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Croatia Will Never Put Barbed Wire on the Way to Bosnia

EU and barbed wire

Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said on Wednesday his government would never put barbed wire on the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina to stop illegal migrants because there are natural obstacles and it would be a bad political signal. He spoke about migration at a meeting with foreign correspondents who arrived in Zagreb from Brussels on the occasion of the Croatian Presidency of the European Union. “Some of the neighboring EU member states have installed fences and barbed wire. We did not do this because we have natural obstacles – the Danube and Sava rivers, mountains and forests,” Plenkovich told a Dutch journalist. He said that Bosnia and Herzegovina is a friendly country with which Croatia has close ties, and that barbed wire would be a bad political signal for bilateral relations.

Addressing 60 foreign journalists, Plenkovic said that Croats live in many places on the other side of the border and that, as prime minister, he would never choose barbed wire between Croats. He said it was necessary to stop illegal migration and reform the Dublin Ordinance, adding that migration was the issue that most changed political moods in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

A New York Times journalist asked if a country accused of beating and shooting migrants, stealing from them and returning them from Zagreb to Bosnia could propose a reform of migration policy. Plenković responded that these were accusations, not facts, except for two shooting incidents that occurred as a result of an accident on Croatian soil, and that Croatia had decided to invest in police capacity instead of barbed wire.