The former Chief of the General Staff of the Czech Army, Jirži Šedivi, warned in an interview for Czech Television and the Parliamentary List portal, that Europe and the Czech Republic do not pay attention to the Western Balkans and thus allow terrorists to "find peace in that region to rest and practice further terrorist attacks".
"We deal with a completely different part of Europe, that is, Western and Central Europe, and since the wars of the 1990s subsided, we stopped paying attention to the Balkans, especially to security. The problem of the Balkans is that it creates a safe environment in which terrorist organizations can establish themselves. cells, they can prepare there, they can have their own logistics centers and background that allow them to prepare and at the same time rest from complicated operations in Western Europe," Šedivi told Parlamnji listi.
The Czech general reminded that the German and Austrian intelligence services have warned over the last year that the Balkans are becoming extremely radicalized, and that the fact that Balkan Muslims are the target of various Islamic regimes from the Middle East also creates a problem.
"At the time when the Czech contingent was in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we saw with our own eyes how humanitarian aid was distributed. In the villages in Bosnia and Herzegovina destroyed by bombing, the houses were not renovated first, the infrastructure was repaired, but the mosques were first renovated," said the general who is himself a veteran of the Bosnian mission of the Czech army.
General Šedivi assessed that the current authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo are not efficient enough to deal with the phenomenon of Islamist radicalization that has been going on since the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
"Are the authorities in those countries capable of dealing with it? I don't think they directly support it, but let's simply understand that the effectiveness of government organizations there is relatively low. A typical example is Bosnia and Herzegovina, where they have three parties on the territory of the state - the Serbian , Bosniak and Croatian, which until today have not found a common language. Kosovo is constantly struggling with economic problems, has huge unemployment. All of this is fertile ground for radicalism to continuously strengthen and spread," said Šedivi.
The general warned that it is important for the Czech Republic to pay attention to the Balkans, because when the West drastically tightens security measures, Islamic terrorists will turn to other countries, Central Europe, where there have been no attacks and where security measures have not been so tightened, and the Balkans are only a few hours by car from the Czech borders.
"We simply have to know what is happening in those two countries. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and possibly Macedonia. We have to pay the same attention to that as the problem of terrorism in Western Europe," said the former Chief of the General Staff of the Czech Army.
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