By IPS Correspondents
BONN, Mar 27 1999 (IPS)

With NATO warplanes pounding Yugoslav targets, analysts questioned the role to be played by the North Atlantic military alliance in the next century.

They also examined the role that NATO members, especially those with greater economic and military muscle, were prepared to assign to the United Nations, the world body set up more than 50 years ago to manage world affairs in a peaceful way.

Against the backdrop of the action against Yugoslavia, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that, while he understood why force might have been necessary, the Security Council should have been involved in any decision to use it.

“The Security Council has primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security. This is explicitly acknowledged in the North Atlantic Treaty,” Annan said at the UN’s headquarters in New York.

His remarks came before the Security Council began its emergency meeting at the request of Russia who, along with fellow permanent Council member China, demanded an end to NATO bombings.

NATO was founded at the height of the cold war to deter a possible Soviet-led communist aggression against democratic states headed by the United States. The alliance will celebrate its 50th anniversary at the end of April at a ceremony in Washington.

In the wake of its first offensive against a sovereign state, however, analysts pondered whether NATO was now moving toward taking over the role of “global sheriff” in the absence of effective instruments of governance in a rapidly globalising world.

There also was concern that, contrast to the US-led allied attacks against Iraq in 1991 – to force President Saddam Hussein withdraw from Kuwait – the latest bombings were aimed at bringing the Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic around to accepting NATO troops presence in his country to monitor a negotiated peace plan for Kosovo province.

This, according to foreign diplomats here raised the question of how far can the United States and NATO go in pressuring heads of governments and states to abide by the universal norms of civilisation.

“I cannot subject my family to torture and then claim ‘my home is my castle’,” said one African diplomat who did not wish to be named. “However, this does not mean saying “yes” to NATO as a global policeman…We need to evolve effective instruments of global governance.”

But he and other diplomats from Africa and Asia – where national boundaries were arbitrarily drawn – understood the rationale behind the NATO bombing of Serbia – the larger of Yugoslavia’s remaining two republics.

As explained by NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana in a statement in Brussels Thursday: “Our actions are directed against the repressive policies of the Yugoslav government, which is refusing to respect civilised norms of behaviour in this Europe at the end of the 20th century.”

Solana’s viewpoint was shared by Germany’s social democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. In a televised address to the nation Schroeder said: “The international community of states cannot sit back and watch the human tragedy in this part of Europe.”

German warplanes have been in action in the Balkans with others from Britain, Canada, France, Italy and the Netherlands. It was the first time since the end of World War II in 1945 that Germany had joined its NATO allies as an active participant in a military conflict.

The government’s decision was widely approved in a parliamentary vote Thursday in Bonn. Support came not only from the dominant coalition partner, the SPD and the once anti-nuclear and environmentalist Alliance 90/The Greens, but also from the opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Christian Social Union (CSU) as well as the liberal FDP.

As the current president of the European Union, Germany’s Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, of the Green party, had tried hard to persuade the Yugoslav government to agree to a peace plan brokered by the U.S. negotiator Richard Holbrooke.

The German government’s decision was rejected by the small opposition Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), heir to the communists who ruled East Germany for nearly 40 years before the unification of Germany.

The NATO rationale, shared by the German and other allies governments is that some 2,000 people have been killed since Feb. 1998 in the ongoing struggle between Serbian security forces and ethnic Albanian rebels seeking independence for the province.

Milosevic, however, insists that Kosovo is an inseparable part of Serbia, the larger of Yugoslavia’s two remaining republics. After protracted negotiations, the ethnic Albanians agreed to sign a peace plan which would have given them wide political autonomy in Kosovo while keeping the province within Serbia’s borders.

The Yugoslav government headed by President Milosevic balked at a key part of the deal which called for NATO forces to monitor and enforce the accord, despite the dire consequences of refusal.

Solana declared Thursday that ‘The responsibility for the current crisis rests with President Milosevic.”

He assured reporters in Brussels that the first air strikes were conducted against “carefully chosen military targets…they focussed on the air defence network of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia”.

Solana added: “Let me reiterate we are determined to continue until we have achieved our objectives: to halt the violence and to stop further humanitarian catastrophe.”

The NATO secretary general reaffirmed the stance taken by the U.S. President Bill Clinton who told Americans in a nationwide TV address that “If President Milosevic will not make peace, we will limit his ability to make war.” Clinton.

How far – and how long – this would be tolerated by Russia and China remained the big question.

In an interview with a German periodical this week, a former General of the German armed forces Bundeswehr, Gerd Schmueckle, warned that “Russia is still the second largest world nuclear power and wishes to remain so.”

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