President of the Czech Republic Miloš Zeman said there is a risk of Saudi Arabia-funded radical Islam spreading to European Union candidate state Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Speaking at a Visegrád Group conference on integrating Baltic nations into the EU, President Zeman said: “All four presidents have clearly agreed that, in particular, there is a risk of further spreading of radical Islam in Bosnia. I am glad that my colleagues have pointed out that this spread is largely funded by Saudi Arabian sources.”
Hungarian President János Áder, Slovak President Andrej Kiska, and Polish President Andrzej Duda agreed with Zeman that these funds do not serve to enrich Bosnia-Herzegovina or neighbouring countries, but rather to invest in mosques and minarets, which may trigger an outbreak of ‘religious intolerance’.
Saudi Arabia has been widely criticised for funding thousands of mosques across Europe and the United States which preach the Gulf nation’s state interpretation of hardline Islam, Wahhabism.
The four Central European presidents met at the Szekszard conference in Hungary, where they agreed to support EU expansionism.
However, they expressed their reservations about the Muslim-majority Bosnia-Herzegovina and disputed former Serbian territory Kosovo, who are both considered “potential candidates” by the EU, entering the European bloc, with Slovakia being amongst the member-states to have denied recognition of Kosovo as a country in 2008.
According to Slovak President Andrej Kiska, western Balkan countries are performing poorly economically, and historical tensions exist between the six nations in the region. “But what all these people associate is the desire to be in the European Union,” Kista said.
At present, former Yugoslavia nations Croatia and Slovenia are members of the EU, and Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia, along with Muslim-majority Albania to the south, are “candidate countries”.
Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage warned, before the historic vote by the UK to leave the bloc, that greater EU expansion including more Balkan nations, Turkey, and the Ukraine would expose the country to record levels of migrants from some of the poorest, most unstable parts of the continent.
In 2016, Breitbart London reported that Bosnia, which has the highest per-capita ratio of foreign Islamic State fighters of any European country, has become a “safe-house for radicals” and enjoys a “stable terrorist infrastructure”.
However, the EU is resolute on integrating the unstable region after instructing Balkan leaders to ‘embrace‘ their EU future – despite a recent political crisis in Macedonia, growing hostility between Serbia and breakaway Kosovo, an opposition boycott of Parliament in Albania, a failed coup attempt in Montenegro, and growing tensions between Bosnia’s ethnic groups.
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