Plenkovic calls Serbia's arms buildup a shopping spree
Croatia's prime minister, speaking in Zagreb alongside Bavarian premier Markus Soder, responded to Defense Minister Ivan Anusic's earlier remarks on Serbian arms purchases.
Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic described Serbia’s arms buildup as a “shopping spree” on Friday, October 2, at a press conference at Banski Dvori in Zagreb, and said every country bordering Serbia must ask itself why it is arming so heavily. The remark concerns Serbia directly: it comes from the prime minister of a neighboring state that belongs to both the European Union and NATO, and it was made in public, with a guest from Germany at his side.
Why did Plenkovic respond to Anusic’s remarks?
Plenkovic hosted Bavarian Premier Markus Soder on Friday. At the press conference he commented on an earlier statement by Croatian Defense Minister Ivan Anusic, who had spoken about the aggressive and hostile rhetoric of a Serbia that keeps arming itself at a growing pace. The prime minister stressed that Croatia keeps a close watch on the situation in Serbia and that the subject has also been discussed at the Defense Council and the National Security Council.
The words that carried the statement into regional media were these:
“It is an incredible process of arming, almost a ‘shopping spree’ in all parts of the world”
Plenkovic said this and added that all of Serbia’s neighbors must ask why Serbia is arming so heavily. Croatian outlets HRT and Index report most of his remarks in indirect speech, with only shorter passages in quotation marks, among them the one containing the phrase “shopping spree”.
What does Zagreb say about its own defense?
In the same appearance the prime minister spoke about what Croatia is doing itself. As a member of the EU and NATO, he said, Croatia looks after its own security and has tripled its defense budget over the past ten years. The capabilities it is building, he said, “pose no threat to anyone” and serve as a deterrent, so that the aggression of the 1990s is never repeated.
Plenkovic also said Croatia is “talking with all its partners” about Serbia’s arming, and that, in his words, they are familiar with the situation.
What did Anusic say earlier?
Minister Ivan Anusic spoke earlier the same day at an international defense industry conference in Zadar. He said Croatia is aware that Serbia has spent ten years intensively arming its military with serious offensive systems. According to him, Serbia has not stopped using the rhetoric “that it had in the 1990s”, which, the minister said, led to bloody wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.
The prime minister’s answer built on that message but went a step further. Anusic talked about rhetoric and the systems Serbia is acquiring, while Plenkovic put the question of why Serbia is arming to all of its neighbors. Reports on the press conference carry no response from Belgrade, so this is an account of the Zagreb side only, as the prime minister and the defense minister presented it.
