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NATO
Will NATO Defend Montenegro?
24 April 1999
By Otfried Nassauer, Director, Berlin Information-center
for Tranatlantic Security, and Karel Koster, Working Group
Eurobomb
Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Romania, have
all received security guarantees from NATO in return for providing
their territory and/or airspace for NATO operations. Montenegro
is likely to become the next addition. Is NATO committing
itself to defend most of the Balkan nations regardless of
whether they are members of the Alliance or not?
"We will not tolerate threats by the Belgrade
regime to the security of its neighbours. We will respond
to such challenges by Belgrade to its neighbours resulting
from the presence of NATO forces or their activities on their
territory during the crisis. We reaffirm our support for the
territorial integrity and sovereignty of all countries in
the region. We reaffirm our strong support for the democratically
elected government of Montenegro. Any move by Belgrade to
undermine the government of President Djukanovic will have
grave consequences", said the NATO statement on Kosovo, issued
yesterday at the Alliance's Summit in Washington.
NATO's security guarantees are seen as being
at the core of the advantages of becoming an Alliance member
and the main reason why NATO enjoys substantial interest in
membership from most of the Central and South-Eastern European
countries.
"NATO makes no clear-cut distinction between
the security guarantees given to Serbia's neighbors and those
issued to the Alliances' members", says Otfried Nassauer,
Director of the Berlin Information-center for Transatlantic
Security. "The Alliance might have to live up to those guarantees
to non-members. In these days this has a higher probability
than NATO having to defend one of its members".
"Parliaments in Europe as well as the US-Congress
will be very concerned about these de-facto guarantees", says
Karel Koster, a Dutch security analyst working with the Project
on European Nuclear Nonproliferation. "They did not agree
to any NATO enlargement through the backdoor."
Indeed, even at the highest levels within NATO
there seems to be some confusion about whether there is any
difference between the guarantees given to member states and
those issued to Belgrade's neighbours. Javier Solana, the
NATO Secretary General said recently: "...of course the security
guarantee will be exactly the same as the guarantee that the
NATO countries do have, but the difference will be very slight.
Any problem that those countries may have stemming from the
presence of NATO troops on the ground will be taken with the
utmost concern by the Alliance and therefore the response
will be very strong and very rapid but of course, they are
not members of NATO and article 5 would not apply to them
but very close to that." (Transcript, Solana Briefing Following
the NAC-Meeting April 12, 1999.)
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