Czech Republic Defence and Security Report 2009

At the end of November 2008 the upper house of the Czech parliament approved the plan to build a US missile defence shield radar base on national territory. The US plan contemplates installing a radar base in the Czech Republic and placing 10 interceptor rockets in Poland. US officials have said the shield would protect Europe from missile attacks from rogue states such as Iran but the Russian government has criticised the plan as an east-west arms escalation. Apart from approval in the upper house, the proposal also needed to be approved in the lower house, where the coalition government lacked an overall majority. Opinion polls had up to that point shown a majority of around 55-60% of Czechs oppose the missile shield. A final vote in the lower house was not expected until after the new US administration of Barack Obama took office in January 2009. Local political analysts said it might take some kind of intervention or special appeal by the incoming US President to sway centre-left deputies who would otherwise vote against the proposal.

In campaign statements Obama said he supported the missile defence proposal in principle but that it should be ‘pragmatic and cost effective’. Hillary Clinton, who had accepted the post of Secretary of State in the new US government, had earlier criticised the outgoing Bush administration for supporting ‘expensive and unproven missile defence technology’. The Czech centre-left opposition party, the Social Democrats, had criticised the missile defence shield and argued that in any case it should have been considered as part of a multinational arrangement, rather than as a purely bilateral US-Czech agreement.

At local government level, Czech mayors have been strongly critical of the proposal. A group of 30 mayors publicised an open letter to Obama in November, saying ‘we kindly ask you to reassess the attitude of the US government towards the placement of national missile defence elements in Europe and to put a stop to this dangerous project’. Separately, Russia said it was responding to the missile shield by deploying short-range Iskander missiles in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad (which borders Lithuania and Poland), a move that the Czech foreign ministry described as ‘unfortunate’.

Despite concerns that the missile defence issue puts the Czech Republic back in the centre of East-West tensions, the country ranks highly in BMI’s security risk ratings. The Czech Republic faces limited security threats. The Czech lands do not have a history of political violence and the two historic political changes, ‘The Velvet Revolution’ which ended the Communist era in 1989, and the division of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, occurred without loss of life or significant violence. The country also enjoys good to excellent relations with all of its neighbours and none of its borders are in dispute. Historically, terrorism has also factored little, however, increasingly it has become at risk, most notably because of the country’s support of the US in the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan and operations in Iraq. In 2008 the Czech ambassador to Pakistan was killed in an untargeted truck bomb attack on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad.