Greek Defense Minister Slams NATO For Refusing To Cooperate With Russia On Anti-Terrorism

Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos said at an international conference that NATO and Europe were unprepared to resist terrorist attacks, while also criticizing NATO for its attitude toward Russia and calling for cooperation with Moscow on counterterrorism issues.

ATHENS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 16th November, 2018) Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos said at an international conference that NATO and Europe were unprepared to resist terrorist attacks, while also criticizing NATO for its attitude toward Russia and calling for cooperation with Moscow on counterterrorism issues.

The Athens 2018 Crisis Management and Security International Conference, whose tagline was "Turning risk into opportunity: An efficient crisis management," was held on November 13-15. It was organized by the Greek Defense Ministry's General Staff.

The conference was attended by the heads of the Greek army, air force and navy headquarters; members of diplomatic missions; senior military officials from foreign countries; military attaches; representatives of international organizations and institutes; members of the academic community; government officials; retired military officers; and security forces.

Kammenos spoke at the opening of the conference. A video of his speech was published by defense media outlets. After a brief formal introduction, the minister said: "And now the truth."

During his speech, which primarily focused on the threat of a "big terrorist attack," Kammenos asked many rhetorical questions, to which he himself answered.

"NATO is ready for this kind of a crisis? Every year it makes scenario of Russian attack in the north ... and leaves the southeastern Mediterranean without control. Here are the terrorists! The illegal traffic of drugs, the illegal traffic of weapons, the illegal traffic of human beings, which finances the terrorism," the minister said.

The marine area between the Suez Canal, Cyprus, Greece, Malta and Libya is uncontrolled, he stressed.

"Our ships play the game to [conduct] searches [of] Russian submarines ... If we do not cooperate with Russia on the terrorism and do not share [information] about terrorists in the Caucasus, we are [naked] against the terrorism," Kammenos stated.

INTELLIGENCE, EXCHANGE OF INFORMATION

According to the minister, despite talks about cooperation and new countries wanting to join the European Union, no one exchanges information about what is happening in the Balkans.

"We share information about organized crime? We know or not that now the terrorist organizations are now [acting] together with organized crime? And they ask us, the armed forces, to resist. How? Without information?" the minister wondered.

He also pointed to the lack of cooperation and information exchange on this issue with intelligence, claiming that intelligence services exchange information only if they want to, and exclusively with top government officials.

"And we ask dear friends and allies. You really take information from the intelligence services about this kind of relation between the organized crime and the terrorism?" Kammenos said.

He noted that the nature of terrorist threats was changing.

"And a big terrorist attack is not a crazy Islamic fighter in the center of a big city. A terrorist attack is to use a 500 euro [$570] drone with biological or chemical weapons of five grams [0.18 ounces] that can destroy a whole city. What we do for that? Nothing," the minister emphasized.

Political leaders are not trained to make decisions quickly in the event of asymmetric air threats, cases of civilians or terrorists hijacking planes code-named "Renegade aircraft," he noted.

Kammenos then recalled the crash of Helios Airlines Flight 522 in Cyprus in 2005, when a Boeing-737 plane went out of control for several hours, and the hijacking of an Egyptian plane in Cyprus in 2016 by a mentally unstable person.

"How many exercises for Renegade [aircraft] we do in Europe or in NATO? Zero! Only national exercise, and if the minister accepts to do that with his chief of staff. Remember the plane from Egypt in Cyprus? We have spent five hours to decide who has to decide. And the terrorists were in the plane. They were not real terrorists, but a crazy man," Kammenos said.

Joint exercises organized by militaries and security services were not being held, he stressed.

The Greek minister said that Europe was not ready to prevent a terrorist attack.

"Europe is very good, the best one, for dinners, for receptions. We work in theory, but we are not ready to act together in such cases," he specified.

Kammenos said that there were former militants from Syria who taught children to become terrorists with European identities in France and in many other countries.

"We try to resist these systems. The European Union's system remains the EURODAC [European Dactyloscopy], the fingerprints. Everybody knows, if we want to compare fingerprints to find the terrorist from a database of 40 million suspects, we want only three hours," the minister said.

The European Union wants to counter terrorism but does not agree with the defense ministers' proposal to introduce a system that uses biometric characteristics, he noted.

Kammenos also said that he did not know whether he would continue his political career in the future and, therefore, decided to share his opinion on the issue.