EU fails to do its share for 4 mln refugees in Turkey, Erdoğan says

Turkey's president on Feb. 22 criticized the EU's double standard of supporting Greece on the issue of migrants but not sharing responsibility for 4 million refugees hosted by Turkey.

"While the EU gives Greece €3 billion [$3.65 billion] for 100,000 refugees, it did not shoulder its responsibility for 4 million refugees in Turkey," said Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, speaking at a migration conference at a university in Turkey's Izmir province.

An amount of €6 billion [$7.3 billion] in support to be allocated to Turkey under a March 2016 agreement is still not fully released, he said.

He added that refugees along the Turkish-Greek border have been openly persecuted by Greek security forces, resulting in shameful scenes.

"Humanity has failed [migrants] not only in the Mediterranean but also in the Aegean and Meric River," he said, citing the river along the Turkish-Greek border, stressing that in 2020 alone, the Greek Coast Guard committed 9,000 cases of illegal pushback of asylum seekers in the Aegean Sea.

The world also has no idea where and who kidnapped tens of thousands of Syrian children seeking refuge in Europe who disappeared, he added.

"What happened in Syria showed us that raising the walls, fencing the borders with barbed wire, or even sinking the boats of migrants are not solutions," he said.

Stressing his country's efforts for refugees and Syrian people, Erdoğan said 420,000 refugees from the country have so far returned to the regions that Turkey cleared of terrorists.

Erdoğan said that approximately 85% of the world's refugee population is not hosted by wealthy states but by countries which are less developed.

"According to figures from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, only 39,500 out of 1.4...