Latest statement by the Prime Minister Duško Marković is a new attempt to cover up the crimes against the Tara River, which for a long time is being conducted by the joint forces of the Government of Montenegro and the Chinese company CRBC.
After ministers Radulović and Simović told us that we should trust them more than our own eyes, now the Prime Minister Marković publicly promises that Tara will remain as it is after the construction of the highway.
We fear that this promise of Marković will be fulfilled, and that after the departure of CRBC, Tara will remain exactly what it is now – polluted and with devastated riverbeds, that nobody will bear responsibility for this, and that ultimately the full cost of destroying Tara will be paid by citizens from their pockets.
Discharge of wastewater into the river, construction in the basin, depositing of construction waste on the shores and destroyed biodiversity are what Tara is today and, unfortunately, it can lead to the re-examination of its status in UNESCO.
It is understandable that Marković sees the campaign of NGOs for the defence of Tara as inappropriate because it does not fit into strictly controlled visits to arranged construction sites around Podgorica that he is accustomed to organize, and that the campaign spoils the idyllic image that everything is all right with the construction of the highway.
Instead of inviting non-governmental organizations, it would be good for the Prime Minister Marković to carry out inspections on Tara and force them to do their job and demand responsibility within their Government, not only because Tara is devastated, but also because they are persistently hiding information about it from the public.
For nearly two years now since the start of the construction, neither Marković nor any of his ministers dared to visit this site and tell the truth to the citizens, until MANS first released disturbing footage of what is happening on Tara.
And while we can understand that the truth about Tara bothers Marković because it testifies to the way his government takes care of the natural resources of this country, it is worrying that there is not even a minimum of readiness to acknowledge the error and begin working on its correction. Instead, Marković joins efforts to hide everything from citizens.
MANS once again reminds Marković that he no longer has to play the “black box” of state secrets as he was accustomed to his previous work place, but is now in the function of which citizens rightly expect full information about what the Government is doing.
On the contrary, by ignoring this problem, Marković himself answers the question of whether Tara will survive the highway.
Dejan Milovac
Director of the Investigative Centre
MANS
