Prague, Jan 24 (CTK) – The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) project putting school children in the role of refugees by means of comics and a film is idiotic and dangerous, President Milos Zeman said on Prima commercial television Saturday.
He praised Education Minister Katerina Valachova who said that her ministry will not distribute the material to schools.
“The comics are another idiotic project of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. I think that it is just as naive as Bolshevik propaganda that, though it did not have the form of comics, was essentially just as stupid,” Zeman said.
He added that comics “in a way simplifies the situation.”
The project Hello Czech Republic is based on a Swedish model. The UNHCR owns the copyright to the model.
It includes a comic book and a film telling the story of Hamid, a boy who sets out on a journey from Afghanistan to Sweden. A 13-minute film tells the story of a Kurdish girl whom her mother sent to Sweden.
Zeman said he believes that children would behave according to the manual in real contact with immigrants and that it would take a woman or a girl in Cologne into a blind ally.
“Every stupid propaganda is dangerous,” Zeman added.
According to witnesses and police, about one thousand people of Arab and North African origin met in Cologne during the night of New Year’s Eve and groups of some men encircle women, sexually attacked them and robbed.
The project on migration for schoolchildren was brought to the Czech Republic by META that focuses on education of foreigners.
The project also includes a fictitious story of a nuclear disaster that forces the ten million Czechs leave their country. It is designed to show children how migration looks like from the other side.
META claimed that the campaign was supported by the Education Ministry. Valachova, however, told the Chamber of Deputies during the question time on Thursday that her ministry did not participate in the preparation of the material, has nothing in common with it and that it is not sponsored by it in any way.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees criticised Zeman last autumn for his statements about the migrant crisis, dismissing them as xenophobic and Islamophobic.
Zeman spoke about the threat of introducing the Islamic law sharia in the Czech Republic and that a majority of the migrants do not deserve compassion.
The Presidential Office dismissed the UNHCR’s criticism as part of an escalating campaign against the Czech Republic over its stance on the migrant crisis.
