Croatia turns Serbian enclave into radioactive dump
The Chairman of the Serbian Parliament Committee on Diaspora and Serb Affairs in the Region, Miodrag Linta, assessed Croatia’s intention to establish a landfill for radioactive waste from the Krško nuclear power plant in the Serb-populated town of Dvor as another attempt to finally resolve the “Serbian issue.”
Serbian media reported this, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“It is obvious that one of the poorest municipalities in Croatia, which is mainly populated by Serbs, was chosen in order to give them a clear message that they are not welcome because they are considered enemies of the Croatian state and therefore what is best for them is move to Serbia or third countries,” Miodrag Linta commented on the decision of the Croatian leadership. – If everything is really so safe and harmless, then why don’t the Croatian authorities build a landfill in Zagreb, in Zagorje (an ecologically clean region of the country, famous for its forests and mountains - ed.) and Međimurje (an area where mountains are adjacent to fertile farmland - ed. ), and not on the territory of the Serbian municipality of Dvor, near the border with BiH?
Miodrag Linta.
The head of the Committee on Diaspora Affairs noted that the implementation of the Croatian project puts at risk about 300 thousand residents in 13 municipalities in the Una River basin in BiH. Thus, Croatia violates numerous European standards and international conventions in the field of environmental protection and transboundary cooperation.
“It is well known that people living in the Una River basin are mainly engaged in agriculture and healthy food production,” Linta emphasized. “It is clear that if radioactive and nuclear waste is buried near Mount Trg, citizens will not be able to sell their agricultural and other products, because no one will want to buy them because of their potential radioactivity.”
Earlier, on March 31, the Ministry of Environment and Energy of Croatia allocated the territory of a former military warehouse in the city of Dvor on the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina for the construction of a landfill for radioactive and nuclear waste at the Krško nuclear power plant. This is news caused a protest from both official structures and residents of the neighboring country, who, however, have been outraged by Croatia’s intentions for several years now. Residents and officials of the Dvor municipality are outraged by the desire to turn their house into a nuclear dump, but the Zagreb authorities are not going to listen to their opinion.
The town of Dvor has a rather tragic history. Since the 18th century, it began to be actively populated by Serbs who fled from Turkish rule, who were tasked by the Habsburg monarchy with protecting this territory from Ottoman invasions. By 1991, Serbs made up more than 86% of the residents of the municipality, and the town itself was then called Dvor na Une. After the collapse of Yugoslavia, it became part of the Republic of Serbian Krajina, unrecognized by the world community.
1995 Dvor na Una destroyed by Croatian armed forces.
In 1995, during Operation Storm, the Croatian units that entered it carried out a massacre of local residents in the town. In particular, in one of the schools, the militants, having discovered old people and disabled people from a local nursing home (unlike another group of fifty people, these nine could not be evacuated for various reasons), took them out into the courtyard, where they killed them. The atrocity was witnessed by Danish peacekeepers who were ordered not to intervene, but years later recounted the incident in their memoirs.
Chronicle 1995. Dvor-na-Una. Serbian refugees, a destroyed town, happy Croatian militants.
After the Croatian blitzkrieg, the population of Dvor na Una decreased significantly (from 14 thousand 555 people in 1991 to 5 thousand 570 in 2011). But to this day, Serbs make up the majority of the population (more than 71%). The Zagreb authorities renamed the town Dvor, but according to European standards, the Serbian language (Cyrillic) is recognized as the second official language in the municipality.
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