Here’s What Prime Minister Viktor Orbán Said about Refugees and the ‘Backroom Deal’ with Turkey
“The basic question sounds like this,” said Prime Minister Orbán, turning to the issue that set the international media abuzz this week. “Does anybody have the right in this world to tell us who we, in our own country, feel like living together with?”
“And the answer,” he continued, “is that no one has the right to define it. It is only to be decided on by us, Hungarians, who live here and own this land. If we can say this sentence, from then on it is logical that we must denounce every such attempt of the Union or Brussels, which takes away from us the right of deciding who we let in, if at all.”
The prime minister, who was addressing a group of ethnic Hungarian civic leaders from around the world on Wednesday, then picked up what he called the “hot potato.”
Behind the official agreement reached last Sunday between the EU and Turkey, another deal has been struck, the prime minister said, whereby “400 to 500 thousand Syrian refugees must be transported into the EU, directly from Turkey.”
It’s hardly a secret because it has already appeared in the German press, but it is not transparent. “My presumption is that such un-public agreement is in place. I think this because once they raised it at the Malta European Council meeting, where we vetoed it. Therefore it has not become a part of the Turkish-EU agreement, but I think that this backroom deal exists and we’ll face it in the upcoming days.”
Hungary and the Visegrad countries will then be subjected to “huge pressure” to accept these refugees “on a mandatory basis,” he said. Hungary, like several other EU countries, opposes such a plan.
The problem, of course, is that the agreement reached last Sunday between the Council of the EU and Turkey says nothing about relocating refugees from Turkey to EU Member States on a binding basis. The agreement talks only about “burden sharing.”
And yet, as other international press reports clearly indicate, Prime Minister Orbán is not the only one who suspects there’s more here than meets the eye.
“EU diplomats hope that the new agreement will not just close down irregular migration routes, but open up the possibility of accepting hundreds of thousands of qualified Syrian refugees through regular channels, after interviewing them in Turkey,” The Economist reported on Monday. European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans, lead negotiator for the Turkish-EU agreement, told the Wall Street Journal in an interview that the EU should take refugees directly from Turkey. “Whatever we decide on the broader issue with Syrian refugees,” he said, “resettlement will have to be a bigger part of the solution than it is now.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker have been talking about a “voluntary program” to accept Syrian refugees. In an article entitled, “Europe’s Refugee Deal with Turkey is Only a Start,” Bloomberg’s editors cited the European Stability Initiative, “a think tank that estimates that as many as 500 thousand to 700 thousand refugees will need to be resettled in the EU per year.” Reuters reported that about eight or nine EU member states (France is reportedly hesitating) would voluntarily accept refugees from Turkey and quoted EU officials on such plans being drafted in the upcoming days and weeks.
