On November 29, the European Union and Turkey approved a joint plan to counter excessive migration to the bloc, under which EU member states will give some 3 billion euros ($3.2 billion at the current exchange rate) to Ankara, fast track visa privileges for Turkish citizens, and revive negotiations for the country's EU accession.
"There will be neither a Turkish membership nor a visa-free regime in the foreseeable future. The EU is making promises which it knows that it won’t keep, because the Erdogan regime is neither able nor willing to fulfill the conditionality accompanying this deal. Both sides are just pretending, each for their own reasons," Kostas Chrysogonos said.
He underlined that Turkey will manage the flow of people toward the European Union, in order to receive bigger amounts of money.
"There won’t be an end to that, unless the civil war in Syria ends," Chrysogonos said.
Also Greek member of the European Parliament stated that the The European Union should find a way to work with adversaries of Islamic State (ISIL, or Daesh in the Arab world) such as Syrian President Bashar Assad and the Kurds, instead of appeasing Turkey.
On November 29, the European Union and Turkey approved a joint plan to counter excessive migration to the bloc, under which EU member states will give some 3 billion euros ($3.2 billion at the current exchange rate) to Ankara and fast track negotiations for its EU accession.
Chrysogonos warned that this appeasement is likely to aggravate the situation instead of improving it.
"The Erdogan regime shares responsibility for the situation in Syria, because it has secretly helped in various ways the extremists to gain control over part of the territory there. Now it is trying to make profits of all kinds-economic and political-out of the refugee drama, which is the consequence of the Syrian civil war," he said.
The European Union is currently struggling to cope with a massive refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands of people leaving conflict-torn countries in the Middle East and North Africa and traveling to Europe. Over a million illegal border crossings have been detected by the EU border agency Frontex since the beginning of 2015.
Nearly 2.2 million Syrian refugees are temporarily living in Turkey, according to the country's authorities. The European Union is attempting to prevent them from reaching the bloc by supporting Turkey financially so that it can provide decent living conditions for the refugees.
