Oil refinery in Bosanski Brod makes living in neighbouring Slavonski Brod unbearable.
There are ways for the refinery in Bosanski Brod to improve its environmental standards. This requires political will, but also legal means and awareness of the need for compliance with health protection standards. It is not just the citizens of Slavonski Brod who are in danger, but also those across the Sava River in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where the situation is perhaps even worse, reports Večernji List on December 23, 2016.
“Solving this problem is a priority task for my government, and that will be a topic of a future joint session of Croatian government and the BiH Council of Ministers”, said Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković on Thursday evening during his visit to Slavonski Brod, where citizens have been for months demanding from the authorities to solve the problem of polluted air coming over the border from the refinery in Bosanski Brod, which is located in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Citizens have been long waiting for the meeting with the Prime Minister, because civic initiatives which have launched recent protests had as one of their goals to set up a meeting with the Prime Minister to tell him everything they know about the refinery.
Plenković announced the possibility of direct talks with the Russian owners of the refinery in Bosanski Brod, as well as discussions with the European Commission and the European institutions. “For people who live in Slavonski Brod, it is already long past the time when it was necessary to solve this pollution problem. There are several levels of action – bilateral, European, directly with the owners, and the talks with the EU Commission. I expect that all these efforts will produce a result”, said Plenković.
The Prime Minister has a difficult job to do, because the government of the Republic Srpska, the Serb part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, last week extended the environmental permit for the refinery until 2020 and in that way showed what it thought about this burning issue.
It is interesting that the Prime Minister held three separate meetings in Slavonski Brod – first with representatives of the county, then with the town authorities, and finally with the representatives of civil initiatives and organizations dealing with the issue of air pollution.
“The problem is not simple, we have been aware of that for the last eight years. It is good that we have talked today. The refinery is not the only problem for people in Slavonia, we have plenty of them, and this was a good opportunity to inform the Prime Minister about the problems of our town and region”, said Mirko Duspara, Mayor of Slavonski Brod.
Civil associations’ representatives said they were not fully satisfied with the meeting. They demanded that the Croatian government should get involved in the negotiations, which has been accepted, but no specific time limits have been determined. “The government has offered some new solutions. This is gasification of not just the refinery, but also of areas on this side of the border, but there are no firm deadlines. The solution for this problem is precisely the gasification, modernization of the refinery, and cooperation with all the partners who can offer a solution, including with Russia as the owner of the refinery”, said Mladen Sudar from citizens’ initiative “People of Brod for Brod”.
