The Belize Defence Force is hosting what's called a national security strategy formulation seminar. The seminar seeks to position Belize's security vision into a 15 year time frame. The strategy will analyze and identify threats and suggest possible ways of reducing those threats. Now the BDF has called its first of three seminars bringing together all law enforcement personnel to see how that can be done. We visited to find out more from coordinator Col. Reuel Black.
Col. Reuel Black, BDF
"If you think of security the first thing that comes to mind is just against external aggression or the security, law and order in the society. It is security when it comes to our health and we need to be secured from pandemics. We also need to have economic stability so we have the threat of financial crime. We have many threats that threaten our security and that includes terrorism, organized crime, and protecting and controlling Belizean territory. The providing environment for a stable and healthy Belize and protecting our natural resources by contributing to regional and international security ourselves because if we don't contribute to international regional security then there will not be a reciprocal for it. There is also non-traditional threats, as I said before, health pandemics.
What we are doing is planning for the next fifteen years. The timing given the world threat, the world having a threat on terrorism, the timing is very important. However if we could have started earlier. At this time however we need to have started at some stage and so this is the time that we chose to start. This is the time that the government delegated us as the lead agency and as soon as they did that, we started planning to ensure that we were not behind."
The national security strategy policy should be complete by the end of this year.
