ZAGREB, 4 Dec, 2021 - Two men, both aged 59, were reported by the police for having organised a COVID rally in Šibenik on 1 December in contravention with the law on public assembly.

The rally of opponents of COVID certificates and anti-vaccine advocates was held in the centre of this Croatian coastal city from 1700 to 2000 hours on 1 December contrary to the relevant law and no anti-epidemic rules had been taken during the gathering.

According to some media reports, the two organisers mobilised an estimated 100 protesters, including a column of several bikers, in Šibenik's central square.

Police investigating several persons suspected of inciting to terrorism

The Police Directorate in Zagreb said on Friday that the law enforcement and prosecutorial authorities were investigating a number of persons suspected of publicly inciting to terrorism.

The police are investigating "actions which incite to undermining Croatia's fundamental constitutional, political, economic or social structures by attacking the physical integrity of other persons and public buildings."

According to media reports, several persons have been arrested, including Marko Francišković and Natko Kovačević, members of an organisation called Pravednik (Righteous).

Francišković spoke at recent protests against COVID certificates in Zagreb and Šibenik.

The police said the investigation was being conducted in Zadar, Šibenik-Knin and Lika-Senj counties as well as in Zagreb and Bjelovar.

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ZAGREB, 28 Nov, 2021 - The head of the Croatian Medical Chamber (HLK) said on Sunday that he was surprised that participants in protests against COVID certificates included doctors, confirming the HLK had launched proceedings against doctors making claims not based on science at those protests, thus misleading the public.

"Certain steps have been taken against six doctors... sanctions range from a warning and a reprimand to the revocation of the licence," Krešimir Luetić said in an interview with the Sunday issue of the Novi List daily.

Asked if such doctors should have their licences revoked, Luetić said the HLK's Ethics Board was an independent body that would make its decision.

Doctors embittered by protests against COVID-19 certificate mandate

Asked about his view of the protests against epidemiological restrictions, vaccination and testing, Luetić said that he shared his fellow doctors' resentment about the protests.

He said that after the protest held in Zagreb last weekend, he was contacted by dozens of colleagues who were embittered as the event was in direct violation of epidemiological restrictions but also because of the messages that could be heard at the rally.

95% of doctors vaccinated

Asked about the fact that among the protesters there were also doctors and that not all protesters were uneducated people, Luetić said that he was shocked by the fact that any intellectual, particularly a doctor, would make comments that were not based on science, medical profession and statistics.

He noted, however, that around 95% of doctors had been vaccinated against coronavirus, thus showing their view of the pandemic and vaccination.

Speaking of vaccination, Luetić recalled that the HLK had already taken the position that vaccination should be mandatory in the health system.

As for the mandatory vaccination of the general population, which Austria has already opted for and some other European countries are considering, Luetić said that it would be a political decision.

"As a doctor and from the point of view of the medical sector, I think such a decision would definitely make the situation in the health system easier, and reduce the number of seriously ill people and fatalities," he said.

If you compare countries like Croatia, Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands, you see that they have roughly the same number of daily infections per million inhabitants, however, compared to Croatia, those three countries have three times fewer hospitalisations and up to five times fewer fatalities, Luetić stressed.

"That is a clear indicator of how important vaccination is, and as to whether our citizens understand that, I think the answer is both yes and no," he said.

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ZAGREB, 27 Nov, 2021 - Ombudswoman Tena Šimonović Einwalter on Saturday strongly condemned calls for violence that could be heard at a protest against the COVID-19 certificate mandate last weekend, stressing that citizens must not be enemies to one another because coronavirus and the pandemic are the enemy.

Speaking in an interview with Croatian Radio, Šimonović Einwalter said that violence  definitely must not be a way to deal with problems.

Citizens are tired, dissatisfied, frustrated and want this situation to be over as soon as possible and one should have understanding for that, she said, adding that the right to assembly was guaranteed by the Constitution, laws and international treaties but that gatherings must be peaceful and not violent.

"What we witnessed was an attack on reporters, calls for violence, war, formation of a military unit - those are extremely serious things that worry me," she said, stressing that one should most strongly condemn calls for violence.

"Citizens must not be enemies to one another in this situation, the virus and the pandemic are the enemy. More responsibility and more solidarity is needed in the fight against the pandemic," she said.

COVID-19 certificates are an instrument that is far from being perfect and citizens have the right to question and critically think about them just as they have the right to question any decision made by the government, she said.

Commenting on plans to collect signatures for a referendum on the abolishment of COVID-19 certificates and on the work of the national COVID-19 response team, Šimonović Einwalter said that the Constitutional Court should state its position on the constitutionality of referendum questions before the collection of signatures starts, to avoid polarisation in society.

"It would be much better to know in advance, before the entire referendum process is set in motion, if a referendum question is in line with the Constitution," she stressed, calling for making changes in that regard.

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ZAGREB, 16 Oct, 2021 - In a comment on protests held outside the homes of members of the national coronavirus crisis management team, Prime Minister Andrej Plenković said on Saturday that such shows were unnecessary as the government was acting responsibly in the coronavirus crisis.

"All those shows... are unnecessary because the government has acted reasonably, responsibly, appropriately and sensitively with regard to all possible segments of state functioning in the 600 days of the pandemic; other countries had months-long lockdowns," the PM said after a conference on agriculture, fisheries and forestry in Zagreb.

Noting that in Croatia there was a ban only on large gatherings and the work of night clubs, Plenković said that the protests did not seem rational, speculating if their real purpose was to generate social unrest.

About a dozen citizens gathered outside Health Minister Vili Beroš's home on Thursday evening after a Religious Instruction teacher from Križevci called on them to do so on his Facebook profile due to restrictions on visits to hospitalised children.

Beroš said that he understood their dissatisfaction, but that the place for dealing with such matters should be the Health Ministry.

Another group of protesters on Friday protested outside the home of the head of Zagreb's Hospital for Infectious Diseases, Alemka Markotić.

Asked if the situation could escalate and if members of the coronavirus crisis management team were under police protection since more protests had been announced, Plenković said that as far as he was aware, they were not.

Should someone resort to violence, they will be given police protection, he said, recalling that until the October 2020 terrorist attack "we had been very easy to approach."

"We are a normal, small Central European and Mediterranean country, civilised, warm, and we are good hosts... There are, on occasion, violent individuals but the Croatian people in general are not violent. These are exceptions. I call on them to calm down and be reasonable, there is no reason for drama, there are much worse situations than this," he said.

Asked about a possible parliamentary vote of no confidence in Finance Minister Zdravko Marić, Plenković said that no opposition motion questioning the government's work had been successful so far and neither would the latest one.

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ZAGREB, 15 Oct 2021 - Health Minister Vili Beroš on Thursday told parents who had demonstrated in front of his home against restrictions on visits to sick children that he understood their dissatisfaction, but that the place for dealing with such matters should be the Health Ministry.

"Neither the Health Ministry nor epidemiologists limited the duration of visits to your sick children," Beroš told a group of parents who had said on Facebook they were protesting because the duration of visits to their sick children was limited to 15 minutes.

The minister said that the national COVID-19 crisis management team and epidemiologists had decided that the parents of sick children being treated in Croatian hospitals and health facilities must meet epidemiological requirements as all other visitors, which means they need to have an EU COVID certificate as proof that they have been vaccinated, have recovered from coronavirus or have been tested for COVID-19.

The organization, time, and duration of visits to sick children, the minister said, is organized by each institution in accordance with its organizational and spatial possibilities, and they are required to inform the parents.

"I understand the dissatisfaction of parents... and I will always stand by them as a doctor, minister, and parent, but I cannot accept the way in which they are expressing their protest," the health minister said.

According to media reports, about a dozen of citizens gathered outside the health minister's home at about 7 pm, at the invitation of a religious education teacher from Križevci, Ivan Pokupac, via Facebook.

In the post, Pokupec said that every day they would visit the home address of one member of the crisis management team for 15 minutes.

Pokupec also wrote that last year parents had been allowed to stay with their children in hospital for 15 minutes, but this time with an additional condition - an EU digital COVID certificate.

He said there was no scientific, epidemiological, or moral argument for this and that the additional requirement served to force the concerned parents to get vaccinated.

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ZAGREB, 4 Oct 2021 - The Croatian province of the Society of Jesus said on Monday it did not authorize father Zdravko Knežević to participate in this morning's protest outside a Zagreb hospital against mandatory COVID certificates for health workers.

Knežević was among some 50 protesters who booed Health Minister Vili Beroš upon his arrival there to mark the start of the certificate mandate in the health sector. The media reported that Knežević shouted "treason, the gallows, you are Judases" to Beroš.

In a press release, the Croatian province of the Society of Jesus distanced itself from Knežević's participation in the protest, even though he said he was there as a private person.

The province also distanced itself from his statements at the protest, saying that some of them, as carried by the media, were totally inappropriate. "Because of that, I apologize to everyone who was hurt by them," father Dalibor Renić said in the press release.

"I believe health workers and their leadership deserve our trust and support in their attempts to give citizens the best healthcare in this pandemic crisis," he added.

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ZAGREB, 4 Oct 2019 - Unvaccinated employees of the KBC Split hospital and members of the public on Monday staged a protest outside the hospital in that coastal city, shouting insults at members of the hospital management.

As of today, employees in the healthcare and welfare systems, visitors, and persons accompanying patients have to have digital COVID-19 certificates. All health workers coming to work have to present their COVID-19 certificate showing that they have either been vaccinated or have recovered from the coronavirus infection while others have to undergo testing two times a week.

The protesters outside the KBC Split hospital shouted insults at members of the hospital management, and some started pulling at them. They also shouted insults at reporters in an attempt to prevent them from taking statements from the hospital management.

The protesters said that they were not against vaccination but against being forced to get vaccinated.

One of the emergency medical service employees said the new rules were a form of pressure and that everyone should have the right to choose while one doctor blamed COVID-19 fatalities on the media which, she said, "kept feeding the public such information, and that hospitalized patients were dying of fear, not of coronavirus."

Split-Dalmatia County Assembly deputy head Mate Šimundić was also among the protesters.

Hospital head Julije Meštrović toured the locations on the hospital premises where employees were being tested for COVID-19, noting that everything was well organized and that there was no queuing.

Asked to comment on the protest, he said that protesters had the right to express their opinion and that most of them were not hospital staff but members of the public.

No protests in Rijeka 

The first day of the new epidemiological regime for healthcare and welfare system workers in Rijeka was without problems or protests, with the testing of unvaccinated staff having started over the weekend.

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ZAGREB, 27 Sept 2021 - In its report for 2020-21, the Security and Intelligence Agency (SOA) says Croatia is a secure and stable democracy but warns about rising extremism and radicalism due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

We are witnessing the biggest pandemic in modern history which has caused unprecedented disruptions in everyday life and enormous damage to the global economy, SOA director Daniel Markić says in the introduction.

The pandemic has additionally increased extremism and radicalism, notably due to disinformation and conspiracy theories concerning Europe's response to the crisis and the effectiveness of democratic and liberal political and social systems, SOA's seventh report says.

Despite 20 years of international efforts in bringing democracy to the local society, the Taliban have taken power in Afghanistan.

SOA also monitored the increasing world dominance of geopolitical reshufflings and competitions as well as the strengthening of the economic, political, and value challengers to liberal democracies in the international order.

Climate change is increasingly showing its consequences, the report says.

Non-Western actors active in the southeastern neighborhood

It indicates that non-Western actors are active in Croatia's southeastern neighborhood and that reforms aimed at reaching European standards are slow.

The Western Balkans is still burdened by unfinished stabilization processes and unsolved inter-state and inter-ethnic issues as well as difficulties in achieving European integration due to insufficient reforms.

Unfavorable political and economic conditions facilitate the strengthening of radical and extreme tendencies as well as rifts within fragile societies, and social and inter-ethnic tensions may lead to incidents, notably in communities with unsolved inter-ethnic relations.

Bosnia and Herzegovina are still politically unstable, primarily due to the different views its constituent peoples have on the country's future constitutional and legal system.

Failure to reach a Serbian-Albanian agreement on Kosovo continues to contribute to instability in the region, and the social rift in Montenegro, where parties of anti-NATO, pro-Serb, and pro-Russian orientation have significant political power in relation to sovereignist, pro-Western forces, is causing particular uncertainty in the Western Balkans.

Promotion of the "Serbian world" additionally destabilizes delicate relations

In the regional context, some state officials in Serbia are promoting the concept of a "Serbian world" as a single Serbian political people and a single political and state union of all Serbs in Southeast Europe in which all Serbs should follow one political direction, that of Serbia.

The promotion of such ideas by Serbia's top officials is additionally destabilizing the delicate inter-ethnic and inter-state relations in Southeast Europe, notably in regards to BiH and Montenegro.

Organized crime in this part of Europe is additionally bolstered by the proliferation of illegal activities, while hotspots like Syria and Libya continue to represent sources of instability and threats.

Cyber technologies have facilitated large-scale cyberattacks aimed at stealing state and industry data, while illegal migration has increased enormously in Southeast Europe, with hundreds of thousands of migrants passing through.

Croatia target of dozens of state-sponsored cyberattacks in recent years

SOA warns that state-sponsored cyberattacks are becoming increasingly common in espionage. 

Those attacks are aimed at carefully selected targets that have been well studied in advance, and they are carried out by state-sponsored APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) groups that are closely linked to the security and intelligence systems of individual countries. Such cyber-attacks are primarily aimed at EU and NATO member states.

In recent years, Croatia has been the target of dozens of state-sponsored cyber attacks. The largest number of them were attempting to break into the information and communication systems of the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs and the Ministry of Defence.

SOA concludes that cyber resilience is becoming a key to national security in the digital era.

The past period was also marked by the creation, rapid expansion, and territorial defeat of the Islamic State, the largest terrorist organization in the world, and the agency has also been monitoring how the spread of democratic values in the world has been replaced by authoritarian tendencies with the return of Cold War tensions, espionage, and the spreading of fake news and propaganda.

There are currently no identified direct terrorist threats to Croatian institutions, citizens, or interest from terrorist groups, and the threat of organized attacks by terrorist groups is still low, but the possibility of a terrorist attack (primarily by independent attackers) can never be ruled out.

Although ISIL and Al Qaida have been significantly weakened and their capacities for carrying out external operations and attacks have been reduced, they remain a threat to Europe. In EU member states, the level of threat from Islamist terrorism varies from low in Central and Eastern European countries to medium or high in most Western European countries.

Many steps forward in the security sphere

Since its first public report, SOA has also followed a number of developments in the security sphere.

EU and NATO membership has allowed us to multiply our capabilities and strengthen our security mechanisms and links to other democratic security and intelligence systems; European countries are getting closer to confronting common security threats; Croatian society and institutions have confirmed their stability and efficiency in many crises situations, the report says.

In addition to that, new infrastructure projects have strengthened energy and national security, SOA says, noting that they are building a new generation of employees through public calls.

All those changes show that security dynamics in the modern world are extremely fast and often unpredictable, new and non-traditional security threats are emerging, and the role of timely and accurate information and assessments is becoming crucial, SOA says.

The report published on the SOA website also stresses that there is no indication of significant destabilization for Croatia, even at such a challenging time and in such a dynamic security environment.

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