The Daily Mail — The Czech president has called for hundreds of thousands of economic migrants who have arrived in Europe to be sent to uninhabited Greek islands.
Milos Zeman said the only solution to the continent’s migrant crisis was to deport those not fleeing war and he suggested they could be sent to ’empty parts’ of Africa.
He claimed ‘less than one-third’ of the one million arrivals last year were genuine refugees.
Milos Zeman (pictured, left, with Tony Blair, back in 2002) claimed less than a third of the migrants who had come to Europe were true refugees
Mr Zeman told the Financial Times: ‘I am for deportation of all economic migrants,’ he told the Financial Times. ‘Of course I respect the cruelty of civil war in Syria, Iraq, and so on. But we do not speak about those people, we speak about economic migrants.’
Speaking on a visit to the Greek island of Rhodes, Mr Zeman antagonised his hosts by saying Greece could find homes for migrants on its islands as a way of paying off its debts to the rest of the EU.
Mr Zeman said: ‘We are in Greece, and Greece has plenty of uninhabited islands, and big foreign debt. So if you have “hotspots” in Greek islands, this would be a sort of payment of foreign debt.’
Mr Zeman also claimed the Muslim culture of many of the new arrivals was incompatible with European society.
He said: ‘I am sure there is a strong connection between the wave of migrants and the wave of jihadis.
‘There are even some reports of the German ministry of interior about the number of jihadis in Germany. And those people who deny this connection are wrong.’
