Tens of thousands march in Zagreb over 37,000 tonnes of waste near Gospic

Tens of thousands of people filled Ban Jelacic Square in Zagreb on Saturday in one of Croatia's largest protests in years, demanding the removal of about 34,000 to 37,000 tonnes of waste buried near Gospic in the Lika region. The march was called Walk for Lika, Walk for Croatia. Banners read "The lungs of Croatia can no longer breathe" and "Nature does not forgive." Crowds chanted the country's name.

The civic group Gospic Is Our Home organised the rally. Vjekoslav Busic, from the initiative, said residents had been reporting suspected illegal activity since 2023. Verica Jurnjak, who travelled from Gospic, said the site should have been cleaned long ago and that no one was thinking about children. Organisers want a full remediation plan with binding deadlines within 20 days, all buried waste removed within three months, named responsibility, and an immediate ban on waste imports.

Police and Europol arrested 13 people last February on suspicion of importing and dumping hazardous waste. Europol said the scheme made at least 4 million euros. Croatian criminal police are investigating at least ten people and four firms as an organised group on environmental and economic charges. Much of the material was imported from Italy in 2023 and 2024 and placed at an abandoned industrial site outside Gospic, in Lika-Senj County, the country's largest and least densely populated county.

Testing has turned the dump from a local complaint into a national health file. The Geotechnical Faculty at the University of Zagreb reported heavy metals, including lead, copper and antimony, and PFAS compounds in groundwater. Croatia's anti-corruption office USKOK published findings in August that some of the waste is hazardous or ecotoxic. Residents say drinking water is the point, not only soil.

Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic visited Gospic on Wednesday and said the government had selected a contractor for the first phase, which is to lift waste off the site. That visit did not empty the square. The political charge of Saturday is the gap between a contractor announcement and a pile that is still in the ground more than a year after the arrests. Plenkovic's government has been in office long enough that delay is now attributed to the cabinet, not to the original dumpers.

Lika sells itself as clean mountain country, a lung for the coast. Importing Italian industrial and medical waste into that story is why the protest used the lung metaphor without irony. It is also why a Zagreb square filled with people who do not live in Gospic. The dump is in a thin county. The water argument travels.

EU law on waste shipment is supposed to stop this kind of load crossing an internal border to be buried in a poorer region. The Europol file says it happened anyway, at a profit. The cleanup bill will be public. The 4 million euros cited as illegal profit will not cover it. That mismatch, profit private and remediation public, is what the 20-day deadline is designed to force onto paper.

Saturday does not move a tonne. It sets a clock the government will be measured against. If the first-phase contractor starts work, the protest has a result. If the waste is still in Gospic in three months, the next march will not need a new slogan.