The Prime Minister is Lying, the Office of the President did Propose a Joint Wreath of the State Leadership

Due to public interest and for the sake of providing truthful information to the public about today’s commemoration marking the 30th anniversary of Operation Plitvice, we must assert that Prime Minister Andrej Plenković is lying again – and we will prove it.

He is lying when he says that “no one asked us to hold a joint protocol.” Not only did the Office of the President of the Republic ask, but it also approached the organizers with a proposal to lay a joint wreath of the state leadership. We proposed this directly to the organizer, the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Croatia, i.e. the ministry headed by Prime Minister Plenković’s Deputy Prime Minister, Davor Božinović. The Ministry of the Interior rejected our proposal and decided that there would be no joint wreath laying of the state leadership, using the “epidemiological situation” to justify its decision.

Let’s start exposing Plenković’s lie with the following: Using the “epidemiological situation” to justify its decision, the Ministry of the Interior informed the President of the Republic on 22 March 2021 that homage at Plitvice Lakes will be given by the “successive arrivals of the delegations,” which would be “agreed at Protocol level” (Document 1).

Therefore, on 25 March 2021, the Protocol of the President of the Republic proposed to the Ministry of the Interior “a joint wreath of the state leadership, if the laying of wreaths and lighting of candles would be attended by the Speaker of the Croatian Parliament and the Prime Minister of the Republic of Croatia” (Document 2).

That same day, the Ministry of the Interior responded by ignoring the proposal for a joint wreath and – with another reference to the epidemiological situation – announced that the arrival of the delegations in succession would be organized (Document 3).

“Since we did not receive a response to our proposal, does that mean that the proposal of the President of the Republic was rejected?”, inquired the Protocol of the President again in its memo to the Ministry of the Interior (Document 4).

The Ministry of the Interior ultimately responded by saying that they were sticking to their decision to lay the wreaths successively, according to their schedule, and concluded: “We were guided by nothing but the aforementioned in our decision that a joint state wreath should not be laid, but that each institution (should lay a wreath) separately” (Document 5).

As is already known, the President of the Republic had previously proposed a joint wreath laying of the state leadership when major anniversaries and holidays are celebrated in Croatia. This should have been self-evident today as well – by default, as Plenković should also understand it – because it is the proper thing to do and worthy of the day that is being marked. But no, Plenković did otherwise; he came and quickly left.

We also saw how two-faced Plenković was through his lies and “compliance” with epidemiological measures, after he crammed about a dozen officials into his delegation, including Minister Božinović – that same minister who refused to organize a joint wreath laying of the state leadership for epidemiological reasons. Yet the three highest officials – the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister and Speaker of Parliament – could not comprise one delegation.