Turkey to erect wall along part of border with Greece

To date, Turkey has refrained from building permanent walls on its western borders with Greece and Bulgaria in its efforts to control migration.

It has, however, erected similar structures before along its borders to the south and to the east, with Syria and with Iran, respectively, to prevent migrant arrival numbers from climbing.

The border wall will be situated in the Edirne province, which borders both Greece and Bulgaria.

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Further measures planned

The governor of Edirne province, Yunus Sezer, said that initially an 8.5-kilometer stretch would be built along the border with Greece to serve as a “physical security measure.” 

“We started from the Greek border. We will continue depending on the situation in the future,” he added in a press conference.

Sezer further highlighted that with the help of the Interior and Defense Ministries in Ankara, Edirne province was also ramping up other measures to contain irregular migration, including electronic surveillance measures and additional fences along the border.

Rivers, fences, walls

Turkey’s border with mainland Greece measures around 200 kilometers, and is for the most past delineated by the Evros river, which provides a natural barrier. However, migrants have repeatedly tried to cross the river, often getting stuck on islets along the way.

There have also been isolated reports of fatalities on this migrant route, as well as allegations of illegal pushbacks in both directions.

Turkey’s initiative to erect a wall comes 13 years after Greece first erected two major barbed-wire fences along 11 kilometers of its border with Turkey, each measuring three meters in height.

Greece’s barbed wire fence has since repeatedly been extended, measuring well over 30 kilometers by now.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has pledged to extend the structure to over 100 kilometres by next year.

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Bulgaria nearly sealed off completely

Bulgaria meanwhile also has a fence in place along its border with Turkey, the first stretch of which was erected in 2014.

Over the past decade, this razor-wire fence has been extended to now cover all of the nearly 260 kilometers of border the EU nation shares with Turkey.

Although migrants tend to avoid the route through Bulgaria, the government took the likelihood of irregular crossings seriously as part of its integration processes into the EU; the country on the Black Sea only fully joined the Schengen free movement area of the European Union at the beginning of this year.

with AFP