Turkey no longer able to face new refugee flow — Erdogan
ANKARA: Turkey’s president said Tuesday that the country would not be able to shoulder a new potential migration wave on its own, Anadolu Agency reported.
Speaking in Istanbul at the 6th Ministerial Conference of the Budapest Process on Migration, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said building higher walls with barbed wire was no way to prevent irregular migration.
There are around 260 million migrants, over 68 million displaced people and more than 25 million refugees worldwide, he said, underscoring that these numbers are increasing day by day due to hunger, famine, civil wars, terrorist attacks, political uncertainties and economic reasons.
Turkey has spent over US$ 37 billion of its own national resources sheltering refugees, he added, citing UN figures.
Touching on allegations of a so- called Armenian genocide, Erdogan said Turkey would leave the issue to historians, regardless of the propaganda spread in the West.
He said Turkey had never committed genocide in its history.
The Budapest Process –a consultative forum on comprehensive and sustainable systems for regular migration – has been chaired by Turkey since 2006. Referring to a decision by the United States to cut all aid to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, Erdogan said cutting off aid to Palestinian refugees and trying to discipline them through poverty is inhuman.
He said it is extremely wrong to use these people, who were driven from their homeland 70 years ago, as a political tool.
Referring to the UN data, he said: “I am saying this as the president of a country that hosts the highest number of refugees in the world.” — Bernama