Netherlands Expels Turkish Minister

A Turkish minister was expelled from The Netherlands and escorted back to Germany by Dutch police after being prevented from addressing a Rotterdam rally, the city’s mayor said early Sunday.

Turkey’s Family Minister Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya, who had arrived late Saturday, was “on the way from Rotterdam to Germany,” mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb told reporters,

“She has been expelled back to the country she came from,” he said, saying she was being taken to the border.

After several hours of negotiations, it had proven “impossible to find a solution.”

Dutch authorities had repeatedly told Turkish officials that Kaya was “not welcome. But nevertheless she decided to travel,” he said.

Aboutaleb also angrily denounced Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s criticism of the Dutch authorities as “the vestiges of the Nazis.”

“Don’t they know that I am the mayor in a land that was bombed by the Nazis?” he asked.

Large parts of Rotterdam were destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1940. And the country was then occupied by the Nazis.