Prime Minister Robert Fico, speaking on Tuesday, March 17, rejected reports which have emerged in Hungary suggesting that the Slovak secret services were involved in the recent murders of members of the Roma community there.
Fico, speaking at a conference on the economic crisis organised by the Slovak Foreign Affairs Ministry, said that countries with serious economic and social problems might attempt to resolve them by stirring up nationalism and extremism.
“It’s impossible [sic] to allow anyone to cover up their problems by shifting their own difficulties regarding the protection of ethnic minorities to Slovakia,” Fico said, at the same time asking Slovak diplomats to pay attention to the case, and describing it as a matter relating to Slovakia’s national and state interests. More than 50 attacks against Roma have taken place in Hungary in recent years, in which ten Roma have been killed, the TASR newswire wrote. Anti-Roma sentiment in Hungary intensified after an incident in the Hungarian town of Veszprem on February 7, in which Roma stabbed to death a member of the Romanian national handball team and injured two of his foreign team-mates (a Serb and a Croat), all members of the MKB Veszprem club. TASR
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
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