The Netherlands is one of the largest donors of aid to Croatia and sees Croatia as its future coalition partner in the European Union, Veer said.
The Dutch ambassador said that his country had also sent aid to Zagreb at the time when Croatian newspapers wrote that the Netherlands, along with Britain, was obstructing the opening of EU membership talks with Croatia.
The Dutch programmes, the aim of which is to help given countries to meet the EU membership criteria, have been available to Croatia since 2001, three years before it was awarded the status of candidate for EU membership.
The Netherlands is Croatia's second largest bilateral donor after the United States, with 1,750,000 euros coming from that country this year.
Cilic said that Croatia could count on greater assistance from the EU than the countries that joined the bloc last year could, because there were many of them and the aid had to be divided.
Noting the diversity of areas of cooperation with the Netherlands, Cilic said that local government units and state administration bodies should participate along with the central government in order to take advantage of all the benefits of pre-accession aid.
By the end of the year Croatia will have access to 105 million euros in total.
How much of it you will use depends on you, Veer said. He added that it was important for requests for funds to be well prepared so that the EU could respond to them as quickly as possible.
The Dutch ambassador said that no other EU member had so many aid programmes available as Croatia, but warned that the European Commission, having learnt from experience from previous rounds of enlargement, would increase supervision to see how the allocated aid was being used in practice.