Journalist:

Please share your expectations and ideas in view of bilateral cooperation on disaster control and emergency management between Crotia and China. We’d like to share your comments on BRIDRREM as well.

Ambassador:

I am delighted to share my comments very soon after the establishment of the Ministry of Emergency Management. Croatia was privileged to host the Vice Minister in early 2019 and to start the dialogue and explore cooperation between Croatia and China in this field. We can see just few days ago the natural disasters brought about by earthquakes, climate change, urbanization, or many other factors.

Unfortunately, disasters could come so frequently. All international organizations and cooperation mechanisms could exchange experiences and unfortunate lessons learned, make proposals on how to cooperate and support better with each other when unfortunate events like that happen. What we can do together not only regionally but globally to address these emergency situations when disasters happen. So in this regard, we are really looking forward to further exploring bilateral cooperation between Croatia and China. Our civil protection directorate within the Ministry of Interior is looking forward to such cooperation.

Finally, my congratulations to Minister Wang and the whole esteem from the Ministry of Emergency Management for hosting the very successful event today. In the meanwhile, we heard about charters of this mechanism and plans for the minister meeting later this year. I am quite certain that Croatia is looking forward to further exchange of ideas and cooperation in this field, as I mentioned earlier.

Unfortunately, every day we witness increasing number of disasters around the world, all of us, I would say need support, need cooperation. Cooperation is the key to address the disasters that we are facing more and more.

In Croatia, we are faced quite often with summer wildfires. We developed the expertise that has been shared with many countries in the Mediterranean Basin, in the EU, within the mechanism of the EU for civil protection. And now I have to say that during the pandemic, we had two earthquakes, one struck our capital and the other struck the city south of our capital.

And then you can imagine, how difficult it is to respond to the emergency situation while dealing with the global pandemic at the same time. As for aftermath of an earthquake, I'm quite certain, what we can do together bilaterally and internationally is to solve human vulnerabilities and ease the pain and suffering of people around the world from disasters. 

Thank you.