Hungary would ‘use force’ against migrants if Erdogan sends them from Turkey: PM
Hungary would have to “use force” at
its southern border with Serbia to protect the European Union’s frontier if
Turkey delivers on a threat to open the gates for refugees through the Balkans
towards Europe, Hungary’s prime minister said.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban built a
steel fence on Hungary’s border with Serbia to seal off the Balkans route of
migration, where hundreds of thousands of people marched through from the
Middle East to Western Europe at the peak of the crisis in 2015.
The EU relies on Turkey to curb the
arrival of refugees into Europe following a 2016 agreement to seal off the
Aegean route after more than one million people entered the bloc.
Turkey, which hosts 3.6 million
Syrian refugees, threatened to “open the gates” to allow those already in the
country to head for Europe if the EU portrayed Turkey’s military operation in
northeast Syria negatively.
“The next weeks will decide what
Turkey does with these people,” Orban told private broadcaster HirTV in an
interview late on Wednesday. “It can steer them in two directions: take them
back to Syria or set them off towards Europe.
“If Turkey chooses the latter, these
people will arrive at Hungary’s southern border in huge masses,” Orban said,
adding that the EU, while criticizing Ankara, should provide more funds to
Turkey to help rebuild Syrian towns.
Orban, who has often been at
loggerheads with Brussels over some of his policies affecting migrants, said
currently there were about 90,000 people on the Balkans migration route and
their ranks could swell to 100,000 shortly.
“If Turkey sets off further hundreds
of thousands on top of this, then we will need to use force to protect the
Hungarian border and the Serbian-Hungarian frontier and I do not wish for
anyone that we should need to resort to that,” Orban said.
Orban’s nationalist government has
forged close relations with Turkey, China, and some ex-Soviet states in Middle
Asia as part of an eastern opening initiative.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan is
due to come to Budapest for a visit early next month.
