Our government doesn't care about its citizens, just about money, so i'm gonna do my best to sabotage our tourism-based economy and ask youse to spread this around. I'll try to be brief. If you are currently in Split, Croatia or somewhere in the vicinity, or if you are ever planning on visiting the country: please go ahead and boycott and let your family/friends know as well.
Moby Drea, a ship full of asbestos, has to have asbest panels dismantled (a few sources in english). Every European port + Turkey rejected this ship. Brodosplit shipyard in Split, Croatia accepted it, and it docked, despite citizens' protesting, just this week (post written in the morning of Friday, August 8th). For reference, Split is the second biggest city in Croatia, after the capital Zagreb. 160k people live there. My parents live there, my uncles, aunts and cousins, my best friends. I wanted to raise my children there one day because the air and water is so much cleaner than in the capital. And now, a ship with 300 tons of asbestos will be dismantled in a shipyard inside the city, during the climax of the tourism season.
The powers that be are promising transparency and that the asbestos panels will be dismantled "fully following procedures". Inspections will be done "regularly". Inspections in Croatia don't mean a thing. A family friend owns a cafe in the capital city, an inspector attempted to coerce him into giving him a bribe, orherwise the inspector would negatively falsify the report. Corruption is so widespread, we joke about always keeping extra money to bribe border control, the police, even doctors. An additional problem is Brodosplit itself. The shipyard hasn't paid out its 500 workers in months. Their pays have been cut. Brodosplit used to be one of the central parts of Split's industry and employed thousands of locals, now it's just a shell of its former self, and obviously used just for the personal profit of a few already rich people. Debeljak, the owner of the group that owns Brodosplit, is also in the business of hiring foreign workers.
For context: Croats and other ex-yu workers in Croatia have been bullied by employers for years. The common phrase was "If you won't work, there are people who will", because the bad pay and awful conditions were always worth the trouble to someone desperate enough. In recent years, nobody "wanted to work". The government didn't fix this by raising minimum wage or improving inspections to improve working conditions, but by having the ruling parties' family members open agencies for foreign workers and installing modern slavery taking advantage of foreign workers who go into debt just to arrive in the country. Workers from Nepal, India and the Philippines are now made to work in inhumane conditions for peanuts. These are workers who came here out of desperation, not because they had skills we needed. It's not their fault, it's our government's because they are being taken advantage of, but they are untrained in the jobs they are given and often barely speak English. Moreover, there are way fewer workers from the Philippines purely because their government offers more protection for its citizens who work abroad. Our government doesn't want to spend money to have these workers trained or protected. How do they plan on having them work safely with asbestos?
They don't. A video went viral a few days ago of foreign workers manually dismantling asbestos without any protective gear in Solin, a small town near Split (source in Croatian with video attached). In Solin, a project of asbestos dismantling not even connected to Moby Drea, but led by a company owned by the same man who owns Brodosplit, Debeljak. This is what his group's spokesperson had to say:
"The presence of the material [asbestos] was, as they claim, neither known nor recorded in the project documentation, but despite that the situation was resolved >quickly, expertly and completely in accordance with obligations imposed by laws and environmental regulations.<" The source goes on to encourage the reader to watch the video and judge for themself just how quickly, expertly and in accordance with regulations the situation was handled, and I would encourage you to do the same.
Because that's the transparency and inspections promised to us. Transparency that's just "we'll lie to your face about it", they did it shamelessly just last week, and now tell us 300 tons of asbestos will be dealt with in the same expert way they claimed this was handled.
Furthermore, the owner is well-connected with the ruling party. Other well-connected folks who never got proper punishment for screwing over the citizens of Croatia include: a former prime minister who was recently released from prison without having to return a single cent of the 1.3 million EUR he stole from the country. So-called "Corona Kid" and his father who sold 1.2 million copies of forged COVID tests in 2022. The late minister of health who accepted a 25k EUR bribe to massively overpay for medical equipment (bought for 135k, sold for 464k EUR). A former minister who caused a car accident and killed a father of two, with the trial's start taking a full year and a half, and his team accused the victim of being drunk and the one at fault for the accident, while it was the minister who was in the wrong lane, speeding while passing a truck with 0.21‰ in his blood and key evidence went missing. Etc. Etc. Etc.
You'd have to be stupid to trust anything they say about handling asbestos safely and in accordance with regulations.
I'm posting this, again, because the powers that be could not care less about the citizens of Croatia and about our future. But they love profit, and they looove foreign money so much that they neglected all our industries just to seek impossible-to-manage growth in tourism (which accounts for 10-15% of our GDP). So much, that, another beautiful aspect of how transparent and honest they are, Croatia was one of the only countries (with the USA) with open borders during summer 2020. We had rising cases of COVID all year, schools closed, everything was closed, but just before the tourism season began, we suddenly saw drops in cases, just in time for the borders to be opened on June 1st. And the second wave started just as summer ended. And because they love foreign money and tourist money so much, I'm hoping to spread the news of asbestos poisoning southern Dalmatia to foreigners. And I'm hoping I cause at least one person to cancel their trip here, because the only thing our government listens to is the rustling of money. It feels like they want to shut down the shipyard completely so they can demolish it and build more hotels on its site. Greed already has folks setting fires to forests so they can build tourist accommodations on the char and ashes, but this is ecocide and endangering everyone, tourists and locals both, for years to come, and the only motivation is greed and profit.
Tl;dr: 300 tons of asbestos docked in a Split shipyard. Pattern recognition says it will most definitely be handled unsafely and poison the city and its surroundings. The country couldn't care less about its citizens, so I'm asking would-be tourists to save their money and go to Greece or Italy instead. It'll be cheaper than Dalmatia, and you won't get lung cancer in 20 years.
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