Around 200 workers at the Sisak oil refinery staged an hour-long protest on Wednesday morning at the plant, protesting against the announced closure of the refinery owned by the country's oil firm Ina.
The workers, carrying Croatian flags, flags of war veteran associations and banners, gathered in one of the plant’s parking lots, and then walked over to the nearby road crossing, blocking all traffic.
They were joined by associations of the 1991-95 war veterans from Rijeka, Zagreb, Solin, Ivanic Grad and other towns, as well as Sisak city officials, including the mayor Kristina Ikic-Banicek.
“The government now seems lost and keep saing that something would be done here, but two years ago they also claimed that they would buy out Ina, but nothing has been done about it since. Workers can no longer trust these promises. Our question is, why do we have to liberate something we had already liberated in 1995,” workers’ spokesman, Predrag Sekulic, told reporters.
The protest came in response to an announcement in December that the Sisak refinery, one of two refineries in the country operated by Ina, would be shut down, with a portion of the workers laid off and the plant re-purposed to produce different types of products.
The management of the company – in which Hungarian oil company Mol holds some 49 percent stake, with the government owning a further 44 percent – said that the oil refining businesses would be entirely moved to the existing refinery in the northern Adriatic port city of Rijeka, where Ina plans to invest 4 billion kuna (€539 million) by 2023 in upgrading its capabilities.
Although Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic had announced in late 2016 that Croatia would try to buy back Mol’s stake at Ina – which the workers believe would help them keep their jobs at Sisak – the plan never materialised.
The workers said on Wednesday that they plan to continue with a series of protests, aimed at saving their jobs at the Sisak refinery.
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