My country is complaining about catastrophic unemployment rates, a stagnating economy and is unable to find a proper solution for our issues. Politics is all about rhetoric, promising you heaven and earth but delivering nothing.

So far it doesn't sound too much different from any other troubled country right now. However, our actions are ridiculously stupid.

We halt our own development. We have myriads of cases all over Croatia, and predominantly in the region in and around Zadar, where we started tearing down buildings without a legit construction permit. In a country where you desperately need employment and development, we don't issue new building permits for the most stupid reasons. Being it "missing construction site safety", or some weird part of the law that the local authorities misinterpret, or ignore altogether (there are no clear definitions for what a safe construction site is) .

On top of that, already built houses, restaurants, bars, hotels and what not are being torn down because their request for legalization is denied, often for no other reason than "no".

It won't help you much if I post news articles for I guess apart from 3/4 other users here, nobody could read it anyway. And those who can are probably already aware of what is going on.

My question is, I guess, if this is really just and understandable. Instead of making money from concessions and allowing people to build their restaurants close to coastal areas (right now you are forced to build some 70 meters away from the coast, with again very dubious exceptions which are applied from case to case), we destroy them after they have already been running for sometimes more than 10 years; resulting in a family losing its business, more people being unemployed and less country income through lesser taxes.

I can see that an illegal building is illegal. Not allowing people to build when and where they please makes sense. But we have gone way beyond what I would find reasonable. There are backwater villages on islands losing houses due to this. There is no big money involved, where you could argue that an illegal building is hindering some plans for future development, i.e. new hotels or tourist-catchers.

It's just a ridiculous movement, probably to please some people in the EU and/or Croatian politics in general. And I think this way of doing it is going to backfire hard on us.