Following Turkey’s move, Croatia’s president also seeks a better deal with the bloc if Zagreb votes to invite the Nordic states
Croatian President Zoran Milanovic plans to instruct Ambassador Mario Nobilo, the country’s permanent representative to NATO, to block the accession of Finland and Sweden to the decades-old military alliance, he said Wednesday.
Refusing consent would turn the international community’s attention to problems facing ethnic Croats in neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, Milanovic told reporters. Under the current election laws, Croat representatives tend to get elected with the votes of Bosnian Muslims, also known as Bosniaks. Zagreb seeks to amend this.
“I have said before, Croats in Bosnia are more important to me than the entire Russian-Finnish border,” Milanovic said.
Stockholm and Helsinki broke off their past of neutrality and applied for NATO membership on May 15. All members must consent to accept new countries into the bloc.
Turkey was “showing how to fight for national interests,” Milanovic said, pointing to Ankara’s opposition to any agreement admitting Sweden and Finland to NATO until they denounce “terrorists and their accomplices” associated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Front (DHKP/C), among other concessions.
“Turkey will certainly not budge before it gets what it wants,” the Croat president said.
Milanovic’s latest comments have placed more strain on his already-fraught relationship with the government of Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, whom he has accused of failing to stand up for Croatian interests, local news outlet N1 reported.
Gordan Grlic-Radman, Croatian Foreign Minister, said on Wednesday state radio that Nobilo was already told. “to approve FinlandAnd Sweden’s membership application” and “will be given power of attorney to sign a protocol that will follow in the next few days.”
Croatia’s parliament is “absolutely certain”Grlici-Radman said that they would ratify it.
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