President Erdogan’s plan to use Syrian refugees as a bargaining chip won’t work for much longer

Editorial: EU and US leaders will have to forcefully persuade the Turkish president that he has even more to lose from refusing to cooperate than he does from fomenting instability

President Erdogan’s diplomacy is difficult to fathom at the best of times, but he cannot make friends by turning them into enemies first. This is especially true of President Trump (AFP via Getty)

In the few days since Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, suddenly declared that his country no longer had any intention of restricting the flow of mostly Syrian refugees to the Greek border and the European Union, some 10,000 have tried to make their way northwards towards something like safety and a new life.

The Greek authorities, panicking and unable to cope with the crisis, say that some 4,000 have been detected attempting to get across the 50-mile border between Greece (ie the EU) and Turkey. Many more will follow from Turkey’s squalid camps and beyond that serve as inadequate shelter for Syrian families caught up in merciless war. It was just the other day that Mr Erdogan declared he had “opened the gates” to the EU for the 4 million refugees currently living in Turkey.

Overwhelmingly they are refugees, who (prior to president Bashar al-Assad’s war on his own people, the establishment of Isis and the clumsy interventions of the Russians and others) had no wish to leave their homeland. Their cities have been reduced to rubble; they have no option but to escape the threat of death, withering by barrel bombs or starvation.

The world had watched, appalled, a similar exodus in 2015, when the flow of humanity across the Mediterranean amounted to a million souls, the largest movement since the end of the Second World War. The image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi is seared in our collective conscience.

That crisis was paused when the German and Swedish governments agreed to take a vastly disproportionate number of Syrian exiles (compared to the contribution of hard-hearted governments in Britain, France and elsewhere), and when the Turkish government was persuaded to help stem the flow of displaced people across its territory.

Now President Erdogan has judged this moment as the right time to apply some pressure to the European Union. His demands are various, and not all are easy to meet. He would like more financial and mercurial assistance to cope with the numbers Turkey has to host – a reasonable request, though one subject to the usual caveats about the trustworthiness of the hard man of Ankara.

As European Union foreign ministers meet in emergency session to assess the crisis – poignantly now with no UK presence – that might be a demand they would be prepared to entertain relatively happily. Apparently, though, Mr Erdogan would prefer the EU to offer support for his skirmishes with Russian and Syrian regime allies as they bomb the surviving parts of Idlib to destruction. The elimination of the last redoubt of the Syrian rebels has also cost the lives of 50 Turkish service personnel, and no doubt more will follow. President Erdogan’s diplomacy is difficult to fathom at the best of times, but he cannot make friends by turning them into enemies first. This is especially true of President Trump’s America, where Turkey has proved an inconsistent and unreliable ally.

The most dangerous turn of events, though, is the reaction of the Greek government. As the barbed wire goes up and the teargas is lobbed across the improvised barriers at the pitiful crowds of refugees stuck in the woods, tensions are rapidly escalating. It seems only a matter of time before some Greek police officer or member of the Hellenic army opens fire and kills some poor Syrian civilian, maybe a child and certainly no terrorist or Assad agent. It’s the kind of nervous error of judgment that happens in a confused, frightening situation, and doesn’t need any explicit or implicit sanction from commanders in Athens. Even so, the Greek government’s pledge to “increase the level of deterrence at our borders to the maximum” carries plenty of menace.

President Erdogan is a blackmailer, on a grandly barbaric scale. He is using innocent, desperate people to further his own strategic purposes – to expand Turkey’s influence in northern Syria, push back the free Kurds and, in effect, place a slice of the northern provinces of Syria under “protective” Turkish control. It is old-fashioned nationalism and new Ottoman imperialism, and the European Union would be playing an extremely dangerous game if it gave in to other blackmail and gave tacit backing to the Turkish attacks.

The answer, insofar as there ever have been any in this hopeless predicament, is, as ever, diplomatic and humanitarian. The Greeks should let the refugees through because they cannot realistically prevent them from coming across such a wide and thinly defended border, much of it comprising the Greek Dodecanese islands around the Turkish coast.

The Greeks cannot, however, be expected to deal with such a strain on their own, and it is incumbent on the whole of Europe (EU and non-EU) to live up to that spirit of solidarity and respect for human rights that is so often spoken of but too rarely acted upon.

In diplomatic terms, the EU leaders, allied with the Americans, will have to forcefully persuade Mr Erdogan that he has even more to lose from refusing to cooperate than he does at present from fomenting instability. In particular, Mr Erdogan should be firmly told that the EU and the US will stand by Greece and Bulgaria, which is in a similar position in sharing an EU external border with Turkey. There are many more sanctions available to America and Europe to pressure Turkey into changing its mind and fulfilling its international obligations, as well as the incentive of ramped-up financial aid.

Greece and Turkey are ancient enemies, and hardly need an excuse to open up small-scale hostilities. To the two governments, shooting at Syrian refugees is one thing, but if the Greeks start firing at the Turks and the fire is returned… that is quite another. After that, anything could happen, and not necessarily to the advantage of a weak and fractured Turkey.

Mr Erdogan may give the impression of being an irrational, reckless semi-dictator – and he has certainly lived up to that reputation. Many autocrats take pleasure in building grandiose palaces for themselves, torturing their enemies, or collecting expensive cars. Mr Erdogan’s hobby is picking fights he cannot win. He is, though, not quite mad. He cannot want to turn his country into a battleground, and one that he himself might soon no longer be in control of. Turkey needs to be handled firmly.