Festival Against Terror | WOZ The weekly newspaper
Next week army and cantonal police in Bern open for the crisis. The exercise raises questions. The responsible authorities do not consider it necessary to fulfill these requirements.
From Anna JikharevaMail to author:inTwitter profile of author:in and Lukas Tobler (text) and Ursula Häne (photo)
A young woman with a veil or stole, crowned with an olive branch, in her hands – depending on the depiction – a bowl or a fruit basket: In Roman mythology, the goddess, Fides, was the personified trust. As “Fides Publica”, public faith, it was later considered the guardian of treaties with other states. Their importance is said to have been so great that the Romans even held annual festivals in their honor.
Festivals of a different kind of art will take place in Bern and the surrounding area next week. From August 15th to 19th, the cantonal police and the army will practice “just in case” under the aegis of the Bern Security Directorate and Defense Department (DDPS). It is not without a certain irony that they have christened their maneuver “Fides 22”. Actually, the exercise should have taken place last year, but it was postponed because of the pandemic.
Well, according to a statement from the Security Directorate, the army – the so-called Territorial Division I – is supposed to protect “important infrastructure that is critical to the functioning of public life”, “specifically and in detail” and “partly on a 1:1 scale”: distribution centers for Food, for example, tunnels, bridges or viaducts, energy supply data centers and government buildings. The “protection of important transports” or embassies is also conceivable.
hijacking and sabotage
The participants remain silent about the specific exercise scenario – the only thing that is known is that it is a “long-term terrorist threat”. However, the maneuver is to be based on findings from the “Security Association Exercise 2019” (“SVU 19”): a national exercise in which the handling of a “prolonged terrorist situation” was also exercised. After all, the scenario at the time WAS described in detail in the associated final report.
The security authorities used a fictitious group called the “Global Liberation Front” as the opposite side, which was a “generic model opponent”. Like other Western countries, Switzerland is part of the “enemy image”. Because, according to the scenario, some members were arrested after an attack on the UN in Geneva, the terrorist group is calling for attacks in Switzerland. With devastating consequences for the whole country. Because the Global Liberation Front, it turns out, is remarkably powerful.
First, she perpetrated an attack on Zurich main station. Only a few days later, she succeeds in “massively” disrupting the power supply as well as rail and payment transactions throughout Switzerland with sabotage and cyber attacks. She also sets a major fire that puts the Army Logistics Center out of action and paralyzes both a major highway and a rail line. And that’s just the starting point. In addition, there were further cyber attacks in “SVU 19”, attacks on embassies, drone attacks on airports, a threat to the Beznau nuclear power plant, traffic chaos caused by false reports, and a hijacked aircraft. And don’t forget the nationwide food supply poisoning. And all of this within 52 hours.
“You don’t have to invent anything,” said Bernese security director Philippe Müller (FDP) about the scenario of a “prolonged terrorist threat” to “20 minutes”. This has been proven by past attacks in European cities. He cannot provide any information about the exact course of the exercise because it is important that the security forces exercising do not know the scenario in advance. So far, so logical.
However, the WOZ would have liked to know from the Security Directorate whether “Fides 22” was initiated by the canton or the army, which authorities were involved, and how much money was budgeted in the canton for planning and implementing the exercise. And who took the conclusion when. But Müller didn’t want to talk. When asked whether one could at least justify why the WOZ was refused any information, his assistant said no. However, the media would be informed about the course of the exercise in due course.
Müller was more talkative not only to the Tamedia newspapers and Blick, but also to the industry journal Swiss Soldier. In an interview in July, he emphasized that the police depended on the support of the army in crisis situations, that Berne had too few policewomen and that the left “did not want to accept the political reality”.
After the initial rejection, the DDPS, which is responsible at the federal level, wrote that no additional costs for the exercise had to be budgeted on its side and that the contents of the exercises were “according to the army’s own needs and those of its partner”. So roughly after those of the canton of Bern.
Vague definitions
It was foreseeable that there would be protests against such a crude exercise. And so an autonomous group called “No Fides” was formed in Bern in advance. Under the motto “Never trust cops, soldiers or the state”, a demo and events will take place in the coming days: on police violence, the militarization of Europe’s external borders or on “military, masculinity and militancy”. The group calls outsiders to sabotage the exercise. “It is important for us to look at who decides what terrorism is and what is not. Who can shape these discourses and exploit such a term” – this is how the group explains their motivation to the WOZ.
What counts as terrorism in Switzerland is regulated in the “Federal Law on Police Measures to Combat Terrorism”, PMT for short, which came into force in June and gives the police extensive powers. The extremely vague definition, according to which even the “spreading of fear and terror” counts as “terrorist activity”, was widely criticized in advance, including by sixty renowned law professors and UN experts. With “Fides 22” police and military counter-insurgency training “under the guise of ensuring security for the population”, the activists fear.
Somewhat polemically suspected: could the army be called up in the future if the climate movement blocks motorways, as the Renovate Switzerland group did this year? Is Bern actually trying to combat uprisings, which are becoming more and more likely in Switzerland due to the global situation? In the “SonntagsZeitung” last weekend, Pierre-Yves Maillard, the country’s top trade unionist, warned of “social unrest” in view of the massively rising prices and uncertain energy supply.
An international trend
It is an international trend that the separation between the military and the police is becoming increasingly blurred. The Bernese Councilor Rahel Ruch from the Green Alliance has observed a “blurring of the boundaries between external and internal security” in recent years. “In small steps we are getting used to the fact that direct protection against terrorist attacks is part of everyday life,” she says. As an example, Ruch cites the installation of concrete bollards to protect against attacks in downtown Bern.
In its media release, the Bern security directorate also refers to international developments. In Belgium, Italy and France, for example, “soldiers in the streets are not an unfamiliar sight”. In Germany, too, cooperation between the military and the police has been practiced intensively for a number of years, despite “historical reservations”.
Such exercises are not new in Switzerland either. In the canton of Zurich, for example, cooperation between the army and the civil authorities is trained every year at the airport. Similar maneuvers have also taken place in Geneva, Solothurn and St. Gallen in recent years. “The aim is to ensure basic readiness at all times,” writes the DDPS. However, the Bern security department states that the lead will remain with the police even in the case of events such as those that are to be trained in Bern next week.