AYS Daily Digest 6/1/20: Can Croatia’s new president help refugees?
By: Are You Syrious
Tags: Croatia, Digest, Zoran Milanović, Bosnia And Herzegovina, Refugees

AYS Daily Digest 6/1/20: Can Croatia’s new president help refugees?

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A victim of Croatian border violence. Photo: Border Violence Monitoring

Feature

Zoran Milanović kept the border open in 2015. Can he do anything to stop the violence now?

Following a five-year presidential term of the conservative Kolinda Grabar Kitarović, Croatia elected a new president, social democrat Zoran Milanović. Milanović was Croatian prime minister in 2015, when the refugee route shifted from Hungary towards Croatia. His government kept a “fast forward” policy, allowing thousands of people to enter the country on daily basis. They were put on trains at the border with Serbia and taken to Slovenia, strategically discouraging their longer stay on Croatian soil to avoid “becoming a hot spot”. In this period, Zoran Milanović’s government kept insisting on having a safe humanitarian corridor from Greece through ex-Yugoslavian countries towards Germany. They seldomly added anyone’s fingerprints to Eurodac, in order to prevent future Dublin returns to Croatia.

Then Prime Minister Zoran Milanović visiting a transit centre in Croatia, 2015.

According to official data, 558,724 people passed through Croatia in late 2015. In January 2016, new conservative government came to power and they almost immediately started reducing the number of people who were allowed to pass, by introducing more and more racial profiling and in the end completely closing the route in March 2016, following the agreement with Austrian and Slovenian governments. By then, 658,068 passed legally through Croatia. Humanitarian corridor was replaced by systematic border violence that remains a burning issue: over 20.000 illegal pushbacks happened in 2019. alone, with over 90 victims claiming they were beaten and/or robbed by Croatian police officers. Over a third of them were children or minors.

In 2020, the narrative is changing again

Croatian president Kolinda Grabar Kitarović was a member of the same conservative party that closed Croatian borders in 2016. She built her reputation as a trigger-happy ex-NATO official who spread misinformation and prejudice against refugees while defending Croatian border violence. In an interview for a Swiss TV, she even admitted violations of human rights in Croatia. “Of course a little bit of violence is needed when doing a pushback”, she famously said. Therefore it is not surprising border management was one of the key issues in the recent presidential campaign.

In the campaign, Zoran Milanović insisted that keeping the border open was a good decision, but not for humanitarian reasons.

“Angela Merkel wanted us to keep 100.000 people in Croatia”, he claimed several times in the past weeks.

Presidential duties in Croatia are largely representative, while most of decision-making is in the hands of the center-right PM Andrej Plenković. When he assumes presidential office, Zoran Milanović will become commander in-chief of the military and chief representative of the Republic of Croatia both within the country and abroad. Having in mind he is an experienced diplomat, he may try to negotiate a new migration deal with European counterparts. Milanović already announced he intends to cooperate with the current government, but the PM said it will be a “hard cohabitation”.

Illegal pushbacks are happening daily at Croatian borders. Photo: BVM

It is extremely hard to believe the new president might stop the border violence, but if he remains dedicated to safeguarding human rights, a topic that had a big role in his campaign, he might work towards de-escalating the toxic public narrative against the refugees. As an NGO officially registered in Croatia, AYS will continue working towards having the governmental officials accountable for human rights violations at the border. We hope the new president might become a pragmatic counterpart in this conversation.