The spokesman for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has denounced European Union citizens who helped smuggle migrants through his country calling them organized criminals.
In a fiery speech to the press in Brussels on Monday Zoltán Kovács, the spokesman for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, railed against the so-called “migrant helpers” who helped smuggled migrants through Hungary last year. Kovács said that only Hungary had acted appropriately to the crisis by erecting a large border fence and that the other European countries, particularly Germany and Austria, were largely to blame for the resulting crisis Spiegel Online reports.
The surge of migrants last September proved to be a “large breach of security” Kovács said adding that “with illegal migration, terrorism came.” The spokesman noted a particular event in which migrants marched from Budapest to Vienna last September and that only a few days afterwards a “mob of hundreds, perhaps thousands of illegal migrants” tried to sneak over the border into Hungary.
Kovács also blamed the mass migration and its supporters for facilitating the Paris attacks last year and the Brussels terror attack this year, saying that at least two of the main organizers of both attacks had come through his country because of the policies and “welcome culture” of Western Europe.
“Governments in Germany and Austria knew everything,” he said and talked about the hundreds of Austrian and German citizens who crossed the border to pick up and drive migrants out of Hungary who were walking to the Austrian border. One of the major catalysts for the “migrant helpers” was an incident in which up to 50 migrants died while smuggling themselves in the back of a refrigerated truck.
Regardless of their motivations, Kovacs said that if their intention was to smuggle people across the Hungarian border, either into or out of the country “citizens of other EU countries have operated organized crime on Hungarian soil.”
Mr. Kovács also defended the actions of the Hungarian government. He said that his country was not responsible for the failings of other countries when it came to migration. Greece, Kovács said, was at fault for not properly protecting the common European Union border, and said that the result left countries like Croatia helpless and unprepared. “Croatia collapsed last year under the pressure of migration within a day,” he said.
The speech comes two weeks before Hungary will ask its citizens their opinion on whether or not migrants should be taken in by the country. The referendum, to be held on October 2nd, is a reaction to the European Union’s migrant redistribution policy which Hungary and a number of other Central European countries have refused to participate in.
Many expect that Viktor Orban will win the referendum and Kovács hinted that it would lead to further laws that would be tough on migration and likely create more conflict between Brussels and Budapest, but did not go into detail on any proposals.