ZAGREB, May 18, 2018 – Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović told the Bosnia-Herzegovina edition of the Večernji List daily on Friday that Croatia would do everything to prevent the entry of migrants from Bosnia and Herzegovina and announced support to the Bosnian authorities in dealing with this problem.
“Croatia will do everything to protect its border and prevent any attempts at crossing the border illegally and has all the necessary resources for that. We are prepared to assist Bosnia and Herzegovina in that regard,” Grabar-Kitarović said.
She said that Croatia could deploy police officers through the EU border control agency Frontex to control the border at the Mali Zvornik crossing between Bosnia and Serbia. She added that the authorities in Zagreb were carefully monitoring the increased influx of migrants on the new route across Bosnia and Herzegovina and their attempts to get to EU countries through Croatia.
“Croatian police have reinforced all the necessary resources to control the state border, which is the EU’s external border with Bosnia and Herzegovina, with additional people and technical resources being deployed,” she said.
“The experience of managing the migrant wave in 2015 points to the conclusion that only with coordinated action of all the relevant state services on the route can any response to this challenge be successful. We recently spoke about this at the Brdo-Brijuni Process Summit in Skopje, considering the significance of this issue for the stability of the entire Southeast Europe,” the president said.
The president’s interview was published just when the migrant crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina had turned into a political problem with unforeseeable consequences as various levels of government were arguing how to respond to the increased influx of refugees and who was responsible for their care.
Security Minister Dragan Mektić and the chief of police of the Bosniak-Croat Federation entity Dragan Lukač warned that the decision to prevent columns of buses full of migrants travelling from Sarajevo to Mostar, which was most likely adopted by the police in Herzegovina-Neretva canton, was unprecedented and represented a threat to the constitutional-legal order of the country. “That is the collapse of the constitutional-legal system. I have never seen anything like it,” Mektić told the Faktor web portal.
He called on the country’s presidency to urgently respond and adopt a decision on measures that need to be taken in this situation. He claimed that authorities in Herzegovina-Neretva Canton don’t have the authority to ban refugees from being accommodated in the Salakovac migrant centre which is managed by the state.
“This is a matter of the functioning of the constitutional-legal system and a matter for the Presidency to resolve, and it is necessary to see if the constitutional-legal system will be respected in this country or not. That is not in my remit. That has nothing to do with security. That is a classical political issue and disrespect for the Constitution and institutions,” Mektić said.
It is not exactly known who ordered that buses with about 250 migrants be stopped, but media speculates that the decision was taken by the cantonal police chief, Ilija Lasić.
