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Hungary to reinforce Serbia border to keep away migrants: PM

Xinhua, August 26, 2016 Adjust font size:

Hungary is reinforcing its border with Serbia to prevent the inflow of migrants, Prime Minister Viktor Orban announced on Friday.

The reinforcements are to consist of a second backup fence that is to be much stronger and resilient than the existing one, Orban told Radio Kossuth, one that will be able to hold back several hundred thousand people simultaneously.

The prime minister warned that a major influx is in the cards should Turkish politics shift and allow the huge numbers of people currently in refugee camps there to travel onward.

He then reiterated the government decision to increase the police force by an additional 3,000.

Orban complained about people whose applications for asylum had been rejected but who had appealed the decision, "financed by human rights organizations." They thus had the right to remain in Hungary until the courts ruled on the appeal, but could not be held in locked facilities in the interim, he said.

Commenting on Austria's interior minister's proposal to declare a state of emergency, Orban said that if Austria really wanted to build fences it should put them up on the Hungarian-Serbian and Hungarian-Croatian borders, not on the Austria-Hungary border.

He said all of Central Europe should get together and build fences along the Serbian-Macedonian and Macedonian-Greek borders. He also suggested that the European Union should combine its resources to protect the borders of the Greek isles.

Orban reiterated his belief that migration and terrorism were linked, saying that anyone who denied this "did not know what they were talking about." Rising terrorism in Europe is the outcome of allowing hundreds of thousands of people to enter the European Union (EU) freely from places that consider the western world their enemy.

He called on the heads of the EU governments to reject the "faulty" decisions of the "Brussels bureaucrats" that would "force" the EU countries to accept migrants.

The countries of the Visegrad Group (Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland) are meeting on Friday to discuss rejecting the idea of admitting migrants and German Chancellor Angela Merkel will attend the gathering, Orban said. Endit