to be realizing his threat. Buses bring migrants to the Mediterranean free of charge so that they can cross over to one of the Greek islands. Turkey is now trying to put pressure on the European Union on this new route – an irresponsible approach anyway, and highly dangerous in the face of the corona pandemic.

The EU already pledged additional financial aid to the refugees to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in March. But Turkey wants to “extort more money,” as Greek media speculated these days. Four million refugees live in Turkey, the majority of whom come from Syria.

A financial injection from the EU would also benefit the Turkish economy, which had already suffered before the Corona crisis. It is significant that Erdogan is one Fundraiser launched has – so the reasoning – to help those in need in the economic downturn. The state is not liquid enough to protect the population in the corona crisis.

The alarm bells are already ringing in Greece. Coast Guard and Navy have intensified their patrols after intelligence agencies and satellite images document the deployment of refugees on the Turkish side of the border. The refugee camps on the Greek islands are already hopelessly overcrowded.

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ISTANBUL, TURKEY - DECEMBER 12: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (C), Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Berat Albayrak (L) and Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu (R) are seen at the site of Istanbul terror attacks in Istanbul's Besiktas, Turkey on December 12, 2016. At least 38 people, including 7 civilians, were killed and 155 people were injured in two separate bomb attacks in the Besiktas district of Istanbul on December 10, 2016. Salih Zeki Fazlioglu / Anadolu Agency | No distribution to resellers.– – – – –

Especially the location on Lesbos is catastrophic. More than 20,000 refugees now live in the Moria Camp, which was originally designed for 3,100 people. The first cases of Covid-19 have already been registered there. Athens is right to fear that with the arrival of new and possibly infected refugees from Turkey, the disease could spread further.

Refugees are an incalculable risk that you want to avoid. In Greece, the number of people infected is 2100. The official number of around 100 deaths also appears to be very low compared to other European countries. At the weekend, the Greek coast guard is said to have already forced some refugee boats to turn back into Turkish waters.

But the number of boats could grow quickly. The Turkish authorities want to empty all internment camps, and there are a total of nine of them, according to the Interior Ministry. In the course of this week, the inmates are to be removed successively.

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Turkish President Erdogan got what he wanted. Now the refugees seem to be only a burden– –

Corona virus in Turkey – – – – –

“We were told that as soon as the curfew was over, it would start,” confirmed Kusai, a Syrian refugee in the container warehouse in Malatya in eastern Anatolia. However, the young man from Homs does not want to try again to come to Greece. “I spent 25 days outside in the cold at the border in March,” Kusai said on the phone. “It is hopeless and we have only been used by Turkey as a game ball.”

It won’t be any different this time, he believes. In addition, the sea route to Greece is much more dangerous than that via the land border. However, the young Syrian is not sure whether he has the choice to return to the city where he is registered in Turkey. “The Turkish soldiers have put us on buses several times,” he says angrily, “and shipped us to wherever they wanted to go.”

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