DM Monitoring
ANKARA: The international community has been increasingly supportive of Turkey safely sending migrants back to their home countries, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said on Sunday.
The international community has started to understand the gravity of the situation, the minister said while speaking to the press in the southern province of Antalya.
Noting that United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) chief Filippo Grandi visited Turkey recently, Çavuşoğlu said: “We have plans to send back migrants to their countries, especially to Syria, with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.”
Çavuşoğlu said that Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, the countries hosting the highest number of Syrian refugees in the world, have launched an initiative. The minister underlined that migrants must not be forced to return, but encouraged to by providing education, health and employment resources for those returning to areas like Syria’s northwestern Idlib province.
Stating that the European Union is against the rebuilding of Syria, Çavuşoğlu added: “The reconstruction of a place or country while the war goes on is not realistic. The stances of all of us against the regime are clear; however, responding to the basic necessities on the ground is not reconstructing a country.” He said that the same can be said for Afghanistan. “It is not right to send people back immediately due to the situation in Afghanistan; it is also not possible. There is no interlocutor.”
