Following floods in Bosnia and Herzegovina, OSCE-supported event focuses on ways to improve disaster management

SARAJEVO, 10 July 2014 – Roles and activities of various actors in relief operations during the floods that struck Bosnia and Herzegovina in May 2014 were analyzed at a roundtable event held today by the Council of Ministers’ Inter-ministerial Working Group on Security Policy and the BiH Coordination Body for Protection and Rescue, with the support of the OSCE Mission to BiH.

“More frequent natural and other disasters, as well as the growing complexity of the security environment have highlighted the need to revise and amend our security policies,” said Mladen Cavar, Deputy Minister of Security of BiH. “The catastrophic floods that struck BiH in May 2014 confirmed this. Today’s discussion serves to highlight key challenges we have faced and draw lessons from this experience.”

John Martin, Acting Director of the Department of Security Co-operation of the OSCE Mission to BiH, said: “The OSCE supports local authorities in all important areas related to security policy development, and disaster management is one of them. Policies and mechanisms need to be further developed to facilitate co-ordinated responses to disasters, with an efficient, effective and reliable crisis management system in BiH being the ultimate goal”.

The roundtable event gathered representatives of authorities from the state, entity and Brcko District levels who discussed what they did during and after the floods, and analyzed ways of improving co-ordination at all levels, and the need to include protection and rescue in the BiH Security Policy document as an important non-military aspect of security.