DEFENCE: NATO, Global Gendarme

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Alicia Fraerman

MADRID, Jun 4 2003 (IPS) - NATO claimed for itself the right to act in any part of the world, to judge by remarks by Secretary-General George Robertson at the close Wednesday of a two-day meeting of the alliance’s foreign ministers in the Spanish capital.

Robertson said that as a collective security alliance, NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) had to be ready ”to go where the threats are.”

The statutes and commitments assumed by the members of the alliance, which was created on Apr. 4, 1949 to defend its members from, and avert, any attack by the now-defunct Soviet Union, state that the organisation’s action was to be restricted to the North Atlantic: the United States, Canada, western Europe and the surrounding oceans.

But Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio justifed NATO’s planned involvement in peacekeeping functions in Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of the U.S.-British attacks on those nations.

Palacio said the decision for NATO to take command of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan in August and to support Polish troops that will help police Iraq ”pragmatically resolves the old debate on the geographic limits of the alliance’s action.”

Spanish peace activists in downtown Madrid protested the founding objectives of the military alliance as well as its new missions, in demonstrations held under the banner ”No to NATO” on Tuesday evening.

But one of the protesters, Francisco Miranda, projects director for the non-governmental organisation Peace and Third World, told IPS Wednesday that the extension of NATO’s radius of action merely formalises what the alliance has already been doing in practice.

”The militaristic and interventionist policy of the United States will no longer be solely ‘American’, but will go by names like ‘the Atlantic alliance’, ‘European-U.S. alliance’ or whatever, although it will continue to be the policy decided on by the hawks in Washington,” he said.

The fact that the alliance will provide support to the Polish troops that will be sent to Iraq substantiates that view, said the activist. And although NATO did not decide to send its own forces, the issue is on the table, said members of the U.S. delegation to the NATO meeting in Madrid.

The ministers also discussed the possibility of NATO involvement in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Greek Foreign Minister Georgios Papandreou said that both the EU and NATO would be willing to contribute to peacekeeping and security efforts in the Middle East.

But other European diplomats pointed to Israel’s reluctance to accept EU involvement in the Middle East peace process.

The resolution adopted by the foreign ministers to make the alliance a global instrument against terrorism pointed to reconciliation after the deep rift over the U.S.-British war on Iraq, which was backed by Spain but opposed by France, Germany and Belgium, said members of the delegations speaking in an unofficial capacity.

NATO is committed to a global perception of security and the stepping-up of efforts in favour of cooperation with other international or regional organisations, stated the final communique released by the ministers.

But Mariano Aguirre, director of the prestigious non- governmental Research Centre for Peace, told IPS that ”the NATO meeting has only formally patched up the deteriorated transatlantic relations.

”The underlying discrepancies between the U.S. government, which wants to dominate its allies as it did 50 years ago, and governments of nations like Germany, Belgium and France, which resist that in order to hold onto their share of power, have not been resolved,” he added.

Aguirre argued that ”the U.S. veto of the proposal for Europe to take charge of the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina, its blocking of the deployment of an international force to oversee an eventual Israeli-Palestinian agreement, and the lack of support for sending European forces to (the Democratic Republic of) Congo highlight the U.S. attempt to assert itself as a neo- imperial power.”

The election for NATO’s new secretary-general is scheduled for November. Among the candidates to replace Robertson, whose mandate ends in 2004, are Norwegian Defence Minister Kristin Krohn Devold – the first female candidate for the post – European Commissioner for Justice and the Interior Antonio Vitorino, from Portugal, and Italian Defence Minister Antonio Martino.