At Emre’s boat shop in central Izmir, one of Turkey’s major ports, you can’t turn around without bumping into a pile of inflatable rubber boats. On this day there are 16 stacked in beige boxes, all numbered with the same inscrutable code, SK-800PLY, and all newly delivered from China. If Emre’s maths is right, all of them will be discarded on a Greek beach within a couple of days. For Emre’s shop is where you can buy boats that take refugees to Europe – and where they are still being sold at a rate of nearly a dozen a day.
“In the summer we were selling more,” Emre tells a potential Syrian customer. “But right now we’re still selling six of the cheaper boats every day, and five of the more expensive ones. How many do you want?”
European officials met with their Turkish counterparts on Sunday, in a bid to persuade Turkey to do more to stem Europe’s greatest wave of mass migration since the second world war. Despite the worsening weather, another 125,000 asylum-seekers have arrived in Greece from Turkey in November – around four times as many as during the whole of 2014. And the biggest proportion probably passed through this quarter of Izmir.
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