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EU ministers meet to break deadlock on migrant crisis
Migrants sleep in front of a registration camp in Opatovac, Croatia, September 22, 2015. PHOTO BY REUTERS/Marko Djurica
By Francesco Guarascio and Alastair Macdonald
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Interior ministers from the European Union were gathering in Brussels on Tuesday to try to break a deadlock on sharing out asylum-seekers that has plunged the 28 member states into a fury of mutual recriminations.
At an emergency summit on Wednesday, leaders want to focus on ramping up aid for Syrian refugees in Turkey and the rest of the Middle East and tightening control on the bloc's frontiers to stem the flow of people fleeing war and poverty.
Despite seeking consensus for weeks on a plan to share out 120,000 of the refugees across the EU, diplomats said it was still unclear whether interior ministers could reach a deal on Tuesday.
Nearly half a million people have crossed the Mediterranean to reach Europe this year, two-fifths of them from Syria, in a tide that has overwhelmed countries like Greece and Hungary.
Senior officials have voiced growing exasperation with the feuding -- notably between Germany, the main destination for the refugees, which wants governments to accept mandatory national quotas for housing the newcomers, and ex-Communist eastern states vehemently opposed to such demands.
The EU's executive Commission backs the quota scheme, but opponents call it a distraction, irrelevant to the problem of targeting aid to the neediest and reducing the numbers risking dangerous sea crossings.
After a failed interior ministers meeting last week, it is clear that the dissenters, notably Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, can be out-voted. But diplomats said they were still working to find consensus to avoid such an outcome, arguing that on such a sensitive issue it could further poison relations in the bloc.
"This is the worst I've ever known things in more than 20 years dealing with European affairs," one senior diplomat said.
SUMMIT PLANS
Officials are hoping that some compromise on the relocation scheme can be found at the ministerial talks starting at 2:30 p.m. (1230 GMT) to prevent the leaders' summit the following evening being consumed by the same thorny issue.
EU officials hope the emergency summit will deliver concrete pledges of financial and other support for Turkey, Jordan and other nations housing some four million Syrian refugees, as well as for the 11 million Syrians now homeless in their own country.
"We feel that after the past few weeks people are much more ready to support refugees while they are still outside Europe, so we want to jump on that," one senior EU official said.
The Commission said last week it was ready to come up with about 1 billion euros for Turkey, more than five times what the EU has already deployed for the two million refugees there.
A senior official told Reuters that about two-thirds of that sum would come from existing funds penciled in for Turkey and the rest by diverting other money in the EU's common budget. But a key element would be raising a matching sum from EU states.
Funds would be used to help the most affected communities, boost health services and support teaching in Arabic. In return, Turkey must do more to improve the conditions for refugees, to fight smugglers and stop more people reaching Greece.
"Turkey has to deliver," the official said. "Europe wants to take its share of refugees and will do, but Syrians should stay as close as possible to their homes."
Turkey wants money but also more recognition of its status after many years in which it has been held in a limbo of possible accession to the EU. Europe is considering holding a "mini-summit" with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Oct. 5.
(Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
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