Greek PM tells the Guardian planned talks including Merkel, Macron and Erdoğan are an opportunity to ‘set the record straight’

Greece is hoping critical talks between the EU and Ankara will help ease the border crisis that has weighed heavily on the country since Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, declared he had “opened the gates” to Europe for migrants and refugees.

In an exclusive interview, the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, said planned talks between the German and French leaders on one hand, and Erdoğan on the other, on Tuesday would be an opportunity to finally “set the record straight”.

At a time when the coronavirus outbreak has overtaken the global agenda, neither Brussels nor Athens want a repeat of the dangerously chaotic scenes that recently played out on the Greek-Turkish border.

“Now that things have quietened down, this is the time to set the record straight and make sure that what has happened is not going to happen again,” Mitsotakis said.

The Greek leader called his Turkish counterpart’s threat of “unleashing” migrants on Europe utterly unacceptable. But he added that the revision of a multi-billion migration deal that was recently jettisoned by Erdoğan might be the best way of ensuring similar crises didn’t erupt again.

“I think, eventually, he will have to acknowledge the fact that there is a win-win solution going forward, that we need to go back to the agreement, improve it in certain aspects,” Mitsotakis said of the EU-Turkey deal struck at the height of the Syrian war aiming to curb the influx of refugees. “But this is not going to happen under conditions of blackmail.”

The pact, reached four years ago this week, dramatically reduced arrivals as Turkey, in return for €6bn in aid, agreed to step up border patrols and host millions of displaced Syrians in what was seen as a victory for realpolitik, if a defeat for human rights.

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Eighteen days have elapsed since Erdoğan announced that refugees would be free to move on and into Europe, adding he had loosened frontier controls because Brussels had failed to keep its part of the deal. Overnight, around 35,000 people amassed along the north-western land borderthe country shares with Greece, many bussed in by Turkish authorities.

In echoes of 2015, when almost 1 million migrants entered Europe through Lesbos and other eastern Aegean islands, some 150,000 also mobilised along Turkey’s western shores in the hope of crossing the sea.

Mitsotakis, whose centre-right government was elected on a tough law-and-order platform in July, responded by reinforcing Greece’s sea and land borders, mobilising EU support and extending a razor wire topped fence along the Evros River separating the two countries – both Nato allies but longtime geopolitical rivals.

The military build-up gave new meaning to the notion of Fortress Europe. But while praised by EU’s commission president Ursula von der Leyen for being Europe’s “shield”, Greece was also criticised for tactics seen as brutal and unforgiving.

Coastal guards were allegedly filmed firing warning shots at one dinghy and using sticks to prevent further arrivals on islands where 44,000 people are crammed in desperately unhygienic camps already multiple times over capacity.

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Turkey, its own propaganda machine in full throttle, made unproven claims that at least four had died and up to 1,000 left injured by riot police using water cannons and tear gas to deter stone-throwing migrants crossing the land border; while Mitsotakis was chided for suspending asylum applications, a move seen as upending the moral foundations on which the EU was built.

But insisting that Greek forces were under strict instructions not to endanger lives, Mitsotakis claimed he had no choice but to defend his country’s sovereign borders when it was confronting such an “asymmetric” threat.

“We haven’t put any lives at risk,” he said. “I will not tolerate any use of force that will endanger lives. I have made that very, very clear. There is no use of live ammunition.”

Mitsotakis also claimed the one-month asylum ban was “an extraordinary measure for extraordinary circumstances”.

“It’s a provisional measure. It was necessary to send a clear signal of deterrence but it was also necessary to make sure, at that given point, our asylum system would not be overwhelmed,” he added, referring to the massive backlog of applications in a system both understaffed and overwhelmed.

Mitsotakis believes that unlike 2015, when Syrians fleeing war and destitution sought refuge in Europe, Turkey, this time, is consciously attempting to weaponise refugees in pursuit of its own policy goals. “This is no longer an asylum problem … it’s not even a refugee problem [or] migration problem. We need to recognise that. It is very clearly a geopolitical issue,” he said, arguing that innocent people being used as political pawns were the real victims of a crisis constructed by Erdoğan to pressure Europe for further financial assistance and support in Idlib, Syria’s last rebel-held province.

Even before the latest flare-up, Greece was being targeted with renewed vigour by traffickers with 74,600 people arriving last year – a jump of 151% compared with 2017 – according to the UN refugee agency. The rise had not only fuelled tensions with Turkey but fomented friction between locals and migrants especially on islands where vigilante groups have appeared.

But signalling that some good had come out of it, Mitsotakis welcomed Europe’s decision to finally implement relief measures, instituting a programme of voluntary returns to alleviate Greece’s vastly overcrowded camps and accepting to relocate minors across the bloc. As many as 5,000 people could be returned to their countries of origin if they accepted Brussel’s offer of €2,000 to go home, he said.

“It’s an incentive for people to leave the islands and it’s also a clear signal to the local population on the islands that we intend to reduce the number of migrants and refugees on [them].”

Seven EU member states had also agreed to take in children and teenagers, “which is something we have been pushing very hard for since September,” he added.

Thousands of asylum seekers still remain at the Turkish land border bent on crossing into Greece. Aid organisations are not without fear: if hit by Covid-19 refugee communities could be decimated.

The pandemic has meant that Tuesday’s talks will be held by teleconference and not in Istanbul where Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron had been scheduled to fly.

Juggling two crises – migration and coronavirus – Mitsotakis is the first to want a breakthrough: “We have to live with Turkey.”

Asked if Greece desired better relations with its neighbour to the east, he smiles and says: “We have to have strong economic ties. We have our differences, we need a roadmap to resolve them.”