Turkey’s Erdoğan holds talks with EU leaders over border opening

The EU has said it will re-home up to 1,500 child refugees living in camps in Greece amid a stand-off between Brussels and Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan over his decision to open his border to migrants travelling to Europe.

The presidents of the European commission and council, Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel, will meet Erdoğan on Monday evening, just over a week after he had encouraged thousands of migrants and refugees to pass through his country into the EU.

With the conditions at border crossings and in Greek refugee camps degrading by the day, the German government said on Monday the EU was considering taking in between 1,000 and 1,500 unaccompanied migrant children.

“A humanitarian solution is being negotiated at the European level for a coalition of the willing to take in these children,” the government said.

Speaking at a press conference to mark her first 100 days in office, Von der Leyen confirmed that five EU member states had so far come forward to offer help. The countries helping are: France, Portugal, Germany, Luxembourg and Finland.

“In the long term’, we need a process to deal with unaccompanied minors, we need a systematic process”, she said.

Von der Leyen added that the EU needed “to make sure that when unaccompanied minors end up in these camps that we have a mechanism to deal with them and a way to ensure they enjoy a safe future”.

The commission president said the talks with Erdogan in Brussels would be the “beginning” of a process to see how much further the EU could financially support Turkey in dealing with migrants coming in from war-torn states.

The EU agreed in 2016 to provide Turkey with €6bn in return for curbs on migration flows but Erdogan claims the true cost has been closer to €40billion.

“The money [promised] has been paid or it has been contracted”, Von der Leyen said. “We ask ourselves how will the next step be but this is at the very beginning.”

She added: “The events at the Greek-Turkish border clearly point to politically motivated pressure on the EU’s external border. Finding a solution to this situation will require relieving the pressure that is put on the border”.

The crisis has unfolded on the borders between Turkey and its EU neighbours, Greece and Bulgaria, since Erdoğan announced last week that he would be “opening the doors” for refugees fleeing Idlib province, the final rebel stronghold in Syria.

Erdoğan has repeatedly criticised the EU’s lack of burden sharing, claiming Turkey can no longer cope with the numbers of people that are seeking asylum.

The result of Erdoğan’s policy has been that around 35,000 people have gathered the border with Greece where they have clashed with Greek police firing teargas and using plastic bullets.

Vigilante groups have started intimidating people at the border. Last week it was reported that locals on the island of Lesbos had blocked a dinghy full of people travelling from Turkey from disembarking, including a pregnant woman and children.

Erdoğan stirred the situation on Sunday by giving a speech in Istanbul calling on the Greek government to “open the gates” itself to allow migrants and refugees to move on to the rest of Europe.

“I hope I will return from Belgium with different outcomes,” Erdoğan said. “Hey Greece, I appeal to you … open the gates as well and be free of this burden. Let them go to other European countries.”

After the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, Josep Borrell, a former Spanish foreign minister, met Erdoğan in Ankara on Wednesday last week, he promised an additional €170m in aid for vulnerable groups in Syria.

But on Friday, Europe’s foreign ministers refused to accede to Turkish demands for more financial aid.

Over the weekend, Johannes Hahn, the EU budget commissioner, also suggested Erdoğan was using the crisis to distract from his weakened position at home.

“It’s the standard reflex in response to all this: you seek an external opponent,” Hahn told the Austrian newspaper Der Standard. “Of course [the flow of refugees] is being steered.”

On Monday, a former close Erdoğan ally became the latest to register a new political organisation to challenge the ruling AKP, saying Turkey needed a “fresh start”.

Ali Babacan, 52, a former deputy prime minister, quit the AKP last July over “deep differences” about its direction.

Last December, another one-time ally, the former prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, established the Future party to rival the AKP.