Turkey shouldn’t threaten Europe over refugees: Greece

Greece says Turkey should not try to pressure Europe in a bid to receive more support for a plan to resettle Syrian refugees in northern Syria.

“Mr. Erdogan must understand that he cannot threaten Greece and Europe in an attempt to secure more resources to handle the refugee (issue),” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told a news conference in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki on Sunday.

“Europe has given a lot of money, six billion euros in recent years, within the framework of an agreement between Europe and Turkey and which was mutually beneficial,” he said.

On Thursday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his country might be forced to stop preventing the flow of refugees into Europe if the European Union (EU) and the United States did not act to provide Ankara with more support toward retaining them.

Erdogan said he would go ahead with a plan to resettle a million refugees in northern Syria, adding that his country had already spent 40 billion dollars hosting what he said was a population of four million refugees from Syria, which was plagued by militancy starting in 2011.

Europe has been the destination of hundreds of thousands of refugees from such crisis zones as Syria, including elsewhere in Asia and Africa, in recent years. Particularly when the crisis began in 2015, many of the refugees arrived in Greece — one of the nearest destinations in Europe — often via Turkey.

SS