President Zoran Milanović said on Monday that Croatians arrested in Athens for involvement in football fan violence in which a Greek national was killed, are being held in custody as if there was a war going on and treated like criminals, and that that has nothing to do with the law, democracy or human rights.

“That’s not what a law-based state should be like. Those people are being treated like prisoners of war. If I were Prime Minister, I would think carefully about what to do. The situation is not simple. This verges on the law of war. (The detainees) are being treated like a captured military unit,” Zoran Milanović said in Jelsa on the island of Hvar, in a comment on the news that 105 men, including 98 supporters of the Croatian Dinamo football club, arrested after the 7 August football fan violence outside the AEK stadium in Athens, have been remanded in custody and that they will be sent to 16 prisons across Greece.

He added that he had mentioned the possibility of something like that happening a few days ago.

“I can speculate about the reasons why this was done now, why it was done in Greece, what Greece expects from UEFA and why it is important to them to shift the responsibility onto a hundred Croats. How many Greeks have been detained?” Milanović said.

He recalled that the Greek authorities did not manage to identify the perpetrator of the murder after keeping the arrested fans in detention for as long as five days without any explanation, remanding eventually all of them in custody.

“You have five days to weed out those responsible yet you place the whole group in custody, scattering them in prisons across Greece so they get beaten up and raped. Great, that’s the EU for you,” Milanović said.

“You cannot hold a hundred people in detention for five days. With that amount of time you have full discretion to establish what happened, and after that (the detainees) should be treated like human beings and our citizens who have their rights,” Milanović added.

“(The Greek authorities’ conduct) has nothing to do with democracy and respect for human rights. If that is what the EU is today, it would be better if it did not exist,” he said, adding that he would like Prime Minister Andrej Plenković to speak up on the matter.

Milanović was speaking to reporters after attending a special session of the Jelsa Municipal Council, held on the occasion of Jelsa Municipality Day and the Feast of the Assumption.

Hvar different from other islands

Speaking about the island of Hvar at the Jelsa Municipal Council session, Milanović said that it was a special island, “combining antiquity, the pre-antiquity era, the Bronze Age, the Middle Ages and the modern era.”

He recalled having regularly spent his holiday on Hvar at the time when he was Prime Minister, adding that he continued to do so as President.

Milanović said that while cycling from one side of the island to the other a couple of days ago, he noticed that there were more and more guests on the island and that after Croatian registration plates, the second most numerous were those from Serbia.

“The situation has been changing in that regard, life goes on, we have been developing, quarreling, making up… but the process is going towards a certain end,” Milanović said.

Health Minister Vili Beroš, who attended the session as PM Plenković’s envoy, announced in his address the establishment of an emergency medical helicopter service, noting that the project has been put out to tender.

“As a tourist country, Croatia must not be among the few European countries that do not have such a service,” he said, adding that if everything goes well with the tender, the service will be established in the first quarter of 2024.

Jelsa Mayor Nikša Peronja reported about ongoing work on a fishermen’s museum in Jelsa, to be built in the shape of a boat.