Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic on Friday told the Bosnian edition of the Vecernji List daily that Croatia would do everything to prevent the entry of migrants from Bosnia and Herzegovina and announced support to Bosnian authorities in dealing with this problem.

“Croatia will do everything to protect its border and prevent any attempts at crossing the border illegally, and has all the necessary resources to do that. We are prepared to assist Bosnia and Herzegovina in that regard,” Grabar-Kitarovic said.

She added that Croatia would deploy police officers through the EU border control agency Frontex to control the border at the Mali Zvornik border crossing between Bosnia and Serbia.

She added that the authorities in Zagreb were carefully monitoring the increased influx of migrants on the new route across Bosnia and Herzegovina and their attempts to get to EU countries by travelling through Croatia.

“Croatian police have reinforced all the resources necessary to control the state border, which is the EU’s external border with Bosnia and Herzegovina, by bringing in additional manpower and technical resources,” she said.

“The experience we have had in managing the migrant crisis in 2015 leads us to conclude that only coordinated efforts of all the relevant state services along the route can make the response to this challenge successful. We recently talked about this at the Brdo-Brijuni Process Summit in Skopje, considering the significance of this issue for the stability of the entire Southeast Europe region,” Grabar-Kitarovic said.

Her interview was published just when the migrant crisis in Bosnia had turned into a political problem with unforeseen consequences as various levels of government started to argue how to respond to the increased influx of refugees, and who was responsible for their care.

Bosnia’s Security Minister, Dragan Mektic, and the chief of police of the Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH) entity, Dragan Lukac, warned that the decision to prevent a convoy of buses carrying migrants from Sarajevo to an asylum centre in Mostar, which was most likely made by the local police authorities in the Herzegovina-Neretva canton, was unprecedented, and represented a threat to the constitutional rule of law in the country.

“That’s a collapse of the constitutional and legal system. I have never seen anything like it,” Mektic told the Faktor web portal.

He called on the country’s tripartite presidency to urgently respond, and adopt a decision on measures that need to be taken in this situation.

He claimed that authorities in the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton do not have the authority to ban refugees from being accommodated in the Salakovac migrant centre at Mostar which is state-run.

“This is a matter of the functioning of the constitutional and legal system, and a matter for the Presidency to resolve, and it is necessary to see if the system will be respected in this country or not. That is not in my remit. That has nothing to do with security. That is a typical political issue, and (shows) disrespect for the constitution and (state) institutions,” Mektic said.

It is not exactly known who ordered the buses carrying about 250 migrants to be stopped, but media speculated on Friday that the decision was taken by the cantonal police chief, Ilija Lasic.

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