'New beginning': EU and Turkey seal migrant deal
Politics
‘New beginning’: EU and Turkey seal migrant deal
In return for cash, visas and renewed talks on joining the European Union, leaders of the EU struck a deal with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in Brussels on Sunday in an agreement hammered out by diplomats over the past month, as Europeans struggle to limit the strain on their 28-nation bloc from taking in hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees. The final offer of “an initial” 3 billion euros represents a compromise between the EU, which offered that sum over two years, and Turkey, which wanted it every year. Now the money, as French President Francois Hollande said, will be paid out bit by bit as conditions are met, leaving the total payout unclear.
Our main goal is to stem the flow of migrants … this is not a simple, trivial trade-off.
Summit chairman Donald Tusk
Before the summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel met leaders of some other EU states that have taken in many refugees — Sweden, Finland, Austria and the Benelux countries — and said afterward that they had discussed how they might resettle more of them directly from Syria rather than wait for families to reach the EU via dangerous smuggling routes across the Mediterranean. While winter weather may lower the numbers for a few months, it is also worsening the plight of tens of thousands stuck by closing borders in the Balkans.
