November 29, 2021 - Based on statistics made by Numbeo, and compiled by the Landgeist web portal, Croatia is considered the second safest European country for walking alone at night, narrowly behind Slovenia, and ahead of Switzerland by more than three points.

There are things one must see or experience to confirm something that is said. About Croatia, I have already been able to corroborate almost immediately the turquoise color and transparency of its waters, as well as many of its customs and traditions. But being a person who by will has stopped going out constantly at night, it was difficult for me to take for granted the security that one has when walking at night in Croatian cities and towns. Even more to consider Croatia as the second safest European country to walk alone at night.

I remember when I was living in Rijeka and studying the Croatian language, my teacher asked the class to survey locals about life in their country. I did not know many people back then, as I had just arrived just a few months ago, in 2019. I had recently joined a film club at the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, and curiously I was the only male in the group. I asked three questions and emailed them to each one of the girls in my group. One of those questions was: ''What do you consider the most positive thing about living in Croatia?'' I may be wrong, but I remember almost with absolute certainty that all the answers to that question revolved around the safety of going outside and walking alone.

I know very well that historically, answering the question about safety on the streets can vary if the person surveyed is a woman or a man. I don't like talking assumptions, but living 24 years in Lima, Peru, I know that the reality of walking alone at night is uneven. My biggest fear was being mugged, but for a woman, it was being mugged, kidnapped, harassed, and more than it costs me to continue writing. I believe that the value of living in a place where you feel safe to walk alone at night greatly reflects the level of security in your country or city. Unfortunately, crime rates are measured differently and one thing is how safe you feel on the street and another is how safe your country really is.

Although the statistics to be presented in this article are prepared based on numerous factors and yield general results, it was enough for me to know the responses of my colleagues from the film club, as well as to see my 7-year-old neighbor returning home from school at 9:00 p.m., or walking with my cousins from the City Center One Mall in Split to the highway for us to wait for the bus almost at midnight, and many other experiences in these last two years, to confirm that walking alone at night through the streets of Croatia is safe indeed, and to be considered the second safest European country is not an exaggeration at all.

Regarding the Numbeo crime statistics published on November 15th of this year, and subsequently represented on a map and shared by Landgeist three days ago, the web portal commented the following:

''How safe one feels to walk alone on the streets at night, doesn’t necessarily say anything about the crime rate in the country. But it does give a very good sense of how safe people feel in their country. Although both are probably closely related, having a low crime rate doesn’t necessarily mean that people will also feel safe. Crime rates can give a skewed view in countries where crime is under-reported or people have lost faith in law enforcement and don’t report crimes anymore.

Apart from crime, there are other factors that can affect one's sense of safety, such as the presence of dangerous animals or poor urban planning that makes cities feel less safe than they are.

Of course, this statistic can vary from city to city and even between neighborhoods. Not just that, it can also vary depending on the demographic you ask. Data on these detailed statistics are non-existing for most countries. So keep in mind that this map only gives a very general view of how safe people feel to walk the streets alone at night per country.

Regardless of whether you think crime rates and how safe people feel are closely connected or not, let’s have a look at the map. Which will just give us an idea of how safe people feel to walk the streets alone at night.

Landgeist map, which shows Croatia as the second safest European country for walking alone at night with a score of 77.4.

We recently looked at how safe people in Asia feel to walk alone at night. As you can see, this map of Europe shows much smaller contrasts than the Asian map. No country in Europe scores over 80, but there are several countries in Asia that do score over 80. On the other hand, there is only one country in Europe that scores below 40. In Asia, there are quite a few countries that score below 40.

At the bottom end in Europe, there is one country that scores far lower than any other country: Belarus (32.3). The next 2 countries also score much lower than others: France (40.3) and Moldova (41.3). Sweden, the UK, Belgium, Ukraine, Ireland, Italy, and Greece also don’t score very well.

The highest scores can be found in Slovenia (78.4) and Croatia (77.4). The only ones to score over 75. Switzerland, Iceland, and the Czech Republic also score very well. The majority of the European countries seem to be scoring fairly OK, with most of them scoring between 50 and 70''.

For some, it may be one more curious fact. But Croatia is a country that from Zagreb, Slavonia, Istria, and even Dalmatia, can boast enviable numbers of tourism throughout the year. Nightlife is an important aspect of that reality, whether it is coming home from a rave, a nightclub, a bar, or a soccer game. Being the second safest European country for people to walk alone on the street at night cannot be overlooked, and it reinforces the idea that Croatia could be promoted as a safe destination for all, but it is a question of whether those who are to charge of showing the country to the rest of the world consider whether it is something important or not. We'll see.

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ZAGREB, 27 Sept 2021 - In its report for 2020-21, the Security and Intelligence Agency (SOA) says Croatia is a secure and stable democracy but warns about rising extremism and radicalism due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

We are witnessing the biggest pandemic in modern history which has caused unprecedented disruptions in everyday life and enormous damage to the global economy, SOA director Daniel Markić says in the introduction.

The pandemic has additionally increased extremism and radicalism, notably due to disinformation and conspiracy theories concerning Europe's response to the crisis and the effectiveness of democratic and liberal political and social systems, SOA's seventh report says.

Despite 20 years of international efforts in bringing democracy to the local society, the Taliban have taken power in Afghanistan.

SOA also monitored the increasing world dominance of geopolitical reshufflings and competitions as well as the strengthening of the economic, political, and value challengers to liberal democracies in the international order.

Climate change is increasingly showing its consequences, the report says.

Non-Western actors active in the southeastern neighborhood

It indicates that non-Western actors are active in Croatia's southeastern neighborhood and that reforms aimed at reaching European standards are slow.

The Western Balkans is still burdened by unfinished stabilization processes and unsolved inter-state and inter-ethnic issues as well as difficulties in achieving European integration due to insufficient reforms.

Unfavorable political and economic conditions facilitate the strengthening of radical and extreme tendencies as well as rifts within fragile societies, and social and inter-ethnic tensions may lead to incidents, notably in communities with unsolved inter-ethnic relations.

Bosnia and Herzegovina are still politically unstable, primarily due to the different views its constituent peoples have on the country's future constitutional and legal system.

Failure to reach a Serbian-Albanian agreement on Kosovo continues to contribute to instability in the region, and the social rift in Montenegro, where parties of anti-NATO, pro-Serb, and pro-Russian orientation have significant political power in relation to sovereignist, pro-Western forces, is causing particular uncertainty in the Western Balkans.

Promotion of the "Serbian world" additionally destabilizes delicate relations

In the regional context, some state officials in Serbia are promoting the concept of a "Serbian world" as a single Serbian political people and a single political and state union of all Serbs in Southeast Europe in which all Serbs should follow one political direction, that of Serbia.

The promotion of such ideas by Serbia's top officials is additionally destabilizing the delicate inter-ethnic and inter-state relations in Southeast Europe, notably in regards to BiH and Montenegro.

Organized crime in this part of Europe is additionally bolstered by the proliferation of illegal activities, while hotspots like Syria and Libya continue to represent sources of instability and threats.

Cyber technologies have facilitated large-scale cyberattacks aimed at stealing state and industry data, while illegal migration has increased enormously in Southeast Europe, with hundreds of thousands of migrants passing through.

Croatia target of dozens of state-sponsored cyberattacks in recent years

SOA warns that state-sponsored cyberattacks are becoming increasingly common in espionage. 

Those attacks are aimed at carefully selected targets that have been well studied in advance, and they are carried out by state-sponsored APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) groups that are closely linked to the security and intelligence systems of individual countries. Such cyber-attacks are primarily aimed at EU and NATO member states.

In recent years, Croatia has been the target of dozens of state-sponsored cyber attacks. The largest number of them were attempting to break into the information and communication systems of the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs and the Ministry of Defence.

SOA concludes that cyber resilience is becoming a key to national security in the digital era.

The past period was also marked by the creation, rapid expansion, and territorial defeat of the Islamic State, the largest terrorist organization in the world, and the agency has also been monitoring how the spread of democratic values in the world has been replaced by authoritarian tendencies with the return of Cold War tensions, espionage, and the spreading of fake news and propaganda.

There are currently no identified direct terrorist threats to Croatian institutions, citizens, or interest from terrorist groups, and the threat of organized attacks by terrorist groups is still low, but the possibility of a terrorist attack (primarily by independent attackers) can never be ruled out.

Although ISIL and Al Qaida have been significantly weakened and their capacities for carrying out external operations and attacks have been reduced, they remain a threat to Europe. In EU member states, the level of threat from Islamist terrorism varies from low in Central and Eastern European countries to medium or high in most Western European countries.

Many steps forward in the security sphere

Since its first public report, SOA has also followed a number of developments in the security sphere.

EU and NATO membership has allowed us to multiply our capabilities and strengthen our security mechanisms and links to other democratic security and intelligence systems; European countries are getting closer to confronting common security threats; Croatian society and institutions have confirmed their stability and efficiency in many crises situations, the report says.

In addition to that, new infrastructure projects have strengthened energy and national security, SOA says, noting that they are building a new generation of employees through public calls.

All those changes show that security dynamics in the modern world are extremely fast and often unpredictable, new and non-traditional security threats are emerging, and the role of timely and accurate information and assessments is becoming crucial, SOA says.

The report published on the SOA website also stresses that there is no indication of significant destabilization for Croatia, even at such a challenging time and in such a dynamic security environment.

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ZAGREB, 20 Sept 2021 - In an address to members of the Croat expatriate community in New York on Sunday, Croatian President Zoran Milanović said that Croatia "is a very safe country" and that it had never been stabler as well as that it was responsible for its neighborhood staying safe as well. 

Milanović arrived in New York on Sunday to attend the 76th session of the UN General Assembly, during which he is expected to hold several bilateral meetings, including with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

On the first day of his visit, Milanović met with representatives of the Croat community at the St. Nikola Tavelić Centre, which is part of the Parish of Saints Cyril and Methodius and St. Raphael, and in his address to them, he said that he was more interested in developments in Croatia and its neighborhood than in topics to be discussed by the UN General Assembly.

"I cannot do a lot, but being President, my voice in the region is heard, analyzed, and criticized, and I will go on," Milanović said as quoted by a statement from his office.

He said that he was dissatisfied with developments in the region, describing Croatia as the most rational stakeholder.

"Fortunately, this is no longer 1990, there is no danger of a serious conflict erupting. But we must follow what is happening in our neighborhood, and people there have been behaving as if war did not happen and no lessons were learned from what happened in the 1990s."

"In all of that, Croatia and the incumbent government, I as President, and my predecessor are the calmest, most conciliatory, and most rational. We are responsible for keeping the region peaceful, safe, and for life in Croatia to stay normal and safe. Croatia is a very safe country," he said.

Despite disagreements on a daily basis, Croatia has never been stabler, Milanović said in his address.

He also again underlined the importance of Croatia making the most of the benefits of its EU membership and fighting for its own interests and repeated his position on COVID-19, calling for lifting epidemiological restrictions.

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