A Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Thomas Waitz of the European Greens has launched a media campaign to warn the public of the extent of damage being caused by excessive logging in areas managed by the Croatian state-owned forest management company Hrvatske Sume.

Waitz launched the campaign after he visited Croatia in July at the invitation of the VIDRA war veteran association’s Green Unit (Zeleni odred), a forum against forest destruction, with whose members he toured devastated forest areas within the Natura 2000 ecological network, the Green Unit said in a press release.

In a public letter sent to the European Commissioner for Environment, Oceans and Fisheries, Virginijus Sinkevicius, Waitz warned of what he described as an alarming situation in Croatian forests, particularly in the area of Crna Mlaka, a special bird reserve just south of Zagreb, where he witnessed violations of rules relating to Natura 2000 and the Ramsar Convention.

Waitz accused Hrvatske Sume of eco-cide in that unique habitat for whose protection the state-owned forest management company took funds from the EU’s Rural Development Programme.

Waitz said that the habitat contains many areas of clear-cutting conducted with large machines while an examination of plastic tubes, used to protect saplings, showed that they were either empty or contained dry saplings, whose purpose was to absorb increasingly large quantities of CO2 in the atmosphere.

He warned that the poor management of protected areas, for which European funds were absorbed, is contrary to Europe’s Green Deal strategy and biodiversity.

Waltz called on Commissioner Sinkevicius to investigate how much of Europeans’ tax money was used for what he described as a senseless attempt to reforest the area and why that was not considered a case of clear-cutting.