President Milanović on detention of fans in Greece: These people are being detained as if there was a war, it has nothing to do with the law
“The State has to do its job. Greece has its procedure but I am President of Croatia, I am subjective and selfish when it comes to a hundred Croatian detainees. These people have been detained as if a war was going on. It has nothing to do with the law. I talked about this a few days ago fearing that something like this would happen, that there would be a collective ethical punishment. Now I can speculate on the reasons why this happened now, why in Greece, what Greece expects from the UEFA and why it is important to them to shift the responsibility onto a hundred Croats. How many Greeks have been detained?” the President of the Republic Zoran Milanović commented in Jelsa on an entire group of Croatian fans being remanded in custody all across Greece.
He reminded that – not even five days after detaining the fans without any explanation – the Greek authorities did not manage to identify the perpetrators, remanding all of them in custody. “Well, that’s not a law-based state! Those people have been treated like prisoners of war. If I were Prime Minister, I would think carefully about what to do. It’s not simple. This verges on the law of war. They are being treated like a captured military unit. You have five days to weed out the bad seed, but instead you scatter all of them in prisons across Greece to get beaten up and raped. Great – that’s the EU”, President Milanović stated. With that amount of time you have full discretion to establish what happened, and after that they should be treated like human beings and our citizens who have rights,” he added, and cautioned that the Croatian fans and citizens are “being treated like scum in Greece”.
“That has nothing to do with democracy and respect for human rights. If that is what the EU is today, it would be better if it did not exist,” he underlined.
The journalists asked him what next? “I would at least like to hear this from the Prime Minister, not for him to think about where he will land a job in Brussels, but to annoy someone. To say what has to be said, and not that only I say these things. It’s always up to me to say what is obvious. This is pure tyranny”, President Milanović noted.