President Milanović Attends Town of Đakovo Municipal Day Celebration

The President of the Republic Zoran Milanović attended the formal session of the Town of Đakovo’s Municipal Council on the occasion of Municipal Day. President Milanović said about Đakovo, which is marking 782 years of the first mention of its name that it is a town in which something urban has been taking place for close to 800 years, and in the last two hundred years modern Croatian history has been happening.

“Croats, catholics, Germans and other nationalities have lived here, large churches were built, the people became literate”, President Milanović noted in his address. “The war is behind us and chances are big, enormous”, he added, and said that on his first visit to Đakovo he expected a small town damaged by the war. “Not in the physical sense but in the sense of stagnation and missed opportunities that are before us and that were before Croatia at the end of the 1980s. We paid a heavy price, and those who attacked us paid an even heavier one”, the President stated.

“We are now in the European Union and once again we divided and surrendered part of our sovereignty and autonomy to someone else who is slightly larger and stronger than we are. That was a rational decision, not a decision from the heart. As for the European Union, it’s first of all a project on paper because what binds us to other European nations is certainly principles and values, but what interests us is money”, President Milanović said and insisted on the importance of absorbing European funds. “These are huge sums of money that we can take and that are offered to us more than ever. They should be absorbed because there is no justification for not doing so. I’m saying this because I see here as in many other Croatian cities that things are progressing and that these funds are being absorbed”, the President stated, and warned that we’ll miss a chance is we’re not persistent.

President Milanović referred to the departure of Croatian citizens to other European countries saying that we cannot substitute them with newborn children because there are no newborn children and the numbers will never be what we wish them to be. “There won’t be seven million of us, but our population will be like the Norwegians and Finns, small but strong nations. We’ll need workers in Croatia and that’s an issue we will not deal with easily”, he said. “We’re a small country and that’s an advantage. It’s essential that there are as many of us as we are now and that we use our resources, our know-how and our intelligence wisely in a fair competition with other nations”, President Milanović concluded.

Attending the formal session of the Town of Đakovo’s Municipal Council was the Head of the Cabinet of the President Bartol Šimunić.

PHOTO: Office of the President of the Republic of Croatia / Tomislav Bušljeta