- Published: 08.10.2015.
PM says president should be in Croatia on Independence Day
Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic said on Thursday that President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic should be in Croatia on Independence Day, observed today, and not in Hungary.
Speaking to reporters in parliament after a reception on the occasion of Independence Day, he said it would be interesting to see if the president and Hungarian PM Viktor Orban had talked about "the return of some parts of (Croatian oil company) INA, management bodies etc."
He said that Croatia's anti-fraud office could not interrogate former MOL CEO Zoltan Hernadi in the INA-MOL case. Hernadi was accused of bribing former Croatian PM Ivo Sanader with EUR 10 million in exchange for MOL's dominating position in INA. "That's where I'd like more cooperation. That's more important than railway cars."
He said Interior Minister Ranko Ostojic told him a week ago that the return of a Croatian Railways train, which Hungarian authorities detained on September 18, had been agreed. The train was returned to Croatia today. The Hungarians had detained it with the explanation that armed Croatian policemen had boarded it together with refugees and entered Hungarian territory.
Grabar-Kitarovic said in Hungary yesterday, after talks with Orban, that she had agreed the train's return with Hungarian authorities, but the Croatian Police Directorate said later in the day that the two countries' police chiefs had agreed on October 1 that the train would would be returned on October 8.
Milanovic said neither the president nor the PM should handle such matters. He said he was talking with "those who are the most important" in the refugee crisis, the Slovenians, and that yesterday he again talked with the Slovenian PM "to see what we'll do if something happens. We are in touch. As you see, Slovenia isn't putting up a wire fence."
"It's not normal for an EU member state to build a barbed wire fence towards another EU member state," he said, adding that Hungary's fence on its borders with Serbia and Croatia "will remain the biggest stain and disgrace at the beginning of the 21st century... I will fight such things with words, because that's not Europe and I don't want Croatia to enter such a Schengen Area."
Asked to comment on Grabar-Kitarovic's visit to Hungary and her meeting with Orban, Milanovic said, "That's not essential for this (refugee) crisis, which the government is managing very well and in an organised manner... I think we are doing this job responsibly and excellently, that our people don't feel it as a burden."
He said the refugee crisis could not be solved in Budapest but in Ankara and that in the wider context of the crisis Croatia and Hungary were unimportant. He added, however, that Croatia was acting as an organised and humane state and that this was noted recently by the German interior minister, who remarked that migrants might be returning to Croatia and Slovenia.
Milanovic went on to say that Independence Day was a central date because on 18 October 1991 parliament finally said that Croatia was independent. He said that date had been preceded by other important decisions and that June 25, Statehood Day, had a somewhat awkward name "because Croatian statehood, according to the Croatian constitution, is 1,300 years old. The key date is Independence Day."
He also voiced confidence that his coalition would be re-elected at the November 8 parliamentary polls.
(Hina) ha