| Russia calls on NATO to solve problems together The meeting of NATO leaders, which opened yesterday in Istanbul, is the first large-scale and solemn event of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after the grandiose expansion of the Alliance that took place on April 2. Let us recall that the NATO bloc has increased from 19 to 26 countries, mainly due to the states of the former socialist camp. The Alliance is not going to stop at the number “26” - it’s not for nothing that almost all the leaders of the CIS countries came to Istanbul.
Vladimir Putin and Armenian President Robert Kocharyan delegated their foreign ministers to the meeting. Russian Minister Sergei Lavrov met yesterday with NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and took part in the special Russia-NATO Council (NRC) created in 2002. This morning and afternoon, Mr. Lavrov will hold talks with colleagues from other countries and will take part in a meeting of the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council.
NATO makes significant curtsies towards Russia. Already in the fall, Russian warships, at the invitation of the Alliance, can take part in NATO’s Operation Active Endeavor in the Mediterranean. As Mr. Scheffer solemnly declared, this will be “Russia’s great contribution to the joint fight against terrorism.” The operation will be aimed at controlling cargo carried by civilian ships. It is assumed that Moscow will allocate two or three ships from the Black Sea Fleet for this purpose.
However, the significant absence of the Russian president from the summit suggests that this holiday is not ours. Moscow does not aim to join NATO, unlike Tbilisi, Baku or Kyiv. By the way, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma is going to meet one-on-one with US President George W. Bush today. Then both leaders will take part in the work of the Ukraine-NATO commission. At the same time, the Alliance rushed not only to the east, but also to the south - to Transcaucasia and Central Asia. Macedonia, Croatia, and Albania are also eager to join NATO.
“NATO expansion is accompanied by unjustified military activity of the Alliance in new member countries,” the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry noted to Russian journalists yesterday. NATO "uses outdated instructions" that were "developed in a different era," Mr. Lavrov added. Moscow is concerned that NATO expansion, at least its April wave, is taking place without taking into account pan-European security measures developed jointly over the past decades. Four of the seven newcomers (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Slovenia) have still not acceded to the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), signed in 1990.
At the NRC meeting, Sergei Lavrov openly expressed regret that in the stable Baltic region “the construction of military infrastructure continues, airfields and ports are being modernized without any discussion with us and without explanation.” From this, he said, “there is only one conclusion that can be drawn: NATO continues to rely more on internal instructions to protect its members than on real joint assessments of the state of security in a particular region.”
The alliance announced the expansion of its mission in Afghanistan - the number of international forces to promote security in this country will increase from 6.5 to 10 thousand people. Afghan President Hamid Karzai attended the summit as a guest. The experience of Afghanistan and Iraq has shown, Sergei Lavrov noted, that “no one can solve global problems alone.”
In response to the news of the early transfer of power in Baghdad, NATO for the first time decided to jointly provide concrete assistance to Iraq - to train local officers. “The transfer of power itself is an important step forward,” Mr. Lavrov noted yesterday, but immediately again called for an international conference through which opposition forces could be involved in the settlement. “Attempts to solve everything by military means failed. There can only be one path - political,” the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry emphasized. He also called for the new relationship between the multinational force in Iraq and the Iraqi government to be legally consolidated, otherwise "the impression of a legal vacuum will be created."
For some, the summit in Istanbul is a holiday, but for the residents of the city it brought nothing but worries. Demonstrations and threats of terrorist attacks (a bomb on a city bus killed three passengers on Thursday) are not so bad. Now you can’t get to the center of Istanbul not only by taxi or your own car, but even by metro and bus. The city seemed to have died out. From the airport to the city center, the motorcade of the Russian delegation drove along a completely empty highway. The Turkish authorities, by a strong-willed decision, swept away all transport from the main roads - no traffic jams, no security problems. Even cars with diplomatic license plates are not allowed into the venue for NATO events; only a few have passes. Even pedestrians are not allowed into some areas of the city; yesterday Russian journalists had difficulty getting to their hotel.
Protest demonstrations, shown on television, take place in Istanbul in specially designated areas far from the center. About 40 thousand people took to the streets of the city, but neither US President George W. Bush nor British Prime Minister Tony Blair saw how demonstrators burned their portraits and shook them with anti-war and anti-NATO slogans. The police were forced to use tear gas and water cannons against one of the demonstrations: demonstrators threw stones and Molotov cocktails at the police.
In the narrow Bosphorus Strait, tankers passing through it angrily wait their turn: the Turks have banned the transport of dangerous goods - oil or gas - through the strait for two days. Patrol boats sail along the Bosphorus, coast guard warships are on duty at the piers, and black helicopters - Iroquois and Blackhawks - fly low over the strait. Even the powerful military bloc NATO is too vulnerable in our troubled times. Elena SUPONINA, Istanbul |
|
