NATO HQ 10 June 2005

Address by H.E. Mate Raboteg,State Secretary of Defence of the Republic of Croatia at Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council Mr. Secretary General, Your excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, In the globalised environment of today the events in any part of the world can influence our security. Therefore we must be prepared to face potentially -dangerous crises at the place of their origin. Both NATO and its partners identified this necessity in the case of Afghanistan, and they fully engaged in their efforts to jointly eliminate the source of terrorism and other problems shaking the world. The situation in Afghanistan is still burdened by the recent past. The country is very impoverished, and the central government in Kabul has no authority over all territories of the country. The hopelessness of young people and the ineffective law enforcement facilitate the development of criminal and extreme political groups, which can become an asylum to the world terrorists. Besides that, we see that almost 90% of the world's heroin production still originates from Afghanistan. This problem cannot be uprooted by the increase of the number of security forces in Afghanistan. People in Afghanistan turn to the poppy production out of necessity, since they have no survival alternative at this moment. We jointly must try to make this other alternative attractive and accessible to them. Consequently, our mission in Afghanistan is clear - we must assist the central Government not only in providing the rule of law, but also in stimulating the economic and social prosperity of the whole country. Each of our countries has by now involved significant human and material resources in order to enlarge the security and stability in the areas outside Kabul. Nevertheless, we must not give up. The resources we involved are therefore no expense: they are far more an investment into our more secure future. Croatia welcomes NATO's decision on the ISAF mission enlargement. We are determined not to allow the decay of our joint investment. Since 2003, Croatia has been participating in the ISAF mission with a military contingent of 50 personnel. The contingent consists of the military police, as well as special teams for criminal investigations, explosive detection and intelligence. At the beginning of this year our civil policemen and diplomats joined the German PRT in Feyzabad. In August this year we will be deploying our medical team to the Kabul Airport together with Albania and Macedonia. It is understood that we would not be able to do all this without the cooperation with NATO, Germany and other countries in the ISAF mission. Next year we are planning to triplicate our personnel in Afghanistan. We will help Lithuania to form their PRT. Most of all we will enlarge our military contingent, so that beside the military police we will also have an infantry company there next year. This will be the most concrete Croatian contribution to the efforts of the international community to enlarge the zone of security and stability. However, this will not be the end of Croatia's engagement; we will permanently continue to examine other possibilites of our contribution in the fight against terrorism through the cooperation with NATO and Partnership countries, as we are successfully doing it in Afghanistan. Thank you for your attention.