The German chancellor, Angel Merkel, has arrived in southern Turkey to inaugurate the EU aid programme for Syrians in the country, amid concerns that her visit validates Turkey’s creeping authoritarianism and overstates the EU’s humanitarian contribution to the Syrian crisis.
Merkel, along with the European council president, Donald Tusk, and Frans Timmermans, the first vice-president of the European commission, were met on Saturday by the Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu. The delegation will visit a new refugee camp near the border with Syria before visiting a child protection centre.
The visit aims to highlight the initial beneficiaries of the €6bn (£4.7bn) that theEU has pledged to give Turkey over the next few years, in exchange for Ankara readmitting all asylum seekers deported from Greece.
Ahead of the trip, Tusk’s office said: “Disbursements from the EU’s newly established facility for refugees in Turkey are ongoing and the identification and planning for further projects has intensified.”
Merkel’s visit is the latest in a series of moves aimed at getting Turkey to help end the continent’s greatest wave of human movement since the second world war.More than 850,000 refugees entered Europe after leaving Turkey last year, the majority of them ending up in Germany, and Merkel wants Ankara’s support to bring the numbers down. In exchange for Turkish acquiescence, Europe has promised looser visa restrictions for Turks travelling to Europe and agreed to accelerate negotiations over Turkey’s proposed accession to the EU.
But Merkel and her European colleagues have been accused of pandering too much to Turkey, amid calls for stronger international criticism of the government’s crackdown on political opponents.
Can Dündar, one of two prominent Turkish journalists on trial for reporting that Turkey was supplying arms to Syrian rebels, said Merkel was betraying the principles of democracy and free speech. Writing in the German weekly Der Spiegel on Saturday, Dündar accused the chancellor of selling out Turkish civil society by giving President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan a free pass over his curbs on political freedom.
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