Hungary’s PM denounced in Bosnia over anti-Muslim rhetoric

Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán has been denounced by Bosnian officials and religious leaders after he claimed integrating the country into the European Union would be a challenge because of its Muslim population. Orbán was giving a speech in Budapest on Tuesday, lines of which were tweeted out in English by his spokesperson. When asked […]

Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán has been denounced by Bosnian officials and religious leaders after he claimed integrating the country into the European Union would be a challenge because of its Muslim population.

Orbán was giving a speech in Budapest on Tuesday, lines of which were tweeted out in English by his spokesperson.

When asked about Bosnia’s bid to join the EU, his spokesman Zoltán Kovács tweeted the PM’s response: “The challenge with Bosnia is how to integrate a country with 2 million Muslims.”

Orbán, during his speech, said that Hungary supports Bosnia’s effort to join the EU, but added that “how we manage the security of a state in which 2 million Muslims live is a key issue for their security too,” referring to other EU states.

Some in Bosnia responded by calling for Orbán’s official visit to Sarajevo to be cancelled, with the head of the country’s Islamic Community, grand mufti Husein Kavazović, calling his statement “xenophobic and racist”.

“If such ideologies become the basis on which the policies of a united Europe are based, then it takes us back to the times when European unity was to be built on similar fascist, Nazi, violent and genocidal ideologies that led to the Holocaust and other horrific crimes,” he said in a statement.

The Bosniak member of the country’s tripartite presidency, Šefik Džaferović, called Orbán’s statement “shameful and rude”.

“It is not a challenge for the EU to integrate 2 million (Bosnian) Muslims, because we are an Indigenous European people who have always lived here and we are Europeans,” he said.

Bosnia, which is made up of Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats, is going through its gravest political crisis since the end of the civil war in the 1990s.

With tacit support from Russia and Serbia, Bosnian Serbs are threatening to form their own army, judiciary and tax authority, reviving fears of another bloody breakup of the Balkan country.

During his speech on Tuesday, Orban also said Hungary would not support EU sanctions against Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik as threatened by Germany and some other member states because of his separatist stand. (Euro News)