Eurasia Press & News
The Croatian government offered promises of renewal after the Petrinja earthquake but one year on, its actions have fallen short. BIRN uncovers how Petrinja was abandoned by the state, long before it was hit by an earthquake.
The cafe in central Petrinja is crowded and buzzing with Saturday afternoon regulars. Outside lie desolate streets lined with ruined buildings, a scene seemingly from another dimension. Gordana Ross sits with coffee and cigarette, reflecting on the cause of the destruction: the magnitude 6.2 earthquake that laid waste to her hometown on December 29, 2020. “The shaking was so powerful, it felt like a roar from the ground,” she recalled. “As if something was coming to swallow you up through the floor tiles.”
At 19 minutes past noon, the church bells of Petrinja ring out as they have done every day for the past year, marking the precise moment of disaster. Ross pauses mid-sentence, catching her breath. Her grandson had been with her at the time, watching cartoons in another room. She rushed to reassure him but, as the ground shifted, struggled to cross the two-metre distance separating them. A closet came crashing down to the sound of breaking glass. It felt like an eternity. “I will never forget the sight of my grandson’s pale face with the ceiling cracking over his head,” she said.
Ross and her grandson would emerge unhurt and, unlike much of the town, her house would escape serious damage. However, a derelict structure next door would be weakened to the point where it threatened her house and so, for the second time in her life, Ross was forced to leave Petrinja. As a young woman in 1991, she had fled when the town was overrun by rebel Serb forces, at the onset of the wars that destroyed Yugoslavia. She spent four years as a refugee on the outskirts of the Croatian capital, Zagreb, caring for her child while her husband served in the army. “We left with just a few belongings in nylon bags,” she said, recalling the war. “And then, after almost 30 years, a natural disaster like this happens and [once again] we have nowhere to go.”
Croatia’s military eventually expelled the rebel Serb forces in August 1995, dismantling their proto-state, the Republic of Krajina, and cementing Zagreb’s control over a belt of territory that included Petrinja. The lightning assault, codenamed Operation Storm, is celebrated as a cornerstone in the foundation of the modern Croatian state.
Since then however, the state has effectively staged a slow retreat from the lands retaken in that dramatic offensive. Investment and development have been concentrated on the capital and the coast, whose tourism sector now accounts for one-fifth of Croatia’s GDP. Weakened by war, the economy of inland, rural regions would continue its decline, along with the agricultural and manufacturing industries that once supported it.
In towns such as Petrinja, the workforce has been winnowed by conflict and migration, leaving behind the elderly and impoverished. While the 2020 earthquake prompted an initial outpouring of official concern, the reconstruction effort has been sluggish, fuelling anger and accusations of abandonment. Far from the glittering coastline, this is the story of another Croatia, coveted in war and neglected in peace.
Experts interviewed by BIRN said the problems exposed and exacerbated by the earthquake had been decades in the making. They blamed successive administrations for having prioritised the easy gains from coastal tourism over long-term planning for the rural interior. “If only I could move the Adriatic Sea to Petrinja – that would be amazing,” said Vladimir Cavrak, a professor at the Department of Macroeconomics and Economic Development at the University of Zagreb. “Great wonders would happen, and there would be no need to plan or do anything.”
While the war had left deep scars in the region, Cavrak said, the post-war years had seen the implementation of “a completely flawed model of reconstruction”: houses were rebuilt but nothing was done for the economy. “We had reconstruction without revitalisation,” he said. “Within that framework, it was inevitable that the young would leave.”
According to Boris Divjak, a development expert from Croatia who has worked for Transparency International and the World Bank, the country’s economic base has been eroded everywhere apart from the capital and the coastal provinces of Dalmatia and Istria. “If it were not for tourism, Istria and Dalmatia, there would be no Croatia outside Zagreb,” he said. “Everything else has been destroyed, there is no source of prosperity elsewhere, nothing sustainable.”
‘You have no shame’
Croatia lies within what is known as the Mediterranean convergence zone, where two vast tectonic plates, African and Eurasian, brush up against each other. The December 2020 earthquake had its epicentre near Petrinja, 60 km south of Zagreb, but its impact would be felt as far afield as Italy, Hungary, Slovakia and Serbia. The moment of disaster was captured by television cameras filming a press conference by the then-mayor of Petrinja, as he was addressing reporters about a weaker earthquake the previous day.
According to town officials, nearly half of Petrinja’s buildings would be destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. Across Sisak-Moslavina, the surrounding county worst hit by the earthquake, the homes of some 15,000 people would be deemed unsafe.
Nearly 40 people were hurt and a total of eight people would die of injuries sustained in the disaster. The relatively low number of dead and injured, compared to the extensive structural damage, alludes to the catastrophe in slow motion that preceded the earthquake – a decades-long demographic collapse that has left many of the buildings uninhabited. According to a 2011 census, Sisak-Moslavina had some 9,000 abandoned housing units, the highest number in all counties of Croatia.
“When you walk these towns, you see that there are hardly any people there,” said Sanja Loncar, an assistant professor at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Zagreb. Loncar grew up in Sisak, the county’s capital and second-largest town. The abandonment of the region “is very visible”, she said.
Over a year has passed since the earthquake, but little of the damage has been rectified. The Ministry of Physical Planning, Construction and State Assets in Zagreb has received some 10,000 applications for financial support and assistance with reconstruction projects from Sisak-Moslavina county. So far, just under 500 applications – less than five per cent of the total – have been processed, the ministry told BIRN.
Meanwhile, nearly 120,000 people – or 70 per cent of the county’s population – are still dependent on some form of humanitarian relief, according to a consortium of aid and government agencies overseeing the response to the earthquake. Many of the residents lack access to drinking water, electricity, food and healthcare.
On the first anniversary of the disaster, Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic visited Petrinja. He assured a press conference that the reconstruction effort was gathering pace. The locals disagreed. As the prime minister walked around town, he was heckled and struck by a snowball. One of the handmade placards, held up during his visit, berated the government: “365 days – you have no shame.”
Frustrated with the public sector, many who lost their homes have turned for assistance to charities that have been raising funds for earthquake relief from individuals and the private sector. A programme coordinator for Solidarna, a Croatian human rights NGO working in the area, described how the latest damage resembled the impact of the decades-old conflict. “You often can’t distinguish between the traces of the war and those of earthquake,” Karla Pudar told BIRN.
In some rural areas, the challenge of re-housing elderly residents has been compounded by their refusal to be separated from the animals on which they depend for their livelihood. NGOs have reported cases of earthquake victims rejecting temporary accommodation in favour of makeshift beds in barns and outbuildings, close to their livestock. The value placed upon farm animals is reflected in the Croatian language, where the word for livestock, “blago”, also means treasure.
Around small towns, many who lost their homes are currently living in re-purposed shipping containers, petitioning the authorities for funding and permits for demolition and construction work. Kristina Grdic is one of them. She was emerging from a difficult divorce when the pandemic hit, derailing her career as a self-employed graphic designer. In October 2020, she nonetheless managed to raise the funds to buy a house in Sisak town. Crucially for her autistic younger son, the new home had an outdoor space. Then came the earthquake, damaging the walls and foundations.
An initial structural survey gave the building a “yellow” rating: it was temporarily unsafe and would need repairs to make it habitable again. Grdic applied for a government grant to help with the repairs. Subsequently, a detailed survey would reveal additional damage to the structure, possibly as a result of aftershocks. The property was given an updated “red” rating: it would have to be demolished and rebuilt. Grdic applied to the government to approve the demolition last June, only to have her application passed from department to department. “It was terribly frustrating,” she said. “You can’t get an answer to your questions, you don’t know whom to ask, what to do.”
As she waits for a new house, Grdic has been living in temporary accommodation provided by the authorities: a complex of converted shipping containers in the Caprag area of Sisak. Each container has its own toilet and shower, with access to a communal kitchen. Meals are provided by the authorities. It is no place for a family – the atmosphere is more like a student dorm, without the levity of youth. “You can hear everybody doing everything through these thin tin walls,” Grdic told BIRN. “No one is here by choice. Everyone is here because they lost the roof over their heads.”
The demolition permit eventually came through after a five-month wait and the damaged home was torn down last November. Grdic had initially applied for a government grant to build a new house at the site of the old one. However, after the struggle to secure a demolition permit, she chose to minimise her dealings with the state and instead accepted an offer of funding from a private donor, arranged through Solidarna, hoping this would speed up the process.
Development expert Boris Divjak says Croatia’s lumbering bureaucracy – partially a relic of the Yugoslav era – has created an opening for the NGO sector. He sees the bureaucracy as a key factor behind the slow pace of reconstruction since the earthquake, compounding the decades of post-war neglect that hobbled the local economy. “The bureaucracy does not serve the victims of the earthquake, it exists in order to serve itself, to ensure that its procedures are followed,” Divjak told BIRN.
While socialist Yugoslavia’s bureaucratic bad habits seem to have endured, its dynamism has faded. The agriculture and manufacturing industries that supported Sisak-Moslavina were dealt a dual blow in the 1990s. The county and the overlapping Banija region would lose factories and workers in the wars that destroyed Yugoslavia. More than half the wartime damage in Sisak-Moslavina would be concentrated on its largest towns and economic hubs, Petrinja and Sisak, according to research by a team of local geographers.
The Banija’s region’s population, a centuries-old mix of Serbs and Croats, would also prove uniquely vulnerable to a war waged along ethnic lines. Tens of thousands of Croats fled in the face of war crimes carried out by the rebel Serb forces that established the breakaway Republic of Krajina in the early 1990s. The Croatian military’s assault on the region in 1995 prompted another exodus, this time of the Serbian population. While some of the original residents would return as hostilities ceased, the demographic damage was done. Banija today is overwhelmingly Croat, with its Serbian minority making up roughly 12 per cent of the population.
The war also put paid to Gordana Ross’ dreams of studying English at university. After four years as a refugee, she came back to Petrinja when the region was retaken by the Croatian military. In the post-war years, she endured spells of unemployment and worked at a local business until a narrow brush with death in a head-on highway collision forced a rethink of priorities. In her own words, the “office rat” was “reborn”.
Nowadays, she channels her literary instincts into a blog, documenting life in the town she loves. A slim, energetic woman with her blonde hair styled in a pixie cut, she seems to know everyone in Petrinja. To this day, she associates the thrill of returning to her hometown after the war with the scent of its linden trees. Leaving the town behind was no easier the second time round, after the earthquake. If anything, the pain of departure was magnified by age – the grandmother of 54 was no match for the young mother of 24. “I am sick without Petrinja,” she said.
‘Transitional gangrene’
In January 2021, shortly after the earthquake, the Croatian government said it was commissioning a panel of experts to come up with a long-term plan for the regeneration of Sisak-Moslavina county. The panel was scrapped a few months later, however, and replaced with a new group of experts, whose recommendations were published in December.
Their proposal for the “Social and Economic Revitalisation” of Sisak-Moslavina was ambitious – it envisaged investment in education and housing and the development of sustainable agriculture and tourism. However, the document’s lack of concrete steps would be criticised by other experts, including Vladimir Cavrak, the macroeconomist from the University of Zagreb who had sat on the original, disbanded panel.
The government has defended the proposal. In a phone interview with BIRN, Deputy Prime Minister Boris Milosevic insisted that there was the “political will” to see it through. “It’s not enough to bring back what the earthquake destroyed,” he said. “We have to build something better than what was there, because what we had was not good enough.”
However, he acknowledged that even if the plan were to be executed in full, there was “no guarantee” that it would rectify more than 30 years of neglect and de-population. “It’s not easy,” he said. “I don’t have a magic wand, a magic formula.”
Milosevic also defended the earthquake response until now, saying the mobilisation of NGOs and the private sector had generated “additional value” within the relief effort. “The fact that civil society joined the earthquake response does not mean that the state did not do anything, or that the state did anything wrong,” he said.
However, Vladimir Cavrak argues that the government’s attempts at post-earthquake reconstruction have no more chance of success than the plans pursued in the post-war years. “The area has been sucked dry,” he said, arguing that the demographic and economic decline can no longer be reversed.
“There are no entrepreneurs, no people who can generate anything new, no financial, material or human capital that can develop this area,” he added, citing 2011 census figures that show one in five residents of Sisak-Moslavina are over the age of 65. According to the Croatian Pension Insurance Institute, the county is alone in Croatia in having a population of retired residents that exceeds the number of residents in employment – 44,053 versus 42,544 respectively.
Additional data support the bleak outlook. Sisak-Moslavina ranks among the poorest performing counties in Croatia by a range of economic measures. In 2020, the county’s registered unemployment rate was 18.7 per cent, more than double the national average, 8.9 per cent. Historic data for the last 20 years show that the unemployment rate for the county has consistently exceeded the national average.
Data from the Croatian Bureau of Statistics illustrate a calamitous decline in the number of people in paid employment in the county’s main towns over the last 30 years. The numbers are not perfectly comparable because of slight differences in methodology between Croatian and Yugoslav-era censuses, but the broader trend is stark, with some towns appearing to lose more than two-thirds of the people in employment between 1989 and 2020.
Behind these numbers lie cycles of unemployment and migration, driven by the failure of post-war privatisation efforts and the collapse of Yugoslav-era industries – a process described by Zagreb-based sociologist Nikolina Rajkovic as “transitional gangrene”. Among the largest firms in the region was the state-owned Sisak Iron and Steel Factory, an industrial powerhouse that reportedly had some 13,692 people on its payroll in 1989 – slightly more than the entire workforce, not including the self-employed, recorded in the town of Sisak in 2020.
As was common in Yugoslavia, the factory also supported a legion of ancillary workers, including doctors and caterers, to meet its employees’ needs. Sanja Loncar, from the University of Zagreb, recalls visiting the factory as a child to greet her mother, who used to work shifts there. “I remember seeing [crowds of] people leaving the factory,” she said. “Now you simply cannot see anything of the kind there.”
The decline in the number of people in paid employment has been accompanied by a steep drop in the population. According to the government’s proposal for regeneration released in December, the population of Sisak-Moslavina county fell by 7 per cent between 2001 and 2011. The population of Croatia as a whole shrank by just over 3 per cent over the same period.
Data from the Croatian Bureau of Statistics suggests that the steepest drop in population occurred in the 1990s, during the war and its immediate aftermath. According to the bureau, the county was home to roughly a quarter of a million people in 1991. Ten years later, in 2001, it was home to roughly 185,000 people – a decline of more than 25 per cent.
Twice forced from her home, Gordana Ross however has no intention of leaving Petrinja behind. She returned to the town last year, after the damaged building next to her house was demolished. She feels secure in her old home, as long as she ignores the cracks that appear in the walls when smaller tremors shake the region. “It’s a defence mechanism,” she said. “If I pretend I have not seen the cracks, maybe there’s a possibility that the walls have not really cracked.” It is harder to ignore the devastation she sees on the streets of Petrinja. “That’s my life,” she said, puffing on her cigarette. “It’s as if I’m walking on the ruins of my life.”
