Turkey insists no deal done on EU refugee plan

Turkish foreign minister Feridun Sinirlioglu insisted that an action plan being worked out by EU officials for joint action with Ankara on the refugee crisis is still a draft.

He also hit out at the EU offer of financial aid to Turkey to ease the crisis as “unacceptable”.

“There is a financial package proposed by the EU and we told them it is unacceptable,” Sinirlioglu told the press, saying that Turkey required at least €3 billion in the first year of the deal.

Earlier, Turkish president Recap Tayyip Erdogan issued a scathing criticism of Europe’s reaction to the refugee crisis.

“They announced they’ll take in 30,000 to 40,000 refugees and then they are nominated for the Nobel for that,” he said. “We are hosting two and a half million refugees but nobody cares.”

Almost 600,000 asylum seekers have reached the EU’s shores by sea so far this year, the majority of them travelling from Turkey.

During a EU Council summit on Thursday, leaders agreed to offer Turkey up to €3 billion in aid, visa-free travel to the borderless Schengen Zone for 75 million Turks, and the resumption of frozen negotiations on Turkey’s EU membership bid.

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said that the offer was aimed at keeping over two million Syrian refugees in Turkey and prevent them from attempting to cross into Europe.

However, diplomats warned that the €3 billion weren’t available, and the offer to fast-track visa waivers for Turks was met with much resistance amongst EU leaders, in particular those of Greece, Cyprus and France.

German chancellor Angela Merkel will travel to Turkey this weekend.

“There is still a huge amount to do, but you cannot say that we’ve achieved nothing,” she said, while warning that the narrow sea channel separating Greece and Turkey was in the hands of human smugglers.

She had earlier said that all EU member states must be prepared to send security staff to Europe’s borders and that it would be unfair to ask EU countries seeing the majority of initial refugee entries to also secure borders.

Also on Friday, Hungary announced it is closing its border with Croatia at midnight local time, a month after it shut its border with Serbia to prevent refugee crossings.

Meanwhile, a Bulgarian border guard reportedly shot dead an Afghan asylum seeker after entering the country from Turkey late on Thursday.