BUDAPEST: Jihadists have exploited Europe’s migrant crisis by hiding among asylum seekers, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said Monday, in the wake of attacks in Paris.
“In a deliberate and organised way, terrorists have exploited mass migration by mingling in the mass of people leaving their homes in the hope of a better life,” Orban told lawmakers in an address titled “Attack on Europe.”
His right-wing government has taken a hard line against migrants, sealing the country’s southern borders with razor-wire fence and repeatedly claiming that the influx of mostly Muslim refugees threatened the continent’s Christian identity.
Orban slammed the European Union for being “adrift, weak and incompetent“, saying top officials should have done more to prevent the attacks in the French capital.
“The right to self defence is stronger than any other, we should not put European lives at risk on the basis of any kind of ideology or economic arguments,” Orban said.
“Those who said yes to immigration, who transported immigrants from warzones, those people did not do everything for the defence of European people.”
Brussels had invited “unchecked” hundreds of thousands of people from warzones into the EU, Orban said.
“We don’t think that everyone is a terrorist but no one can say how many terrorists have arrived already, how many are coming day by day,” he told parliament in Budapest.
Orban also reiterated his rejection of the EU’s “irrational” obligatory quota system for migrants.
“As long as this government is breathing, there won’t be any quota,” he said.
Hungarian lawmakers are due to vote early next month on a legal challenge to the scheme in EU courts.
More than 800,000 migrants, mostly fleeing violence in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, have landed on European shores so far this year, sparking the continent’s biggest migration crisis since World War II.
Friday’s attacks in Paris and the discovery of a Syrian passport near one of the assailant’s bodies have revived a European debate on whether to take a harder line on migrants. --AFP