Turkey alone can’t solve Europe’s refugee crisis

Flickr/CAFOD Photo Library. Some rights reserved.I talked to “Nabeel,” a 52-year-old man from Syria, a few days ago in the resort town of Cesme on Turkeys’ Aegean coast. He told me how the overcrowded boat he’d boarded with his wife and four children a few days earlier sank. Turkish coastguards saved them. With his 9-year-old son by his side, he told me his priority was his children’s future. “I just want my kids to be in school, and to have medical care. If this was provided in Turkey or Lebanon I would have stayed.”

Watching the news from London, it would be easy to think the EU’s deal with Turkey on refugees is a simple trade-off: three billion Euros, visa free travel and the reopening of EU accession negotiations for Turkey in exchange for stemming the flow of the hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who have been arriving on Europe’s shores via Turkey. But spending a week speaking to asylum seekers and nongovernmental groups in Turkey made clear that the situation on the ground there is complex, and that Turkey alone is not the answer.

Though it doesn’t recognize them as refugees, Turkey provides most of the more than two million Syrians living there with temporary protection that allows them to get medical treatment and education. Earlier this month, the Turkish government announced that it would give work permits to Syrians who have been in Turkey for over six months. But important as that step is, giving Syrians the right to work is unlikely to deter people seeking protection in Europe or risking their lives in the process. The deaths of more 40 people - including 17 children - when their boats sank in the Aegean last week makes that clear.