Liberland

Land nobody wants

When Yugoslavia broke up, the border between Croatia and Serbia along the Danube was left to be negotiated. The river has shifted its course over time, and the land records date from Austro-Hungarian days, when it flowed differently: Gornja Siga, on the western bank, was recorded as Serbian. For reasons tied to that shift, each country would rather the pocket belonged to the other, so for more than 25 years no one claimed it.^[1][2]

A country is declared

In April 2015 Vít Jedlička, a Czech libertarian politician, claimed the unpopulated forest as Liberland and named himself president. It began as something of a stunt, a tax-free, libertarian state that would use Bitcoin, but hundreds of thousands of people applied for citizenship.^[3]

Liberland’s case is that the land is terra nullius, unoccupied and unclaimed by any state. Croatia’s government answered that the border was still being negotiated, but “the area concerned does not involve no man’s land (terra nullius) which could be subject to occupation by a third party.” Its border police patrol the area and arrested would-be settlers, many of whom stayed in rented villas on the Serbian side.^[3]

“the area concerned does not involve no man’s land (terra nullius) which could be subject to occupation by a third party”^[3]

Settled, then cleared

When Croatia joined the Schengen area in 2023, its Danube border became Schengen’s too, and for a while that year Croatian police let settlers in; they built wooden shelters, solar panels and a border crossing point.^[2][1] It did not last. On 9 September 2023, Jedlička’s 40th birthday, he was arrested and banned from Croatia and Liberland for five years, and on 21 September a company working for Croatia’s state forests, escorted by police, dismantled the settlement.^[2]

Jedlička read even that as progress: the papers expelling him named Croatia and Gornja Siga separately, which he says shows Croatia does not consider the land its own.^[1]