Prefaces and Greetings
Preface
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Friends of European Special Intervention Units,
Ministerial Councillor Bernhard Treibenreif, B.A., M.A. ATLAS President Special Unit Task Force Cobra/Directorate for Special Forces (DSE)
since September 11, 2001, 20 years passed. On that day, several thousand people in the USA died because of simultaneously committed unimaginable brutal terror attacks. The terrible pictures went around the world. This event did not leave Europe unscathed either – a few days later, as a first response the Council of European Ministers of the Interior ordered the Belgian EU Council Presidency to increase the cooperation of European counter-terrorism units as quickly as possible. Shortly after the attack, we – the commanders of all EU counter-terrorism units – met under the Chairman of the Belgian special unit DSU and founded the so-called ATLAS Network. This is the close cooperation network of the meanwhile 38 special police forces of the 27 EU member states, the United Kingdom and the associated countries (Iceland, Norway, Switzerland). After years during which Belgium held the chairman ship and Austria provided the vice chairman, the ATLAS Presidency was taken by the Netherlands, Germany and in 2017 by Austria.
Since then, a lot has happened: From its beginning ATLAS has developed constantly – in fact, with full support of all units because every commander knew that this EU-wide cooperation could und will lead at any time to incidents requiring cross-border cooperation. Many examples of cross-border special operations show this to be true. Unfortunately, even Europe was not spared from serious attacks, for example in Mad-
rid in 2003, in London in 2005, in Paris in 2015 – to name just a few. Three EU Council decisions, achieved under Estonian and Austrian chairmanship, created the legal regulations to anchor the ATLAS Network on a European level and to strengthen the network, in particular with a cooperation to Europol and a fixed annual EU-budget. This in turn enables the ATLAS units to carry out extensive activities, for example workshops, cross-border exercises or joint developments of operational techniques and tactics. Meanwhile, all over Europe joint training centres for special forces are set up and the standards for equipment and education of all units reached a compatible level. Still a lot of work needs to be done. But Special Intervention Units und their commanders all have the peculiar intention to pursue reasonable and important aims persistently and to finish projects successfully. Therefore, this common pathway of development will proceed. A fair bit of this common and successful pathway lies behind us – a long way of necessary further developments still lies before us. Following the guideline of ATLAS, “All together to protect you”, we will still undertake everything in our influence to protect the people in our European states as far as possible. Wiener Neustadt, May 2021
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