MINSK, 10 January (BelTA) - Particular attention should be paid to the countering of terrorism and extremism in all its manifestations, State Secretary of the Belarusian Security Council Aleksandr Volfovich told BelTA following the special meeting of the CSTO Collective Security Council to discuss the situation in Kazakhstan.
"Today, the people of Kazakhstan are dealing with a tough challenge. The armed riots organized for the purpose of a coup d'état left people killed, including representatives of law enforcement and the infrastructure destroyed," Aleksandr Volfovich noted. "But the riots, with terrorist militants being their backbone, failed to sow chaos in the country, to unleash a fratricidal war."
According to the state secretary, the Kazakhstan government declared a state of emergency in a timely manner and gave a tough and decisive response to terrorists during the counter-terrorist operation. At the official request of the country's leadership, a CSTO peacekeeping contingent was promptly deployed to Kazakhstan, which took strategically important facilities under protection. This allowed the law enforcement agencies of Kazakhstan to focus on normalizing the situation, searching for and eliminating armed gangs.
"The deployment of peacekeepers, including Belarusian servicemen, has had a stabilizing effect on the situation in the country and the region as a whole," Aleksandr Volfovich emphasized.
The state secretary of the Security Council also drew attention to the fact that during the special meeting of the CSTO Collective Security Council on Kazakhstan, the Belarusian president correctly pointed to the influence of an external factor in the events in Kazakhstan. The intervention of the collective West has never led to anything good: new hotbeds of instability and wars break out in various regions of the world, and civil confrontation is unleashed. Belarus has experienced a similar pressure.
"According to the latest information, the situation in Kazakhstan is returning back to normal. Today we need to draw conclusions and learn lessons from what happened,” Aleksandr Volfovich noted. “It is important to improve the CSTO's peacekeeping potential, increase the organization's capacity to respond promptly to such situations, and step up cooperation within the framework of the integration associations. Particular attention should be paid to the countering of terrorism and extremism in all their manifestations, first of all, the activities of the so-called sleeper terrorist cells. No one is immune from this today."
