Slovakia last week said it was granting asylum to a group of 149 Christians who live in Iraq and face extremism there. Their arrival in Slovakia comes amid mounting tensions between the European Union and Slovakia and several other Eastern European countries over a plan to divide refugees among member states.
Slovakia’s Interior Minister Robert Kalinak says that 25 Christian families will arrive from troubled Iraq in Slovakia within in the next few days. He adds that Slovakia should act, as in his words “they would lose their lives if we didn’t help them”.
Officials say that the families will be initially placed in a center in eastern Slovakia and the Catholic Church has agreed to help them integrate into society.
However Slovakia, a predominantly Roman Catholic country, remains opposed to a European plan to redistribute as many as 160,000 asylum-seekers fleeing war and poverty among the European Union’s 28 member states.
Yet EU leaders say they still hope that all member states will participate in the scheme after Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu urged closer cooperation during a summit with the EU last week. “This is not a
Turkish issue, this is a European issue,” he said.
“Turkey or the EU are not responsible for this humanitarian crisis. But at the end of the day we have to act together how to deal with the refugee crisis.”
The EU has pledged €3 billion to support Syrian refugees in Turkey.
Last last month, Greek Orthodox Archbishop Ieronymos II of Athens and All Greece has called for the European Union to assume a more active role in tackling Europe’s refugee crisis, describing the possibility of a large number of refugees being trapped in Balkans states as a “powder keg”.
In comments reported by the World Council of Churches, Archbishop Ieronymos, Primate of the Church of Greece whose country has been among those bearing the brunt of the crisis, said Europe “must assume its responsibilities as regards the refugee problem and contribute to tackling the causes that provoked it”. “The Western world has responsibilities for the appearance of the refugee problem”.
The archbishop has visited refugees on the Greek island of Samos, among the more the 700,000 who have passed through Greece since January.
– with BosNewsLife
