PHOTOS: Hungary built an entire youth centre in an African country

A youth counseling centre built in part from funds contributed by the Hungarian government has been inaugurated in Ethiopia, Péter Szijjártó, the minister of foreign affairs and trade, said in Addis Ababa on Tuesday.

Hungary contributed 160 million forints (EUR 429,000) to the construction of the centre that will enable young people in Ethiopia to stay in and return to their homeland, Szijjártó told the inauguration ceremony, according to a ministry statement. The minister underscored the importance of supporting local communities so that they can remain in or return to “their homeland of hundreds of years or more”. “Our basic principle is that help should be taken where it is needed rather than bringing problems where there aren’t any yet,” Szijjártó said.

Europe has been facing strong migration pressure in the recent period, which poses serious security challenges to migrants’ countries of origin, transit countries and their destination countries, he said. Migration should be prevented rather than encouraged, he said, and called for creating the circumstances that will enable people to remain in their homeland. This is what Hungary is doing in some fifty countries worldwide, most of them in Africa, Szijjártó said, adding that Hungary was prepared to keep financing such projects in the future, too. As a country with one thousand years of Christian statehood, Hungary feels responsibility for all Christians, Szijjártó said, adding that Christianity was the most persecuted religion in the world today.

Persecuted Christians

Szijjártó said that some 360 million Christians faced persecution, oppression or discrimination last year. He said there were 26 countries in Africa alone where Christian communities were in danger, noting that Ethiopia was not one of them. He said it was frustrating that this issue was not getting the attention it needed, while Muslim countries were putting significant emphasis on fighting Islamophobia and supporting Muslim communities.

This, he added, raised the question as to why the governments of Christian countries “are not brave enough” to display a similarly firm stance, saying that many took a “hypocritical and unreasonable” position on the issue. Szijjártó said that though Hungary and Ethiopia were thousands of kilometres apart, they were linked by the bond of Christianity. Cardinal Berhaneyesus Demerew Souraphiel, Archbishop of Addis Ababa, said Ethiopia and Hungary had both preserved their Christian values, making them similar in many ways.

He thanked Hungary for taking on a proactive role in the protection of Christians worldwide, saying it was not common for a government to treat the religious freedom of persecuted Christians as a priority in such a way. This initiative would deserve attention from other European countries, too, he added.

Here are some recently shared photos of the foreign minister’s Addis Ababa visit: