Turkey: UK aid needed to solve refugee crisis
BRITAIN and the EU need to provide financial aid to Turkey if they want to stop the flow of illegal migration.
The warning came from Fatma Sahin, a senior ally of Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said the EU “was not interested” in the Syrian crisis until immigrants became a problem.
Ms Sahin is mayor of Gaziantep, a municipality close to the Syrian border.
She was cabinet minister for family and social policy before taking charge of her home region, which bore the brunt of the refugee crisis after the Syrian civil war and has had problems with Islamic State.
As a result of years of war, four million refugees poured into Gaziantep and were held in refugee camps near the border.
The issue is still having repercussions for the UK and EU, with thousands of illegal immigrants making the journey to Europe, and an estimated 20,000 making a perilous crossing across the English Channel this year alone.
Home Secretary Priti Patel has indicated criminal gangs operating from Turkey, North Africa and China are responsible for thousands of immigrants arriving
illegally on UK shores. But Ms Sahin said the problem was caused by inaction at the start of the Syrian crisis back in 2011.
She now wants funding to build 50,000 homes and 4,000 schools for refugee families.
“When [Syrian president] Assad started bombing his people there was a lot of talk but nobody did anything. Obama was still president but there was no action then,” she said.
“The EU said a lot but was not interested until immigrants started coming to its borders.
“The immigration crisis is like Covid and climate change, it does not recognise international borders and needs to be viewed
as the same.” She has attempted to take a humanitarian approach with a government decision to close the camps, even though they were “among the best in the world”, and help refugees settle in her city region until it is safe for them to return to Syria.
She said: “We need to build 50,000 new homes and 4,000 new schools. But we need help from Britain and the European Union to do this.
“I can build 5,000 new homes but it is not nearly enough.”
Prior to the Syrian crisis, the Gaziantep region was a popular destination for British tourists, and Ms Sahin is hopeful stability will bring visitors back.