Prague, Sept 3 (CTK) – More and more Czechs are offering aid, including accommodation and jobs, to refugees flowing from the Middle East and Africa to Europe, daily Hospodarske noviny (HN) writes yesterday.
It cites an example of Anna, a clerk from Mnisek pod Brdy, central Bohemia, who with her husband decided to provide free rooms in their house for three to four refugees, preferably a family. She reacted to the words by President Milos Zeman who called on signatories of the academics’ petition expressing solidarity with refugees, to take one refugee home each, HN says.
Biologist Adam Weiss from Prague is considering offering a whole flat to refugees. Moreover, he wants to get acquainted with them, show them the city and help them communicate with authorities, HN writes.
Kvido Stepanek, owner of the Isolit-Bravo mechanical engineering firm, wants to accommodate refugees in the firm’s dormitory for workers with 20 flats that is being reconstructed.
“These people are sleeping somewhere at railway stations on a a piece of blanket. We simply must do something with it. It is a shame,” Stepanek, a philanthropist who is sending humanitarian aid to Ukraine, told HN.
Other Czech businesspeople do not offer accommodation to migrants, but they would be willing to employ them in their plants to compensate lack of technical staff.
However, the possibility to really help migrants from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq heading mainly for Germany and Nordic countries across the Czech Republic is limited now. If they are detained by police, they end up in detention facilities, and if released, they go on to the West, HN says.
Consequently, it adds, Czechs will have the first chance to really help refugees at the end of the year when the first 50 refugees will arrive out of the 1500 the Czech Republic promised to accept in the next two years. This year, 400 migrants should arrive in the country, while in 2016 and 2017, it should be 700 and 400.
Some 20 people a day turn to the Association for Integration and Migration with an offer of aid to refugees and other people contact the iDobrovolnik.cz portal for volunteering in this respect, HN says.
Though the number of Czechs expressing solidary with migrants has been rising, 71 percent of them agree with Zeman’s view of refugees, according to the latest poll of the ppm factum agency, HN writes.
Zeman said in a recent interview with the Blesk.cz server that no one had invited the refugees to the Czech Republic and that they should respect the rules of this country or leave.
The prime ministers of the Visegrad Four (V4) countries, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, will debate the migration crisis in Prague on Friday. However, compared to Hungary, the other three V4 members are facing minimal problems with migrants, HN says.
Since the Czech police tightened the checks of foreigners in mid-June, they have detained some 2400 migrants, while 3650 of them arrived in Austria on Monday alone, almost 39,000 asked for asylum in Hungary in August and 800,000 are to get to Germany this year, HN writes.
