Tens of thousands of protesters marched through the Croatian capital this weekend, demanding that the government urgently clear a vast dump of hazardous waste that residents say is poisoning a once-pristine mountain region.
The demonstration in Zagreb on September 5 was one of the largest protests that the EU’s youngest member has seen in years, as Croatian media outlets pointed out.
It was driven by growing frustration over authorities’ failure to remove more than 30,000 tonnes of waste, including medical and industrial material, buried near the town of Gospic in the mountainous Lika region.
The anger has widened into a broader challenge to Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic’s conservative government, which opponents accuse of concealing the true scale of the pollution.
Police and Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, arrested 13 people in February over the illegal import and dumping of the waste, which had been brought in from elsewhere in the bloc since 2023.
Investigators said the scheme generated more than $4 million for the suspects before it was uncovered at an abandoned industrial site outside Gospic.
Plenkovic visited the site last week and said his government had selected a contractor to begin removing the waste, marking the first phase of a promised cleanup.
Croatian officials have also said that soil and water tests around Gospic have not shown contamination. However, that claim conflicts with an assessment published last month by Croatia’s anticorruption agency, which found elevated levels of metals in the soil and detected PFAS chemicals, known as “forever chemicals” because of how long they persist, in nearby groundwater.
The discrepancy between the government’s data and the agency’s findings remains the major factor behind the crowds that gathered in Zagreb’s main square this week. Organisers demanded a comprehensive cleanup plan with binding deadlines within 20 days and the removal of all buried waste within three months.
The rally attracted lawmakers from across the political spectrum, including members of the centre-left Social Democratic Party and Most, a smaller anticorruption party.
Environmental experts say the damage has so far remained local, but warn that the region’s porous terrain and rivers could eventually carry pollutants towards the Adriatic Sea, a coastline on which the region’s tourism industry depends.
By Nazrin Sadigova
