Orban says would have to ‘use force’ if Turkey ‘opens gates’ to refugees
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Hungary would “use force” at its southern border with Serbia to protect the European Union’s frontier if Turkey follows through on its threat to open the gates to Europe to refugees, Hungary’s Viktor Orban said.
The Hungarian prime minister put up a fence on the country’s border with Serbia to block the Balkan 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 next weeks will decide what Turkey does with these people,” Orban told private broadcaster HirTV in an interview. “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 should provide more funds to Turkey to help rebuild Syrian towns.
“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,” he said.
The EU is dependent on Turkey to lessen the arrival of refugees into Europe after a 2016 agreement to seal off the Aegean route was signed.
Turkey — who currently hosts 3.6 million Syrian refugees — threatened to “open the gates” to allow those already in the country to continue their way to Europe if the EU acted against the NATO ally for its incursion into northeast Syria.
