Tens of thousands protest in Zagreb over illegal hazardous waste dump near Gospic

Tens of thousands of protesters have marched through the Croatian capital demanding the government urgently clear a vast illegal dump of hazardous waste that residents say is poisoning a once-pristine mountain region.

Saturday’s demonstration in Zagreb was one of the largest protests Croatia has seen in years, driven by growing frustration that authorities have spent months failing 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 corruption and of covering up the pollution’s true scale.

Police and Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, arrested 13 people in February over the illegal importing and dumping of the waste, brought in from elsewhere in the bloc since 2023.

Investigators said the scheme earned suspects more than $4m before it was uncovered at an abandoned industrial site outside Gospic.

Plenkovic visited the site last week and said his government had chosen a contractor to begin removing the waste, the first phase of a promised cleanup.

Croatian officials have also said soil and water tests around Gospic have not shown contamination, a claim that clashes with an assessment published last month by Croatia’s anticorruption agency, which found elevated metal levels in the soil and detected PFAS chemicals, known as “forever chemicals” for how long they persist, in nearby groundwater.

‘Not a tragedy, a crime’

That gap between the government’s assurances and the pollution findings is what brought crowds into Zagreb’s main square on Saturday, where organisers demanded a complete cleanup plan with binding deadlines within 20 days and the removal of all buried waste within three months.

Many protesters said they no longer trusted official explanations for how so much waste had gone unnoticed for so long.

“This is not a tragedy, this is a crime,” demonstrator Ivan Rittinger told The Associated Press news agency, arguing that someone had profited while officials looked away.

Vjekoslav Busic, who leads the Gospic Is Our Home community group that organised the march, told the crowd the failure went beyond any single official, asking who had built the institutions and appointed the people that let the pollution continue for years.

The rally drew lawmakers from across the political spectrum, including the centre-left Social Democratic Party and Most, a smaller anticorruption party whose name means “bridge”, alongside the well-known Croatian actor Rade Serbedzija, a sign of how far the anger has spread beyond any one faction.

Environmental experts say the damage has stayed local so far, but warn the region’s porous terrain and rivers could eventually carry pollutants towards the Adriatic Sea, a coastline the region’s tourism depends on.

Plenkovic has dismissed the criticism as an attempt by rivals to exploit the scandal, even as prosecutors continue investigating a Croatian company accused of burying toxic waste at several sites beyond Gospic.