SHAFAQNA – Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico said on Thursday his government will stop Muslims from entering the country. The statement comes in the wake of the Paris attack and the mass sexual assaults in Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve.
In light of the attacks, Fico said that the idea of multicultural Europe “has failed” and the idea of integrating Muslim refugees is impossible, vowing that his government will stop Muslims from creating “a unified Muslim community in Slovakia.”
The Slovakian official claimed that there is a “clear link” between the waves of refugees and the Paris attacks and the sexual assaults during the New Year’s Eve festivities in Germany.
“We don’t want something like what happened in Germany taking place in Slovakia,” Fico said.
He added that his country must “prevent women from being molested in public places.”
Dissatisfied with the European Commission’s plan for mandatory quotas to share out 120,000 asylum seekers by virtue of which Slovakia should take in 802 migrants, the Catholic country had already filed a lawsuit against the program.
While several European countries opened their doors to refugees irrespective of their religion, the Slovakian government said in August that the country would only accept Christian migrants because “Muslims would not feel at home.”
Along the lines of Slovakia’s position, Hungary and Poland also challenged mandatory quotas in court, claiming that “the influx of refugees into Europe threatens to undermine the continent’s Christian roots.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country has received nearly 1.1 million people asylum-seekers last year, stressed that “the continent’s open-borders system” will surely work if others share responsibility for the migrant crisis.
“I don’t want to make any concrete threats here … but I would like to say that a Schengen (border-free travel) system can only work if joint responsibility is taken for refugees and joint responsibility is taken for protecting external borders,” Merkel said after a meeting with her Romanian counterpart on Thursday.