POLITICS-EUROPE: Spain Wants Defence Independent of USA

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Jul 16 1999 (IPS) - Spain commemorates the 50th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) by celebrating its action in Yugoslavia, which it calls a victory. But Spain also demands that the European Union take on the responsibility of defending itself.

“Europe has to start acting on security, instead of talking about security that is gauranteed by others (the United States),” declared Spain’s prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, at a Spanish Atlantic Association seminar Thursday in Madrid.

Spain “is ready to do its part and is willing to take on more responsibilities in European and Atlantic defence,” Aznar added.

Javier Ruperez, president of NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly and of Spain’s Congressional Foreign Commission, said during the two-day meeting that it is a “bitter-sweet” anniversary because it coincides with the alliance’s first military intervention – its intervention in Yugoslavia.

Ruperez stressed that Spain’s NATO participation is no longer a divisive issue for Spaniards – referring to Spain’s entry into the alliance in 1981, which was protested by many, including the opposition parties at the time: the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) and the Communist Party.

Once the PSOE reached power in 1983, the party radically changed its position, and now a long-time party leader, Javier Solana, is NATO’s secretary general.

“We must question NATO’s new role,” said Willy Meyer, spokesman on defence issues for the United Left, the only Spanish political party in parliament that did not participate in this week’s seminar.

NATO’s invervention in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo is evidence of the Atlantic alliance’s new strategic philosophy, which is no longer defensive when it takes on missions that are not even under United Nations (UN) jurisdiction, warned Meyer.

Aznar and defence minister Eduardo Serra both called the Kosovo intervention a triumph – a word rejected by Michael Rose, British former commander of the UN’s military intervention force in Bosnia- Herzegovina.

Rose, in a letter to the Spanish newspaper ABC, stated that NATO went to war on March 24 to to prevent continued human suffering and the violence and repression against the civilian population of Kosovo,” as Solana had said at the time.

“After 11 weeks of one of the most intensive air campaigns in the history of war, it is clear that NATO failed to reach its initial objectives,” said Rose.

Thousands of people “were brutally murdered and more than a million were expelled from their homes by the Serbs.” Instead of participating “in cynical propaganda exercises, … NATO should examine how it can be more effective in fighting humanitarian wars in the future,” he said.

Aznar, perhaps with an eye on Spanish Basque separatists’ demands for independence, said during the seminar that “NATO did not intervene to make Kosova an independent state. We did not fight in the Balkans to let ethnically pure states win.”

Federico Trillo, president of the Spanish chamber of deputies, restated NATO’s fundamental principles, “which are based on the defence of liberty, democracy and the rule of law.”

His opinion was shared by other parliamentary representatives, with the exception of the United Left – a coalition dominated by the Communist Party – which emphasised its discrepancy with the majority opinion by not attending the seminar.

When the decision was made in March for military action against Yugoslavia, the United Left criticised Aznar’s centre-right government for its failure to request parliamentary authorisation before participating in the NATO attack.

The Spanish government believes that NATO’s jurisdiction must be expanded to include Africa’s northwestern coast, in order to include as its defence objectives the cities of Ceuta and Melilla – Spanish enclaves claimed by Morocco – and the Canary Islands (Spanish) located in the Atlantic Ocean off the Moroccan coast.

Such an expansion is now possible with the new NATO strategic philosophy. During the organisation’s first 50 years, strategic objectives were defensive and limited to the territories of its member countries, but now potentially include the entire world.