NATO to Set Balkans Stability as Goal

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By Thomas W. Lippman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 21, 1999; Page A20

Driven by the experience of Kosovo, leaders of the NATO alliance will commit themselves at a summit conference this weekend to a long-term political, economic and military effort to stabilize the Balkans and keep peace in the region, senior Clinton administration officials said yesterday.

The Kosovo conflict has taken over a large part of the agenda for the alliance's 50th anniversary summit meeting here and reinforced a conviction among alliance leaders that NATO must assume responsibility for Balkan security, the officials said.

"Kosovo is yet another reminder that the greatest challenges in Europe, to Europe's stability, emanate from beyond NATO's territory," national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger said at a White House briefing.

"NATO must play the same stabilizing role in central and southeastern Europe that it played in Western Europe, and more recently in Central Europe, by integrating new democracies, giving them an incentive to resolve their tensions peacefully and encouraging them to pool their strength instead of pitting it against their neighbors or their own people."

Berger, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and other officials have provided few details of the Balkan stabilization effort they expect NATO to embrace at the summit. It will include development funds from the World Bank, direct assistance from the United States and the European Union to cooperative countries in the region, and a commitment to modernize those nations' armed forces, officials said.

And according to Albright, it will eventually have to include the removal from power of the Yugoslav and Serb leader, President Slobodan Milosevic, whom the administration blames for the violence that has plagued the region for a decade. His removal is not a specific objective of the NATO bombing campaign, she said, but regional stability cannot be achieved so long as he is running Yugoslavia.

NATO's goal, Albright said, speaking at the same briefing as Berger, "should be to transform the Balkans from Europe's primary source of instability into an important part of its mainstream."

Greek Prime Minister Costas Simitis has called for a "package of incentives that will compose a kind of Marshall Plan" for the region, but no specific financial commitments are on the table.

The summit was originally conceived as a celebration of the alliance's success in holding back Soviet power in Europe and of the admission to membership of three former Warsaw Pact countries: Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Those themes remain, U.S. officials and alliance diplomats said, but the gathering this weekend has taken on a somber significance that was not envisioned before NATO commenced an air war against Yugoslavia four weeks ago.

The first event on the revised schedule will be a three-hour meeting Friday morning of all 19 NATO heads of state or government on the subject of Kosovo. That afternoon, Albright will meet separately with her counterparts from what are collectively called the "front line states," Yugoslavia's nervous neighbors: Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Hungary and Croatia.

With NATO committed to a "no retreat, no concessions" policy of bombing Yugoslavia until Milosevic meets its demands in Kosovo, the summit has emerged as a defining moment for the alliance.

"If we do not achieve our goals in Kosovo, NATO is finished as an alliance," said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.

The bombardment of Yugoslavia has preempted what was to have been one of the key questions to be answered at the summit: whether, and under what circumstances, NATO would ever undertake military action outside the territory of its members. With its aerial assault on Yugoslavia, the alliance has in effect committed itself to a transformation long sought by Washington – from a military alliance responsible for collective defense against Soviet expansionism to a military-political grouping responsible for security Europe-wide.

"Before March 24 [when the airstrikes began], it may have been possible to argue that NATO is or ought to be about defending alliance territory, and really ought not to be involved in questions like Kosovo," former White House official Ivo Daalder said at a Brookings Institution forum. "After March 24, that stance is no longer possible. NATO is doing Kosovo, and the only question is, will it do it right, in which case it can continue to do Kosovos in the future, or will do it wrong, in which case it won't be doing very much at all in the future."

Administration officials said the conflict over Kosovo has transformed what had been a theoretical debate about NATO's future into a recognition that Balkan instability, unless rectified, will be a permanent threat to European security.

"We feel it's very important, even as we prosecute vigorously and successfully the immediate military campaign, also to have a vision of the future in which the Balkans would be stable rather than volatile," Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott said at a White House briefing. "The long and short of it is we don't want to have to do this again."

Administration officials said they had hoped to keep the summit's discussion of Kosovo and the progress of the conflict separate from arguments about operational details, such as whether to expand the target list to include Serb television transmitters or oil import facilities on the Adriatic coast. But that may no longer be possible, officials said, with the addition of the three-hour Kosovo meeting and the expected participation of Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the supreme NATO military commander.

Albright said the summit participants will "affirm that the door to the alliance remains open" to future new members, but U.S. officials and diplomats from NATO countries said no new invitations will be issued. Instead, the alliance will offer aspirant countries such as Slovenia and Bulgaria what Albright called "a practical plan to help potential new members meet NATO's high standards."

According to U.S. officials, that means assisting candidate nations in modernizing their economies and stabilizing their political and judicial systems so that they meet the standards of the 19 current members.

One issue that some alliance members had hoped to settle at this summit that will apparently not be resolved is the relationship between NATO and the U.N. Security Council. Some members have been seeking a commitment to undertake future military actions only pursuant to specific authorization from the Security Council.

The United States and Britain, however, have opposed such a commitment, arguing that it would be tantamount to giving Russia and China a veto over NATO decision-making. The Kosovo experience has driven home this point, senior U.S. officials said, because Russia, a strong opponent of the air campaign, would certainly have vetoed any Security Council resolution authorizing it.

"This is one of the issues we have been working on in the lead-up to the summit," Albright said. "We will continue to do so. And presumably, we will get it resolved, either before the summit or at it."