Bosnia officials slam anti-Muslim comment by Hungarian Prime Minister.
Bosnian authorities and religious leaders have slammed comments made by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his spokesman that Bosnia and Herzegovina’s integration into the European Union will be difficult due to the country’s sizable Muslim population.
“The difficulty with Bosnia is how to integrate a country with 2 million Muslims,” Orban’s spokesman Zoltan Kovacs tweeted.
Right-wing populist Orban said Hungary supports Bosnia’s EU bid during a long speech in Budapest on Tuesday, adding that as an EU member, Hungary had to mobilize a lot of energy to overcome “the expansion lethargy that has gripped the European Union.”
“I am doing my best to convince Europe’s great leaders that the Balkans may be further away from them than from Hungary, but how we manage the security of a state in which 2 million Muslims live is a key issue for their security too.”
Bosnia officials denounce anti-Muslim comment by Hungarian Prime Minister.
On Wednesday, certain Bosniak parties demanded that Orban’s planned official visit to Sarajevo be canceled, while the head of the Islamic community, Grand Mufti Husein Kavazovic, called 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 the 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, Sefik Dzaferovic, called Orban’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 and Herzegovina, which is made up of Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats, is experiencing its worst political crisis since the civil war ended in the 1990s.
Bosnian Serbs are threatening to build their own army, judiciary, and tax authority, with implicit assistance from Russia and Serbia, reigniting concerns of another deadly separation of the Balkan country.
Orban also stated during his speech on Tuesday that Hungary will not support EU penalties on Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, who has been threatened with sanctions by Germany and other EU member states due to his separatist stance.
“Sarajevo has lost its nerve, it is attacking everyone – Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, now Hungary. Not to mention Russia,” Dodik said on Wednesday, referring to support he has allegedly received from those countries.
Orban has a reputation for anti-immigration views, believing that Muslim migrants pose the greatest threat to Europe’s Christian values. Despite his friend, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic’s increasingly extreme views, he has supported Serbia’s rapid accession to the EU.
During the 1992-95 Bosnian Serb war, more than 100,000 people were killed and millions were displaced as Bosnian Serbs attempted to build ethnically pure territory in order to merge them with Serbia.
