Bosnia and Herzegovina's Security Minister Dragan Mektic said on Monday that the entity authorities had informed him that they did not want to take part in the exercise and that they did not want to have such an exercise on the entity's territory.
A rejection letter was forwarded by the head of the Serb entity's civil exercise administration, Mile Medjed.
The EADRCC director, Gunter Bretschneider, said in Sarajevo today that the disastrous flooding that hit Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2014 showed that it was necessary to be prepared to respond to such disasters.
"The 17th EADRCC consequence management field exercise, called 'BOSNA I HERCEGOVINA 2017', will be jointly organised by the Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Centre (EADRCC) and the Ministry of the Security (Mos) of Bosnia and Herzegovina," the EADRCC, NATO’s principal civil emergency response mechanism in the Euro-Atlantic area, states on its web site.
"It is planned that the field exercise will be preceded by a training programme, a Table Top Exercise and a Virtual Reality - Command Post Exercise with the aim to train and exercise procedures for the Local Emergency Management Authority (LEMA), the UN model On-site Operation Co-ordination Centre (OSOCC), the liaison officers, the On-site commanders as well as the team leaders of participating consequence management teams.
"The consequence management activities on the ground will be based on a scenario that will include floods, an earthquake, landslides and chemical incidents affecting the population and critical infrastructure in Tuzla canton," according to the information on the EADRC web site.