Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development : Minister Müller in northern Iraq: key to resolving the refugee crisis lies in the region itself

Press re­lease of 27.01.2016 |

Er­bil - In prepa­ra­tion for the Syr­ian donor con­fer­ence tak­ing place in Lon­don on 4 Feb­ru­ary, Fed­eral Min­is­ter Gerd Müller, who is cur­rently vis­it­ing the Mid­dle East re­gion, had a meet­ing with Nechir­van Barzani, the Prime Min­is­ter of the Kur­dish re­gional gov­ern­ment, and with mem­bers of his cab­i­net. The re­gion, with a pop­u­la­tion of over five mil­lion Kurds, has taken in 1.5 mil­lion Iraqis flee­ing from the ac­tiv­i­ties of the IS and also 300,000 Syr­i­ans.

Com­ment­ing on the sit­u­a­tion, Min­is­ter Müller said: 'The key to re­solv­ing the refugee cri­sis lies in the re­gion it­self. Ger­many is al­ready do­ing every­thing in its power to help. What we need now is an in­ter­na­tional con­certed ef­fort. We must crank up the econ­omy in the main host coun­tries. We must cre­ate hun­dreds and thou­sands of jobs, for lo­cals and for refugees. Given the state of the re­gion's in­fra­struc­ture, an in­vest­ment and eco­nomic de­vel­op­ment pro­gramme is just what is needed to sta­bilise the sit­u­a­tion. If peo­ple have prospects for a vi­able fu­ture where they are, then they will not put them­selves in the hands of traf­fick­ers and peo­ple smug­glers in a bid to reach Eu­rope. The Syr­ian donor con­fer­ence in Lon­don needs to send a strong mes­sage in this re­gard. We must show the refugees by our ac­tions that, whilst they can­not all come to us, we will come to them with a pow­er­ful Mar­shall Plan and will help cre­ate for them the prospect of a bet­ter fu­ture.'

In north­ern Iraq, the has built win­terised shel­ters for al­most 30,000 refugees in ten camps, has im­proved the wa­ter sup­ply for 100,000 peo­ple, has set up a hos­pi­tal and health cen­tres to look af­ter half a mil­lion peo­ple and has opened seven new schools for 50,000 chil­dren. Over the past two years, the has tripled its over­all fund­ing to help deal with the Syr­ian-Iraq cri­sis. Be­fore ar­riv­ing in north­ern Iraq, Min­is­ter Müller had been in Turkey and Jor­dan.