EU Negotiating With Turkey To Integrate Syrians Into Turkish System

The European Union has been negotiating with Turkey over the settlement and integration of Syrian refugees who fled from the Syrian civil war to Turkey but have dim prospects of returning to Syria anytime soon.

The 28-nation political and economic bloc is also considering allocating 70 million euros to Turkey for the integration project.

A European diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said on Friday that the “guest” status of Syrian refugees can no longer be managed and that EU officials have been talking with Turkish authorities for months about the need for an “integration plan.”

He said the 70 million euros allocated to Turkey for its integration plan will be a first step and that the EU is ready to provide more help with donations.

The diplomat said: “To host the Syrian refugees in camps is costly and difficult. At a certain moment, the Syrian children need to go to school and they need to have access to housing and health care. Syrians cannot be managed as guests any more. Turkey needs a plan for integration.”

About 1.6 million Syrian refugees have fled to Turkey since the civil war in Syria broke out in 2011.

The European diplomat said the integration process will certainly be complex and will require a certain amount of tolerance on the part of Turkish society. A few incidents of violence have been carried out on refugees in Turkey, whose numbers in Turkey have been increasing since 2011. The Turkish government refers to Syrians who fled from the war as “guests.”

When asked whether the EU expects Turkey to shoulder the burden of the Syrian refugee problem alone, the diplomat said: “Realistically, people are here [in Turkey]. So we need to start here.”

Turkey shares a border with Syria of about 900 kilometers (600 miles). The current fierce fighting between Kurdish forces in the town of Kobani in Syria against the radical Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has caused a number of Kurdish civilians to flee to Turkey as well.

Syria's civil war has forced about 3 million people out of their country, half of them children.

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) recently pointed to the increasingly horrifying conditions inside Syria as a reason for the explosion in the number of refugees in the last few years. The majority of displaced Syrians have been hosted by Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.

(Cihan/Today's Zaman)