This is an excerpt from today New York Times article by Thomas Friedman.
"This shift from NATO to BATO -- the Balkan-Atlantic Treaty
Organization -- has been driven both by humanitarian demands and
institutional imperatives. "In order to survive, an international organization
can't just have a conceptual mission," the official said. "Organizations seek
out action. They need to do things. That's why NATO needs the Balkans
as much as the Balkans need NATO.
"The Balkans is one security issue that NATO can actually do something
about," he added. "We talked about dealing with drugs, terrorism,
proliferation and the mafia, but the truth is there is not much we can really
do about them. The thing about the Balkans is that what NATO has to
offer is exactly what they need. We have a product that they want --
peacekeeping and providing security."
And there are a lot of customers. Once NATO forces are fully in place in
Kosovo, NATO's Balkan deployment will involve nearly 100,000 troops --
30,000 in Bosnia, 57,000 in Kosovo, 7,000 in Albania, 2,000 in Macedonia
and 1,000 in Croatia. Many of those troops are committed indefinitely.
Indeed, the poor Albanians have quietly told NATO they hope its troops
never leave. "
The best thing that will ever happen to the Balkans is to get NATO out of the region as soon as possible. No need for intergovernmental Balkan councils,- wasn't this called Imperial councils before NATO?. Now it sounds as if the whole region has been occupied by the neonazis. It is really criminal to argue that NATO needs the Balkans to survive. This then explains why the attack on a sovereign state, why international law was disregarded. It also explains why a small group of armed bandits with major interests in drug trafficking was turned to a "liberation army". In the meantime, a NATO country can ,with the blessings of Brussels and Washington, ethnic cleanse millions of people, burn around 3,500 villages, and kill about 40,000 people because they demand the right to speak their language.NATO's deafening silence on the plight of Kurds in Turkey earned it the right to proclaim itself as a protector of human rights on a selective basis and in countries other than its own. Those who argue for self-determination of any group in the Balkans should extend this right to every group not just to the one that at present, seems to satisfy the interests of the US. And then it will be evident what will resurt from such a policy. The history of the Balkans is the history of federal states, two of them being the Byzantine and the Ottoman empires. It is not a history of nation-states. Yugoslavia was in a sense, a microcopy of the federal states that have governed the region for thousands of years. The countries with the highest share of defence spending in the world are Greece and Turkey. The NATO attack on Yugoslavia intensified fears of insecurity in the Greek public and soon, we will see another major expansion of military spending. The fear of a greater Albania will increase the pressure even more. Turkey will follow suit and I am sure the neighboughring counties will do the same. The Americans and the rest of the war makers will be happy that they now found new markets for their arms. Meanwhile, everybody will wonder why there will be no development in the Balkans. The only sensible proposal is to hold the level of defence spending of all Balkan countries at its current level, level not share. But this is as unrealistic as my dream of a Balkans free of NATO.
elias