Political blockades and lack of consensus among decision-makers have long cost the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Numerous infrastructure projects are pending, and many of them are of strategic importance for economic development. It is still not possible to cross the new bridge in Gradiška, and carriers also have a problem with the new border crossing in Svilaj. They have been warning the authorities about this for months.
The new bridge on the Sava near Gradiska was completed two months ago, but it still serves only for decoration. Traffic has not been released, and it probably won’t be next year either. The transporters were especially looking forward to this project, because a new border crossing for freight traffic is planned as part of the bridge package, which would solve multi-day waiting and kilometer-long queues in the very center of Gradiska. Apart from Croatia, the problem was also created within Bosnia and Herzegovina, because there was no agreement in the Council of Ministers – whether to categorize the crossing in Gradiška in a package with Svilaj or separately.
“The Gradiška border crossing is also one of the most frequented crossings in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and there is no drinking water, toilets, where you have to wait for two or three days. If we only take into account that one day of the car, a day of waiting is somewhere around 500 marks , plus a driver. We must remind that most of the drivers from Bosnia and Herzegovina left precisely because of such work at border crossings and customs terminals, where there are huge waits and no one wants to stay for two or three days for the goods to be cleared and cleared through customs,” says Nikola Grbić, President of the Association of Carriers for International Internal Transport of the RS.
The Svilaj border crossing cost 17.7 million marks. The temporary categorization for the crossing in Svilaj expires at the end of the year, and the question is when the Council of Ministers will decide on this again. Modern border crossings are a prerequisite for economic development.
“We have five and a half billion marks in trade with Croatia, and of course that exchange and the pressure on that border is the greatest. Not only because Croatia is our largest foreign trade partner, but also because we export 72 percent of our goods to the EU market and it is a transit country. As a result, 50 border crossings, of which 30 are for international passenger transport, 20 are border crossings, we will see what will happen when the issue is in the Schengen zone, i.e. Croatia’s entry into Schengen,” says Vjekoslav Vuković, vice president of the Foreign Trade Chamber of BiH.
These are not the only projects that are at a standstill due to the lack of consensus within the institutions. Losses – huge.
“This is about billions, the projects we need, which have been approved, are being blocked. Such behavior, on the one hand, has direct losses, Europe no longer wants to be a donor to any project in Bosnia and Herzegovina if its agencies do not implement it. We are in a situation where they are bypassing us in a wide arc”, emphasizes economic analyst Zoran Pavlović.
“I think that actually all those people who were supposed to make such important decisions regarding the citizens looked at their own interests, the interests of certain groups, with very narrow, limited views, and hiding behind the fact that they exclusively protect the interests of the ethnic community to which they belong,” he says. political analyst Tanja Topić.
Carriers claim that if border crossings were modernized and procedures simplified, the numbers would increase significantly, not only for Croatia but also for other EU countries.
