“An agreement with Turkey makes sense only if it effectively contains the flow of refugees”, said Donald Tusk, the European Council president, in the early hours of Friday as the summit wrapped up.
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But member countries have been slow to offer money for the refugee crisis overall and are divided over how much to help migrants and how much to help Turkey.
Turkey is hosting a few two million migrants, majority fleeing the war in neighbouring Syria.
“Our intensified meetings with Turkish leaders… were devoted to one goal: stemming the migratory flows that go via Turkey to the EU”. Greece is a gateway to Europe for people from the Middle East and Africa.
Senior Turkish and European Commission officials who talked late into the night in Ankara were “close to finalising” a cooperation agreement largely along the lines of a Commission draft published last week, officials involved in the talks said.
Meanwhile Bulgaria is investigating the death of an Afghan migrant on its border with Turkey Thursday.
More than 613,000 migrants and asylum seekers have reached Europe via the Mediterranean Sea this year, according to figures updated daily by the global Organization for Migration.
“We need direction and we need organisation – and we need predictability – and that means sharing the burden, and most of all that we don’t concede sovereignty over the seas to the smugglers”, Merkel said after the talks.
The crisis has led to splits between member states over how to respond.
On the margins of the European Union summit, United Kingdom prime minister David Cameron sought to defuse fellow European Union leaders’ frustration over a lack of detail in his demand for new membership terms from the bloc by promising on Thursday to send them his wish-list in writing in early November. The summit underscored the challenge facing Europe with the leaders attempting to woo Turkey, already harboring more than 2 million refugees, after cold-shouldering its requests to join the bloc for the past decade.
“We still must clarify the timelines, what should happen, when, how reliable our promises of support are, how reliable Turkey’s promises of regulation are”, she said.
The notion of opening Europe’s border to 75 million Turks has also been a politically hard message for European leaders to deliver to their national constituencies.
Turkey hosts more refugees than any other country in the world.
Three other victims, “a woman, a man and a minor”, were found later, the coastguard said as Greek rescuers backed by a Portuguese ship and an European Union border agency Frontex helicopter combed the waters.
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“Bashar al-Assad can’t be the future of Syria”, French President Francois Hollande said.
