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NATO's Global Mission Creep
1) Tenth Anniversary Of NATO's Drive Into Eastern Europe (by Rick Rozoff)
2) NATO's Global Mission Creep (by DIANA JOHNSTONE)
3) NO alla NATO! Appello del Coordinamento Antimperialista e di altri iniziatori, in Germania, per il 60.mo della NATO
4) Si è arrestata l'espansione della NATO ad est? (di Mauro Gemma)
5) Il bugiardo Jamie Shea continua a fare il portavoce della NATO:
NATO Official Keen To Bring Balkans Into Alliance / NATO-Bombensprecher als Gastredner auf grüner NATO-Jubelfeier in Berlin
di Diana Johnstone raccomandiamo anche l'importante articolo del 2004:
Clinton, Kerry e il Kosovo. L'Impostura di una "Guerra Buona" / Clinton, Kerry and Kosovo. The Lie of a "Good War"
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/3861
http://www.counterpunch.org/johnstone06242004.html
=== 1 ===
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/37891
Stop NATO - March 13, 2009
Tenth Anniversary Of NATO's Drive Into Eastern Europe
Rick Rozoff
March 12 of this year marked the tenth anniversary of NATO expanding into Eastern Europe and incorporating former members of its Warsaw Pact rival.
Nine years after the George H.W. Bush's administration's Secretary of State James Baker had assured the Soviet Union's last president Mikhail Gorbachev that "there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east," the Alliance, in the case of one of its new members, Poland, moved directly to the border of Russia's Kaliningrad territory.
Om March 12, 1999 Baker's successor once-removed, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, gathered the the foreign ministers of the new inductees, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, to the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri where in NATOese she "accepted the instruments of accession to NATO of the three countries."
The speeches of all four foreign policy chiefs were larded with celebratory and self-congratulatory effusions about the end of the Cold War, with the Hungarian, Czech and Polish foreign ministers competing with each other in claiming that the beginning of the new Jerusalem and the advent of post-history - or the Eschaton - was first signaled by events in Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968 or Gdansk in 1981.
The Polish foreign minister of the time, Bronislaw Geremek, in noting the proximity of Independence to another city of some note, observed that "Fifty-three years ago, in nearby Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill delivered his famous address."
Geremek was of course referring to the Iron Curtain speech of 1946 and the official trumpet blast of the Cold War. The Polish foreign minister also dutifully quoted the US president of the same time, Harry Truman, he who lent his name to the doctrine of the following year, one which was immediately implemented with the US and its Western allies intervening in civil conflicts in Greece and Korea, the latter leading to direct combat between the United States and China.
Forty full years of Western-instigated wars - conventional, colonial, counterinsurgency, proxy and civil - and military-backed coups d'etat throughout Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America would be the fruits of the policies advocated by Churchill, inaugurated by Truman and continued by his successors in history's longest self-proclaimed crusade, that of "containing communism."
It was the victory of that campaign that Madeleine Albright and her three Eastern European counterparts were celebrating ten years ago by welcoming three former Warsaw Pact nations into what was at the time and remains today the world's only military bloc.
The Polish visitor's speech contained a line about the end of the bipolar era, meaning that of the US and Soviet led alliances.
Many in 1991, though far fewer when Geremek spoke eight years later, hoped that the alternative to a bipolar world be be non-polar or at any rate a multipolar one.
The formal accession of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland to NATO and events that followed close on its heels would soon dispel any such illusions. The bipolar world had given way to history's first unipolar global order.
Even at the time of the accession ceremony the contours of the evolving post-Cold War US- and NATO-dominated world were becoming incontestably clear.
The speeches at Independence were replete with words like freedom, democracy, liberty, independence and self-determination; words that have in earlier periods been noble and inspiring ones, the concepts and practices they represent causes that countless millions have lived and often died for.
However, there have been few occasions throughout human history when even the most ambitious and ruthless tyrants and empire-builders have not invoked one or more of these terms, according to their own lights and for their own purposes, to justify conquest, pillage and in the worst cases extermination.
Grand words are like coins that have become effaced by passing through too many hands, often in illicit transactions.
How sincerely the words were used by Albright and her collaborators was demonstrated even at the time of their meeting and with a savage vengeance shortly thereafter.
There was an empty seat in the Truman Library on March 12 of ten years ago: That of the foreign minister of Slovakia.
The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland are three of the four members of Visegrad Four grouping established in 1991 to "further European integration."
The fourth is Slovakia. All four nations joined the European Union simultaneously in 2004.
The Visegrad Four group has been routinely characterized as an alliance of Central European nations; not Eastern European, as the same countries were referred to during the Cold War era.
Geography as well as terminology assume a hugh degree of plasticity in the view of NATO nations' planners and both are harnessed to the cart of geopolitical and military expediency.
Even more preposterously, political leaders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are now referring to their nations as being in Central Europe; all three countries are on the Baltic Sea and border Russia in one manner or another.
Officials in Georgia and their Western sponsors frequently speak of the nation, especially in reference to NATO membership, as "rejoining Europe." Georgia lies to the south of Turkey and a sizeable part of the nation is to the east of the eastern-most part of Turkey, which the West considers an Asian nation.
If integration with NATO and the European Union demands as a prerequisite and enforces as a membership rule the uniform subordination to Brussels of a nation's military, security, defense industry, judicial and economic prerogatives, it also mandates that candidates and new members be whipped into line politically.
Slovakia wasn't invited to join NATO in 1999 because it was inhabited by a population that interpreted the words thrown around by Western power brokers, especially self-determination and freedom of choice, in the traditional, literal sense. That is, according to Brussels and Washington, they persistently voted the wrong way.
In federal election after federal election Slovaks gave the political party of the country's first prime minister Vladimir Meciar, the People's Party - Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS), a plurality of their votes.
And just as consistently American, European Union and even NATO officials issued the diktat that not only could the HZDS not form, it could not join, a federal cabinet.
It took five more years before NATO considered the country sufficiently tamed and broken in to join the Alliance.
The genuine, violent and horrific, meaning of what the new expansionist NATO portended for Europe and the world didn't take long to manifest itself.
Only twelve days after Albright's conclave in Missouri, with herself as arguably the prime mover, NATO launched its first sustained campaign of all-out military aggression, the 78-day Operation Allied Force onslaught against Yugoslavia.
The Czech Republic, Hungary (which then bordered Yugoslavia) and Poland hardly had time to catch their collective breath when they were plunged into the first war against a sovereign European nation since Hitler's blitzkrieg assaults of 1939-1941.
Unremittingly and with increasing ferocity NATO unleashed an almost three month attack on a small nation with 1,000 warplanes flying over 38,000 combat missions (which included the return of the German Luftwaffe to the skies of Europe for the first time since the defeat of the Third Reich) and, along with cruise missiles launched from warships and submarines in the Mediterranean, spared nothing in an aerial avalanche of cluster bombs, graphite weapons and depleted uranium: Factories, apartment complexes, broadcasting facilities, hospitals, power grids, passenger trains, refugee columns, religious processions and the Chinese embassy.
A month into the conflict the NATO 50th anniversary jubilee summit was held in Washington, DC, where the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland were formally inducted into the bloc, one now at war for the first time.
There can be little doubt that the timing of the attack on Yugoslavia on March 24 was coordinated with the scheduled NATO summit on April 23-24 and that the second was planned to celebrate an anticipated capitulation by Yugoslavia and the unveiling of the new, global NATO as the world's preeminent arbiter of internal as well as international disputes, the redrawing of national borders and the use of military force.
This in contraposition to the United Nations and international law, both of which had been circumvented, subverted and supplanted by a Western military bloc with the war against Yugoslavia with neither yet recuperating from the blow.
NATO underestimated Serbian resolve, as Hitler had done in 1941, delaying the arrival of his Wehrmacht to the gates of Moscow for several critically important weeks.
The NATO summit then, far from dragging the pennants of a subjugated nation cum conquered province through the dust and conducting a triumph reminiscent of those of the Rome of the Caesars, was on April 24 rather confronted with considering a ground invasion of the nation it had failed to bomb into submission.
The three new NATO members, none of whom had deployed troops for combat missions since World War II, were close to discovering what joining the "alliance of free nations" actually entailed.
Largely through the treachery of Finland's Maarti Ahtisaari and the complicity of Russia's Viktor Chernomyrdin they weren't provided that opportunity in 1999 but neither did they have to wait long for another.
One of the catchphrases employed at the time that the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland were being integrated into NATO was mutual defense; that is, by joining the world's sole remaining military bloc the three countries would acquire powerful protectors - the United States, Britain, France and Germany most notably - in the event any or all of the three were victims of armed aggression.
This means the activation of NATO's Article 5, which obliges all Alliance member states to offer military assistance to any other that requests it.
In 1999 Washington and Brussels had a compliant Yeltsin government in power in Russia, one that would have ceded the West anything it asked for short of Cathedral Square in the center of Moscow's Kremlin, so it was evident that Article 5 in fact had nothing to do with defense but everything to do with joint military action of another nature.
This was two and a half years before NATO and the US seized upon the alleged war on terrorism (prior to that they were inclined in the opposite direction), so mythic threats by non-state actors couldn't be employed as a pretext for an urgent need to take the three new members under NATO's collective defense - and nuclear - umbrella.
Other motives were behind doing so, including moving NATO military hardware, surveillance, air patrols, training centers and operational contingencies further eastward up to the Russian border.
But NATO first implemented its mutual military assistance clause because of events and against targets in parts of the world never expected by most: The bloc used the events of September 11, 2001 in the United States to launch a full 19-member military operation in Afghanistan.
In thirty five years as members of the Warsaw Pact the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland had never been called upon to send troops to a war zone; in only 30 months as NATO members they were pulled into what is soon to be an eight-year war in South Asia.
All three nations have troops deployed in Afghanistan and all three have suffered combat fatalities there.
The seven other Eastern European nations that followed them into NATO - Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia - and the three that are to follow the above ten - Albania, Croatia and Macedonia - also have troops stationed in the world's most dangerous war zone, and most all of them, including the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, had troops stationed in Iraq after March of 2003.
The last three countries have all lost troops there also.
Shortly after the invasion of Iraq and the deployment of a US military headquarters in Baghdad and a British counterpart in Basra, a third, middle zone around the ancient city of Babylon and Karbala was under Polish military command (consisting of 7,000 troops) with NATO assistance.
The main Polish base was called Camp Babylon in fact and was the site of desecration and destruction of some of the world's most treasured artifacts at the hands of new NATO's occupation forces.
Collectively the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland had not lost a single troop in combat operations since World War II, but now all have done so in two nations, with the Polish death toll in Iraq at 21 and in Afghanistan at 9.
Serving NATO at the expense of one's nation and people is not limited to killing and dying overseas, however, as the Alliance has endangered the three states at home in addition.
The US intends to station an X-Band radar transferred from the Marshall Islands to the Czech municipality of Brdy as part of a global missile shield system and NATO has constructed a radar installation in the city of Slavkov near the site of the Battle of Austerlitz.
There is fierce and committed local opposition to both deployments, two of many and illimitable obligations of NATO membership.
A comparable campaign exists in Hungary to stop the deployment of a NATO radar facility on Tubes Hill near Pecs.
Poland is slated for the most provocative and threatening projects: Ten US interceptor missile silos at or near the Redzikowo airport in Slupsk near the Baltic Sea coast and a Patriot missile battery not too far from Russia's Kaliningrad enclave.
Redzikowo formerly housed a Nazi German airbase, from where Luftwaffe warplanes took off to bomb Poland itself in World War II.
....
A decade later the 1999 NATO accession was marked by expensive celebrations and hollow speeches in Budapest, Prague and Warsaw with Madeleine Albright condescending to visit the three capitals - recall she had summoned the foreign ministers to Missouri to recruit them ten years earlier - and Polish Defense Minister Bogdan Klich opening a "NATO village" on the grounds of the University of Warsaw and decking the capital with NATO flags.
The EU's Javier Solana, NATO Secretary General during the three nations' absorption, boasted of his own accomplishment while waxing enthusiastic over the prospects of the bloc moving yet further east into former Soviet space.
Ex-Czech president Vaclav Havel used the occasion to call for NATO to continue the trend by dragging in Belarus and Ukraine.
Hungarian Defence Minister Imre Szekeres was ordered to Washington during the anniversary to get his latest marching orders from Pentagon chief Robert Gates and current National Security Advisor and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander James Jones.
Ten years ago there was only one NATO state bordering Russia, Norway with a narrow corridor linking the two nations.
Now there are four new full members on Russia's borders - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland - and four former Soviet Republics with NATO Individual Partnership Action Plans also abutting Russia - Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
Finland, a former neutral sharing a 1,300-kilometer border with Russia, is being prepared for further NATO integration and has proven its bona fides in this respect by deploying troops under the Alliance's command in Afghanistan.
A decade after the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland were absorbed by NATO the state of the world and the landscape of Europe have changed.
Yugoslavia no longer exists, even on maps.
And other nations within or against whom NATO has attacked or conducted other military operations - Bosnia, Macedonia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Pakistan and Somalia - may suffer the same fate.
March 12 is not an occasion for celebration but a cause for the deepest concern and a spur to oppose history's first attempt at creating a worldwide military bloc ahead of its 60th anniversary summit beginning in less than three weeks.
Source: Stop NATO
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato
=== 2 ===
CounterPunch March 13 / 15, 2009
French Kissing
NATO's Global Mission Creep
By DIANA JOHNSTONE
NATO, the main overseas arm of the U.S. military-industrial complex, just keeps expanding. Its original raison d'être, the supposedly menacing Soviet bloc, has been dead for twenty years. But like the military-industrial complex itself, NATO is kept alive and growing by entrenched economic interests, institutional inertia and an official mindset resembling paranoia, with think tanks looking around desperately for "threats".
This behemoth is getting ready to celebrate its 60th birthday in the twin cities of Strasbourg (France) and Kehl (Germany) on the Rhine early in April. A special gift is being offered by France's increasingly unpopular president, Nicolas Sarkozy: the return of France to NATO's "integrated command". This bureaucratic event, whose practical significance remains unclear, provides the chorus of NATOlatrous officials and editorialists something to crow about. See, the silly French have seen the error of their ways and returned to the fold.
Sarkozy, of course, puts it in different terms. He asserts that joining the NATO command will enhance France's importance by giving it influence over the strategy and operations of an Alliance which it never left, and to which it has continued to contribute more than its share of armed forces.
The flaw in that argument is that it was the totally unshakable U.S. control of NATO's integrated command that persuaded General Charles de Gaulle to leave in the first place, back in March 1966. De Gaulle did not do so on a whim. He had tried to change the decision-making process and found it impossible. The Soviet threat had diminished, and de Gaulle did not want to be dragged into wars he thought unnecessary, such as the U.S. effort to win a war in Indochina that France had already lost and considered unwinnable. He wanted France to be able to pursue its own interests in the Middle East and Africa. Besides, the US military presence in France stimulated "Yankee go home" demonstrations. Transferring the NATO command to Belgium satisfied everyone.
Sarkozy's predecessor Jacques Chirac, wrongly labeled "anti-American" by US media, was already willing to rejoin the NATO command if he could get something substantial in return, such as NATO's Mediterranean command. The United States flatly refused.
Instead, Sarkozy is settling for crumbs: assignment of senior French officers to a command in Portugal and to some training base in the United States. "Nothing was negotiated. Two or three more French officers in position to take orders from the Americans changes nothing", observed former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine at a recent colloquium on France and NATO.
Sarkozy announced the return on March 11, six days before the issue is to be debated by the French National Assembly. The protests from both sides of the aisle will be in vain.
There appear to be two main causes of this unconditional surrender.
One is the psychology of Sarkozy himself, whose love for the most superficial aspects of the United States was expressed in his embarrassing speech to the U.S. Congress in November 2007. Sarkozy may be the first French president who seems not to like France. Or at least, to like the United States better (from watching television). He can give the impression of having wanted to be president of France not for love of country, but in social revenge against it. From the start, he has shown himself eager to "normalize" France, that is, to remake it according to the American model.
The other, less obvious but more objective cause is the recent expansion of the European Union. The rapid absorption of all the former Eastern European satellites, plus the former Soviet Republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, has drastically changed the balance of power within the EU itself. The core founding nations, France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries, are no long able to steer the Union toward a unified foreign and security policy. After France and Germany refused to go along with the invasion of Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld dismissed them as "old Europe" and gloated over the willingness of "new Europe" to follow the United States lead. Britain to the west, and the "new" European satellites to the East are both more attached to the United States politically and emotionally than they are to the European Union that took them in and provided them with considerable economic development aid and a veto over major policy issues.
This expansion effectively buried the longstanding French project to build a European defense force that could act outside the NATO command. The rulers of Poland and the Baltic States want U.S. defense, by way of NATO, period. They would never accept the French project of an EU defense not tied to NATO and the United States.
France has its own military-industrial complex, totally dwarfed by the one in the United States, but the largest in Western Europe. Any such complex needs export markets for its arms industry. The best potential market would have been independent European armed forces. Without that prospect, some may hope that joining the integrated command can open NATO markets to French military products.
A slim hope, however. The United States jealously guards major NATO procurements for its own industry. France is unlikely to have much influence within NATO for the same reason it is giving up its attempt to build an independent European army. The Europeans themselves are deeply divided. With Europe divided, the United States rules. Moreover, with the economic crisis deepening, money is running short for weaponry.
From the viewpoint of French national interest, this feeble hope for marketing military hardware is vastly outweighed by the disastrous political consequences of Sarkozy's act of allegiance.
It is true that even outside the NATO integrated command, France's independence was only relative. France followed the United States into the first Gulf War – President François Mitterrand vainly hoped thereby to gain influence in Washington, the usual mirage that beckons allies into dubious U.S. operations. France joined the 1999 NATO war against Yugoslavia, despite misgivings at the highest levels. But in 2003, President Jacques Chirac and his foreign minister Dominique de Villepin actually made use of their independence by rejecting the invasion of Iraq. It is generally acknowledged that the French stand enabled Germany to do the same. Belgium followed.
Villepin's February 14, 2003, speech to the UN Security Council giving priority to disarmament and peace over war won a rare standing ovation. The Villepin speech was hugely popular around the world, and greatly enhanced French prestige, especially in the Arab world. But back in Paris, the personal hatred between Sarkozy and Villepin has reached operatic heights of passion, and one can suspect that Sarkozy's return to NATO obedience is also an act of personal revenge.
The worst political effect is much broader. The impression is now created that "the West", Europe and North America, are barricading themselves by a military alliance against the rest of the world. In retrospect, the French dissent accomplished a service to the whole West by giving the impression, or the illusion, that independent thought and action were still possible, and that someone in Europe might listen to what other parts of the world thought and said. Now, this "closing of ranks", hailed by the NATO champions as "improving our security", will sound the alarms in the rest of the world. The empire seems to be closing its ranks in order to rule the world. The United States and its allies do not openly claim to rule the world, only to regulate it. The West controls the world's financial institutions, the IMF and the World Bank. It controls the judiciary, the International Criminal Court, which in six years of existence has put on trial only one obscure Congolese warlord and brought charges against 12 other persons, all of them Africans – while meanwhile the United States causes the deaths of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of people in Iraq and Afghanistan and supports Israel's ongoing aggression against the Palestinian people. To the rest of the world, NATO is just the armed branch of this enterprise of domination. And this at a time when the Western-dominated system of financial capitalism is bringing the world economy to collapse.
This gesture of "showing Western unity" for "our security" can only make the rest of the world feel insecure. Meanwhile, NATO moves every day to surround Russia with military bases and hostile alliances, notably in Georgia. Despite the smiles over dinner with her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, Hillary Clinton repeats the stunning mantra that "spheres of influence are not acceptable" – meaning, of course, that the historic Russian sphere of interest is unacceptable, while the United States is vigorously incorporating it into its own sphere of influence, called NATO.
Already China and Russia are increasing their defense cooperation. The economic interests and institutional inertia of NATO are pushing the world toward a pre-war lineup far more dangerous than the Cold War.
The lesson NATO refuses to learn is that its pursuit of enemies creates enemies. The war against terrorism fosters terrorism. Surrounding Russian with missiles proclaimed "defensive" – when any strategist knows that a shield accompanied by a sword is also an offensive weapon – will create a Russian enemy.
The Search for Threats
To prove to itself that it is really "defensive", NATO keeps looking for threats. Well, the world is a troubled place, thanks in large part to the sort of economic globalization imposed by the United States over the past decades. This might be the time to be undertaking diplomatic and political efforts to work out internationally agreed ways of dealing with such problems as global economic crisis, climate change, energy use, hackers ("cyberwar"). NATO think tanks are pouncing on these problems as new "threats" to be dealt with by NATO. This leads to a militarization of policy-making where it should be demilitarized.
For example, what can it mean to meet the supposed threat of climate change with military means? The answer seems obvious: military force may be used in some way against the populations forced from their homes by drought or flooding. Perhaps, as in Darfur, drought will lead to clashes between ethnic or social groups. Then NATO can decide which is the "good" side and bomb the others. That sort of thing.
The world indeed appears to be heading into a time of troubles. NATO appears getting read to deal with these troubles by using armed force against unruly populations.
This will be evident at NATO's 60th anniversary celebration in Strasbourg/Kehl on April 3 and 4.
The cities will be turned into armed camps. Residents of the tranquil city of Strasbourg are obliged to apply for badges in order to leave or enter their own homes during the happy event. At crucial times, they will not be allowed to leave home at all, except under emergency circumstances. Urban transport will be brought to a standstill. The cities will be as dead as if they had been bombed, to allow the NATO dignitaries to put on a show of peace.
The high point is to be a ten-minute photo op when French and German leaders shake hands on the bridge over the Rhine connected Strasbourg and Kehl. As if Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy were making peace between France and Germany for the first time. The locals are to be locked up so as not to disturb the charade.
NATO will be behaving as though the biggest threat it faces is the people of Europe. And the biggest threat to the people of Europe may well be NATO.
Diana Johnstone is author of Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Monthly Review Press).
She can be reached at diana.josto@...
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( Dieser Aufruf auf deutscher Sprache: NEIN zur NATO
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/6265 )
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http://www.lsmetropolis.org/2009/02/no-alla-nato/
NO alla NATO!
Posted By rino On 22 Febbraio 2009 @ 9:56 pm In Internazionale, NO WAR | No Comments
Solidali con tutti coloro che manifesteranno nell'aprile del 2009 a Strasburgo e a Baden-Baden contro il summit della NATO il giorno del 60 anniversario della sua creazione, facciamo un appello affinché tutte queste proteste diventino il punto di partenza di una campagna permanente contro la NATO e la militarizzazione dell'Unione Europea, concentrandoci innanzitutto sui seguenti punti:
In Afghanistan: ritiro di tutte le truppe straniere;
In Iraq: ritiro di tutte le truppe straniere; cessazione del sostegno militare tedesco all'occupazione;
Solidarietà con la legittima resistenza di tutti i popoli del Vicino e Medio Oriente alla guerra e all'occupazione;
Rimozione dell'assedio imposto a Gaza, demolizione del Muro di separazione e degli insediamenti ebraici illegali;
Cessazione delle minacce di guerra contro l'Iran;
NO all'ingerenza della NATO nei Balcani e ritiro delle sue truppe; il riconoscimento del "Kosovo" è dichiarato immediatamente nullo e mai avvenuto;
Scioglimento dei tribunali ad hoc per il Ruanda e la Jugoslavia: sono contrari al diritto internazionale e servono solo alla propaganda a favore della NATO e al lavaggio del cervello;
No all'allargamento a Est della NATO (Ucraina, Georgia);
Solidarietà con la resistenza allo scudo anti-missile statunitense nella Repubblica Ceca e in Polonia.
Le nazioni alleate all'interno della NATO rappresentano un ostacolo alla risoluzione pacifica di quasi tutti i conflitti presenti nel mondo. La NATO impedisce ai popoli di evolvere verso la democrazia e di disporre di sé stessi, e distrugge così le basi del benessere sociale e di una gestione rispettosa dell'ambiente.
Dopo la lunga serie di aggressioni contro l'Iraq (1991), la Somalia (1992), la Jugoslavia (1999), l'Afghanistan (2001) e ancora l'Iraq (2003), nonché di guerre per procura: quelle delle milizie contro la Repubblica Democratica del Congo (1998), di Israele contro il Libano e della Georgia contro la Russia (2008), ci si chiede con inquietudine cosa si debba ora temere dagli Stati Uniti e dai loro alleati. Un'intensificazione dell'occupazione in Afghanistan? Una destabilizzazione dell'India e del Pakistan? Un bombardamento dell'Iran? Un annientamento con la forza delle armi del cammino intrapreso da Cuba, dal Venezuela e da un numero sempre maggiore di altri paesi latino-americani?
Davanti all'estensione della crisi economica mondiale, si ricorda che gli imperialismi avevano tentato di risolvere quella degli anni Trenta del Novecento con la corsa agli armamenti e la guerra che condussero all'esito catastrofico della Seconda guerra mondiale.
La risposta del movimento pacifista alla politica della NATO dev'essere proporzionata alle dimensioni del pericolo sempre più grave. Per questo motivo facciamo appello a tutte le persone che amano la giustizia: organizziamo una campagna permanente, vasta e decisa contro la NATO.
Elaboriamo strategie coordinate per mobilitare azioni di opposizione in tutti i teatri e in tutte le zone in cui la NATO spiega le sue attività. Impariamo a riconoscere per tempo i pericoli più gravi e diamo l'allarme perché il maggior numero di persone possa reagire e difendersi.
Smascheriamo le menzogne che servono a giustificare le guerre e opponiamo al lavaggio del cervello l'informazione e la pedagogia.
Cerchiamo ostinatamente di ottenere dagli Stati membri della NATO il ritiro individuale dalla struttura.
Tutto quello che indebolisce la NATO consolida le forze della pace e del progresso in tutto il mondo. Vent'anni dopo lo scioglimento del Patto di Varsavia è ben ora di procedere a quello della NATO.
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L'Unione Europea si è estesa verso l'Est e il Sud-Est dell'Europa parallelamente all'allargamento a Est della NATO. Ma è stata ancora una volta spaccata da nuove frontiere esterne. Viene strumentalizzata nel nuovo scontro tra la Russia e la Bielorussia. La dottrina della «guerra preventiva» comune alla NATO e agli Stati Uniti è stata ripresa in ambito europeo. Sono state create «Forze di intervento rapido» europee per intervenire militarmente in tutto il mondo in coordinamento con la NATO sotto il pretesto di «missioni umanitarie» di «lotta contro il terrorismo» o di «risoluzione dei crisi». A fini di addomesticamento politico, di controllo sui mercati e di spoliazione delle risorse naturali di paesi terzi, la collaborazione tra l'Unione Europea, gli Stati Uniti e la NATO si è notevolmente intensificata. L'Unione Europea impone ai suoi membri un proseguimento della militarizzazione e della corsa agli armamenti. In perfetto accordo con la NATO e gli Stati Uniti e con i meccanismi dell'Unione, i governi europei hanno messo in atto delle misure mirate a limitare i diritti civili, annullare le conquiste sociali e sviluppare delle strutture repressive contro i movimenti popolari. L'Unione Europea sta assumendo sempre più i tratti di un'unione imperialista di governi europei, e questo impedisce di parlare di autonomia europea e di rottura con la tutela della superpotenza imperiale, nonostante occasionali deleghe di potere.
Ma le contraddizioni interne dell'Unione Europea, il consenso tra tutte le potenze imperialiste, lo scacco della politica europea, il NO francese, olandese e irlandese al TCE, il rifiuto e la disobbedienza civile opposti alle regolamentazioni dell'Unione aprono delle prospettive su nuove forme di collaborazione tra i paesi europei, con i paesi dell'ex Unione Sovietica ma anche con i paesi del litorale mediterraneo, il mondo arabo e gli altri continenti. Solo rifiutando il ruolo di fratelli minori degli Stati Uniti e della NATO, resistendo a un'Europa imperialista e ritirandole la sua pretesa "legittimità" si potrà intraprendere appieno la lotta antimilitarista e anti-NATO.
La crisi universale che stiamo attraversando e che coinvolge l'economia, la finanza, il progresso sociale, la fornitura di materie prime e l'ambiente, è foriera di nuovi pericoli ma anche di nuove opportunità. La politica neoliberista ha già dovuto riconoscere il proprio totale fallimento. L'egemonia statunitense sul pianeta è sempre più spesso messa in discussione. Il tentativo di rimodellare in senso neocoloniale il Vicino e Medio Oriente è giunto a un punto morto, perché le forze d'affermazione nazionale della regione conducono una lotta di resistenza accanita contro il rullo compressore militare degli Stati Uniti e dei loro alleati. In America latina si sono aperte nuove prospettive socialiste. Vedono la luce nuove coalizioni, per esempio tra la Cina, la Russia, il Brasile e l'India, che spingono verso un mondo multipolare. È ormai finita l'epoca in cui si celebrava il trionfo del capitalismo sul socialismo, la "fine della Storia". Il mondo è entrato in un periodo di nuovo slancio delle lotte anti-imperialiste a favore dell'indipendenza, del progresso sociale, delle nazioni e dei popoli.
Il rifiuto categorico del patto imperialista della NATO e delle sue truppe ausiliarie dell'Unione Europea non è, come vorrebbero far credere le élite finanziarie, un ripiego isolazionista, nazionalista e autarchico, ma la riconquista della sovranità nazionale, base essenziale di un'evoluzione verso la democrazia e il socialismo. Bisogna opporre alla NATO e all'Unione Europea un NO di principio se si vuole superare la crisi e creare nuove forme di collaborazione internazionale al servizio della maggioranza dei lavoratori.
PER UN MONDO SENZA NATO – PER UN'EUROPA DEI POPOLI
Primi firmatari:
Deutscher Freidenker-Verband (Associazione tedesca di liberi pensatori)Initiativ e.V. (Associazione Iniziativa)
Antiimperialistische Koordination (Coordinamento anti-imperialista)
Vereinigung für Internationale Solidarität (VIS) e.V. (Associazione per la solidarietà internazionale)
Arbeitskreis Marburger WissenschaftlerInnen für Friedens- und Abrüstungsforschung (Comitato di lavoro degli scienzati di Marburgo per la ricerca sulla pace e il disarmo)
Arbeiterfotografie - Forum für Engagierte Fotografie (Fotografia operaia – Foro per una fotografia impegnata)
Contatto: [1] redaktion@...
Per firmare la petizione internazionale vai a
[2] TLAXCALA The Translators' Network for Linguistic Diversity- NO NATO! http://www.tlaxcala.es/detail_campagne.asp?lg=it&ref_campagne=9
Article printed from metropoLiS - Rivista Online: http://www.lsmetropolis.org
URL to article: http://www.lsmetropolis.org/2009/02/no-alla-nato/
URLs in this post:
[1] redaktion@...: mailto:redaktion@...
[2] TLAXCALA The Translators' Network for Linguistic Diversity- NO NATO!: http://www.tlaxcala.es/detail_campagne.asp?lg=it&ref_campagne=9
=== 4 ===
http://www.lernesto.it/index.aspx?m=77&f=2&IDArticolo=18040
Si è arrestata l'espansione della NATO ad est?
di Mauro Gemma
su altre testate del 03/03/2009
L'esempio dell'Ucraina
In una recente intervista concessa all'agenzia russa Interfax, il Sottosegretario statunitense per gli Affari Politici William Burns torna sulla questione dell'adesione di Ucraina e Georgia alla NATO, ribadendo la tradizionale posizione USA, secondo cui "anche Ucraina e Georgia hanno il diritto di essere membri NATO" dal momento che "ogni nazione sovrana ha diritto di prendere la propria decisione e di scegliere i propri alleati".
Allo stesso tempo però, Burns precisa che al momento "l'Ucraina e la Georgia non sono pronte per entrare a far parte della NATO", subordinando la decisione definitiva in merito alla richiesta di adesione al fatto che "tutti i membri della NATO siano d'accordo, e che i cittadini di quel paese appoggino la decisione".
Non sfugge certamente che la relativa prudenza dei più recenti approcci "ufficiali" alla questione dell'ulteriore allargamento della NATO ad est, che si coglie, oltre che in quella di Burns, anche in altre recenti dichiarazioni di politici e diplomatici statunitensi, è in larga parte dovuta agli esiti "disastrosi" per l'amministrazione USA della crisi caucasica della scorsa estate, conclusasi con il rovescio della provocazione georgiana alle frontiere della Russia, in seguito alla dura e vittoriosa reazione armata del Cremlino.
E' in particolare a partire da quel momento, che gli approcci USA all'allargamento della NATO hanno dovuto ovviamente tener conto (come, afferma Burns nella sua intervista) del fatto che evidentemente non tutti i partner europei della NATO (in particolare, Germania, Francia e la stessa Italia, che hanno svolto un ruolo relativamente autonomo nella ricerca di una composizione della crisi tra Russia e Georgia) appaiono disponibili ad acuire gli elementi di tensione con Mosca nell'attuale momento di profonda crisi economica che attraversa il "vecchio Continente" e in una situazione di acuta dipendenza dalle risorse energetiche del mercato russo.
Ma tutte queste considerazioni ci permettono di affermare con sicurezza che ci troviamo di fronte a una frenata o, addirittura, al definitivo arresto dei piani di allargamento ad Est del sistema di alleanze militari e politiche imperialiste, che ebbero proprio in esperti e potenti sostenitori delle amministrazioni democratiche USA passate e presente (Brzezinski, Soros, Albright) i principali ispiratori e strateghi?
Uno sguardo più attento all'evolversi della situazione nelle aree interessate, dovrebbe indurre a maggiore prudenza molti entusiasti sostenitori di una presunta "vocazione" della nuova amministrazione USA alla composizione dei conflitti tuttora in corso con la Russia e con altri protagonisti della scena internazionale, i quali danno per scontata la sua accettazione incondizionata di un nuovo orizzonte multipolare delle relazioni internazionali, in cui non ci sia posto per le scelte avventurose che hanno caratterizzato la precedente presidenza Bush.
Se ci limitiamo, ad esempio, ad esaminare alcuni sviluppi degli avvenimenti in Ucraina, il grande paese europeo considerato da sempre strategico per gli interessi USA e oggetto, da lunghi anni, di pressioni e condizionamenti esterni, possiamo trarre la conclusione che il tentativo di "forzare i tempi" della sua integrazione nell'orbita occidentale non si è certo definitivamente arrestato, che le speranze di un'accelerazione dei progetti di "colonizzazione" e asservimento militare a suo tempo intrapresi continuano ad essere coltivate, approfittando anche della profonda crisi economica in cui versa l'ex repubblica sovietica, sull'orlo della bancarotta.
Anche il notevole sviluppo del movimento anti-NATO (per iniziativa, in particolare, del Partito Comunista di Ucraina e di altre forze di sinistra), a cui si è assistito in questi ultimi giorni, con grandi manifestazioni in diverse parti del paese (in particolare in Crimea, scenario potenziale di un pericoloso scontro tra le forze navali di Mosca e di Washington), sta lì a dimostrare che la consapevolezza del pericolo di definitivo assoggettamento al "carro americano" è ben presente in larghi strati dell'opinione pubblica ucraina, che non ha certo abbassato la guardia, neppure dopo l'avvento di Obama alla presidenza.
Rivelatrice dell'incertezza di un futuro di "distensione" della politica USA in quest'area, appare, ad esempio, l'intervista al quotidiano francese Le Figaro, in cui, nei giorni scorsi, il principale ispiratore della politica estera "democratica" verso il mondo ex sovietico, Zbigniew Brzezinski, si è espresso per l'apertura di "sedi di dialogo" con Mosca, ma ha anche precisato che l'approccio negoziale deve avvenire nel contesto di una concezione delle relazioni con la Russia e gli stati dell'ex URSS, che non lascia spazio a dubbi interpretativi: "L'inizio del dialogo con la Russia non può avvenire a costo di limitare le aspirazioni di quei paesi che vogliono aderire alla NATO – come l'Ucraina e la Georgia – soprattutto perché l'Ucraina, in quanto membro della NATO, spianerebbe la strada alla democratizzazione della Russia". Ancora una volta, Ucraina, Georgia (e altri stati dell'ex URSS) dirette da elite fedeli ai valori di "missione di civiltà" della potenza USA, integrate militarmente nel blocco imperialista, e garanti degli interessi USA contro una Russia ricondotta a più miti consigli e disposta a trattare (o meglio, a collaborare) alle condizioni imposte. E', tra l'altro, non privo di significato che l'intervista sia stata diffusa contemporaneamente al diffondersi di voci circa la nomina del figlio dello stesso Brzezinski ad ambasciatore a Varsavia, capitale di un paese che da secoli nutre velleità egemoniche sugli stati slavi europei limitrofi alla Russia (Bielorussia e Ucraina) e che, più di tutti, ha operato, negli ultimi anni, a favore di una politica aggressiva nei confronti dell'amministrazione russa, in perfetta sintonia con gli orientamenti della politica estera USA.
A metà febbraio, nel corso di una visita in Georgia, il portavoce del Dipartimento di Stato USA, Robert Wood, pur con toni meno aggressivi di quelli che caratterizzavano l'era Bush, richiesto di un parere circa un possibile cambiamento dell'atteggiamento della nuova amministrazione Obama nei confronti dell'adesione di Georgia e Ucraina all'Alleanza Atlantica, ha risposto che gli Stati Uniti "sono ancora impegnati nel migliorare e rafforzare le relazioni della NATO" con i due paesi. E ha concluso: "a quanto ne so, non c'è stato alcun cambiamento della posizione rispetto alla dichiarazione di Bucarest (dei leader della NATO, in aprile 2008): è evidente che questi due paesi saranno membri della NATO".
Un altro segnale che le manovre tendenti ad integrare l'Ucraina nella NATO non stiano subendo rallentamenti viene dalla recente visita (21 febbraio) del vice ministro degli esteri ucraino Volodymyr Handogyi in Romania per consultazioni in merito alle modalità che facilitino l'accesso all'Alleanza Atlantica e la definizione dell'agenda di impegni relativi alla realizzazione delle decisioni assunte nel vertice di Bucarest in relazione all'adesione di Kiev.
Nel frattempo, prosegue incessante la stretta collaborazione degli USA con il governo di Kiev (peraltro alle prese con una drammatica crisi di credibilità presso l'opinione pubblica del proprio paese) per garantire, come sottolinea il 21 febbraio l'analista politico ucraino Viktor Pirozhenko nel sito russo del "Fondo di Cultura Strategica" (http://www.fondsk.ru/article.php?id=1936), "un'adesione silenziosa, non formale alla NATO dell'Ucraina", che viene considerata "membro de facto dell'alleanza, anche in assenza di una formalizzazione giuridica". A tal scopo, sottolinea Pirozhenko, è previsto un drastico incremento del numero degli osservatori statunitensi e una sostanziosa crescita dell'appoggio finanziario da parte USA a innumerevoli organizzazioni non governative ucraine (quelle, tanto per intendersi, che hanno svolto un ruolo decisivo nella vittoria della "rivoluzione arancione" alla fine del 2004).
In effetti, pur non essendo formalmente membro della NATO, con la presidenza di Juschenko, l'Ucraina assolve praticamente agli stessi obblighi previsti per i membri a pieno titolo dell'alleanza militare. Ad esempio, lo spiegamento ai confini della Russia di parte consistente delle formazioni militari di Kiev, ha rappresentato, come ha dichiarato, nel dicembre 2008, il Capo di Stato Maggiore S. Kirichenko, "il rafforzamento delle frontiere della NATO, fino alla linea di confine ucraino-russa". Un altro passo che sancisce l'adesione di fatto alla NATO si è registrato con l'accordo, siglato dal ministro della difesa Jekanurov, che permette il transito e la dislocazione delle forze e del personale dell'alleanza su tutto il territorio nazionale.
Un altro esempio viene dalla ratifica, il 18 febbraio, da parte del parlamento ucraino dei "protocolli aggiuntivi" al "Memorandum di intesa" siglato dal governo e dalla NATO, che prevede l'installazione di un "Centro di Informazione e Documentazione della NATO" e la dislocazione in tutto il paese di ufficiali di collegamento del blocco militare.
"Se l'Ucraina continuerà ad adempiere fedelmente agli obblighi previsti per tutti i paesi membri della NATO, pur continuando a stare fuori dall'alleanza" – conclude l'analisi di Pirozhenko – "alla fine, i partners europei (riluttanti) degli Stati Uniti si convinceranno che l'Ucraina dovrà essere ammessa, senza osservare le procedure normalmente richieste, ma semplicemente legittimando la situazione esistente".
=== 5 ===
http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=3971666&c=EUR&s=TOP
Defense News
March 3, 2009
NATO Official Keen To Bring Balkans Into Alliance
By JULIAN HALE
BRUSSELS - A NATO official has said he strongly favors bringing Balkans countries into NATO structures.
"We have a political debt to finish what we begun in the 1990s," said Jamie Shea, NATO's director for policy and planning, at a debate, "Could Balkan Newcomers to NATO and the EU Affect the Security of the West?" organized by the Security and Defence Agenda think tank here March 2.
Arguing that the West tends to deal with countries too much on a bilateral basis, Shea said a strategic dialogue with the Balkans as a whole is needed. He suggested creation of a Balkans historical commission to address nationalistic tendencies in some countries.
In addition, he recommended examining the networks of corruption that fuel nationalism, and expressed hope that Albania and Croatia would join NATO at the April summit.
Doris Pack, the chairwoman of the European Parliament's delegation for relations with South East European countries, said questions remain about Croatia joining NATO because of its border dispute with neighboring Slovenia, but she believes this should be dealt with bilaterally.
"If a country fulfills the conditions to join, it can't be blackmailed by a member with other interests using its membership to deal with bilateral political problems," she said.
She argued that an EU country could have used the border dispute to prevent Slovenia from joining the European Union but did not do it. "Germany had problems with the Czech Republic but didn't burden the EU accession process of the Czechs with these bilateral problems," she said.
She said Croatia should enter NATO as it would be "a good signal" for other countries in the region.
The Turkish ambassador to NATO, Tacan Ildem, stressed the importance of NATO's open-door policy with regard to enlargement. Addressing the dispute between the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Greece over the name of the former country, which calls itself Macedonia, he said it is "incumbent on Greece and Macedonia" to reach an agreement. "I fear that if we can't reach an agreement expeditiously, then Macedonia will feel abandoned."
With regard to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Shea argued that linking aid to multi-ethnic cooperation could help the situation.
Shea said that, while additional NATO troops would be helpful in Afghanistan, "we can't withdraw them from Kosovo for now."
---
http://www.jungewelt.de/2009/03-06/011.php
06.03.2009 / Schwerpunkt / Seite 3
Neue Vision vom Krieg
Jamie Shea und die Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung: NATO-Bombensprecher als Gastredner auf grüner NATO-Jubelfeier in Berlin
Von Werner Pirker
Sechzig Jahre NATO – für die Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, das von den deutschen Grünen unterhaltene Zentrum für schlichtes Denken, ist das Grund genug, eine internationale Konferenz mit relativ prominenter Besetzung zu veranstalten. Neben Claudia Roth und Jürgen Trittin als Vertreter der Gastgeber werden sich an diesem Freitag und Samstag mehrere im Auftrag des westlichen Machtkartells tätige Forschungsleiter in Berlin-Mitte die Ehre geben: Dimitri Trenin, Direktor des US-gesponserten Carnegie Mos cow Centers zum Beispiel oder der Director for Transatlantic Relations an der Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Dan Hamilton. Überstrahlt wird die Runde von Jamie Shea, inzwischen Direktor für »Policy Planning« im Büro des NATO-Generalsekretärs, berühmt-berüchtigt geworden aber als Sprecher der Allianz während ihres Bombenkrieges 1999 gegen Jugoslawien.
Auch wenn es sich um eine eher ungewollte Symbolik handeln dürfte: Mit Sheas Teilnahme an der Veranstaltung zum 60. Jahrestag der Gründung des Nordatlantikpaktes rückt das zehnjährige Jubiläum des ersten Kriegseinsatzes des westlichen »Verteidigungsbündnisses« – der Überfall auf Jugoslawien am 24. März 1999 – zwangsläufig in den Mittelpunkt der grünen NATO-Jubelfeierlichkeiten. Das Wiedersehen mit Jamie Shea ist ein für die Grünen eher peinliches Déjà-vu-Erlebnis, das sie sich auch noch selbst ins Haus bestellt haben.
Jamie Sheas eingefrorenes Lächeln prägte das Gesicht eines Krieges, in dem Feigheit und Verlogenheit mit ideologischer Anmaßung einhergingen. Es war ein vom UN-Sicherheitsrat nicht mandatierter und damit illegaler Krieg. Weil fast ausschließlich und bewußt gegen die Zivilbevölkerung gerichtet, erfüllte er generell den Tatbestands eines Kriegsverbrechens, wobei der Einsatz international geächteter Waffen erschwerend hinzukam. Das Kriegsziel bestand in der Unterwerfung eines seine Souveränität gegen das imperialistische Globalisierungsregime verteidigenden Landes. Als Kriegsgrund wurde ein Nationalitätenkonflikt vorgeschoben, von dem es auf der Welt mehr gibt als Nationalitäten. Ungeachtet der Tatsache, daß in Jugoslawien Nationalitätenfragen stets auf höchstem Niveau der nationalen Gleichberechtigung verhandelt wurden, wovon auch ein im Februar 1999 vorgelegter Plan zur Selbstverwaltung des Kosovo zeugte, wurde Belgrad brutaler ethnischer Säuberungen und einer systematischen Vertreibungspolitik bezichtigt.
Der NATO-Krieg bildete die Fortsetzung der Blockadepolitik des Westens gegenüber Jugoslawien. Jamie Shea war die Aufgabe übertragen, die von NATO-Bomben verursachte Vertreibung der Kosovo-Albaner – die Fluchtbewegung war wegen der Bombardements um ein 30faches angestiegen – den Serben anzulasten. Wo das nicht glaubhaft zu vermitteln war, führte Shea grinsend den Begriff der Kollateralschäden ein. Damit waren getötete Zivilisten gemeint.
Je ruhmloser sich die Auftritte des promovierten Historikers an der Kriegspropagandafront gestalteten, desto mehr fühlten sich Berlins rot-grüne Politiker zu Heldentaten berufen. Joseph Fischers Erfahrungen aus dem Frankfurter Häuserkampf – legal, illegal, scheißegal – fanden ihre völkerrechtsnihilistische Entsprechung in den Schluchten des Balkans. Die Pflicht zur Verhinderung eines Völkermordes rangiere vor dem Völkerrecht, machte Deutschlands grüner Außenminister der Welt klar. Mit »Nie wieder Auschwitz« gab er gleich auch noch den vermeintlich antifaschistischen Ton der mörderischen Bombenkampagne an. Nicht »Nie wieder Krieg«, sondern »Krieg!«.
Die pazifistische Grundströmung bei den Grünen reagierte darauf leicht irritiert. Doch abstrakte Postulate wie die absolute Gewaltfreiheit lassen sich nun einmal schwer durchhalten. Es ist freilich längst nicht mehr das Recht auf gewaltsamen Widerstand, welches grünes Gewissen bewegt. Die Grünen haben mit dem von oben ausgeübten Gewaltmonopol längst ihren Frieden geschlossen. Das soll auch ihre Konferenz anläßlich des NATO-Jubiläums zum Ausdruck bringen. Das imperialistische Kriegsbündnis als grüne Projektionsfläche für »globale sicherheitspolitische Herausforderungen«. Und so suchen heute abend Jamie Shea und Jürgen Trittin im »strategischen Dialog« »eine neue Vision für die NATO«.
NATO's Global Mission Creep
1) Tenth Anniversary Of NATO's Drive Into Eastern Europe (by Rick Rozoff)
2) NATO's Global Mission Creep (by DIANA JOHNSTONE)
3) NO alla NATO! Appello del Coordinamento Antimperialista e di altri iniziatori, in Germania, per il 60.mo della NATO
4) Si è arrestata l'espansione della NATO ad est? (di Mauro Gemma)
5) Il bugiardo Jamie Shea continua a fare il portavoce della NATO:
NATO Official Keen To Bring Balkans Into Alliance / NATO-Bombensprecher als Gastredner auf grüner NATO-Jubelfeier in Berlin
di Diana Johnstone raccomandiamo anche l'importante articolo del 2004:
Clinton, Kerry e il Kosovo. L'Impostura di una "Guerra Buona" / Clinton, Kerry and Kosovo. The Lie of a "Good War"
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/3861
http://www.counterpunch.org/johnstone06242004.html
=== 1 ===
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/37891
Stop NATO - March 13, 2009
Tenth Anniversary Of NATO's Drive Into Eastern Europe
Rick Rozoff
March 12 of this year marked the tenth anniversary of NATO expanding into Eastern Europe and incorporating former members of its Warsaw Pact rival.
Nine years after the George H.W. Bush's administration's Secretary of State James Baker had assured the Soviet Union's last president Mikhail Gorbachev that "there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east," the Alliance, in the case of one of its new members, Poland, moved directly to the border of Russia's Kaliningrad territory.
Om March 12, 1999 Baker's successor once-removed, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, gathered the the foreign ministers of the new inductees, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, to the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri where in NATOese she "accepted the instruments of accession to NATO of the three countries."
The speeches of all four foreign policy chiefs were larded with celebratory and self-congratulatory effusions about the end of the Cold War, with the Hungarian, Czech and Polish foreign ministers competing with each other in claiming that the beginning of the new Jerusalem and the advent of post-history - or the Eschaton - was first signaled by events in Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968 or Gdansk in 1981.
The Polish foreign minister of the time, Bronislaw Geremek, in noting the proximity of Independence to another city of some note, observed that "Fifty-three years ago, in nearby Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill delivered his famous address."
Geremek was of course referring to the Iron Curtain speech of 1946 and the official trumpet blast of the Cold War. The Polish foreign minister also dutifully quoted the US president of the same time, Harry Truman, he who lent his name to the doctrine of the following year, one which was immediately implemented with the US and its Western allies intervening in civil conflicts in Greece and Korea, the latter leading to direct combat between the United States and China.
Forty full years of Western-instigated wars - conventional, colonial, counterinsurgency, proxy and civil - and military-backed coups d'etat throughout Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America would be the fruits of the policies advocated by Churchill, inaugurated by Truman and continued by his successors in history's longest self-proclaimed crusade, that of "containing communism."
It was the victory of that campaign that Madeleine Albright and her three Eastern European counterparts were celebrating ten years ago by welcoming three former Warsaw Pact nations into what was at the time and remains today the world's only military bloc.
The Polish visitor's speech contained a line about the end of the bipolar era, meaning that of the US and Soviet led alliances.
Many in 1991, though far fewer when Geremek spoke eight years later, hoped that the alternative to a bipolar world be be non-polar or at any rate a multipolar one.
The formal accession of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland to NATO and events that followed close on its heels would soon dispel any such illusions. The bipolar world had given way to history's first unipolar global order.
Even at the time of the accession ceremony the contours of the evolving post-Cold War US- and NATO-dominated world were becoming incontestably clear.
The speeches at Independence were replete with words like freedom, democracy, liberty, independence and self-determination; words that have in earlier periods been noble and inspiring ones, the concepts and practices they represent causes that countless millions have lived and often died for.
However, there have been few occasions throughout human history when even the most ambitious and ruthless tyrants and empire-builders have not invoked one or more of these terms, according to their own lights and for their own purposes, to justify conquest, pillage and in the worst cases extermination.
Grand words are like coins that have become effaced by passing through too many hands, often in illicit transactions.
How sincerely the words were used by Albright and her collaborators was demonstrated even at the time of their meeting and with a savage vengeance shortly thereafter.
There was an empty seat in the Truman Library on March 12 of ten years ago: That of the foreign minister of Slovakia.
The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland are three of the four members of Visegrad Four grouping established in 1991 to "further European integration."
The fourth is Slovakia. All four nations joined the European Union simultaneously in 2004.
The Visegrad Four group has been routinely characterized as an alliance of Central European nations; not Eastern European, as the same countries were referred to during the Cold War era.
Geography as well as terminology assume a hugh degree of plasticity in the view of NATO nations' planners and both are harnessed to the cart of geopolitical and military expediency.
Even more preposterously, political leaders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are now referring to their nations as being in Central Europe; all three countries are on the Baltic Sea and border Russia in one manner or another.
Officials in Georgia and their Western sponsors frequently speak of the nation, especially in reference to NATO membership, as "rejoining Europe." Georgia lies to the south of Turkey and a sizeable part of the nation is to the east of the eastern-most part of Turkey, which the West considers an Asian nation.
If integration with NATO and the European Union demands as a prerequisite and enforces as a membership rule the uniform subordination to Brussels of a nation's military, security, defense industry, judicial and economic prerogatives, it also mandates that candidates and new members be whipped into line politically.
Slovakia wasn't invited to join NATO in 1999 because it was inhabited by a population that interpreted the words thrown around by Western power brokers, especially self-determination and freedom of choice, in the traditional, literal sense. That is, according to Brussels and Washington, they persistently voted the wrong way.
In federal election after federal election Slovaks gave the political party of the country's first prime minister Vladimir Meciar, the People's Party - Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS), a plurality of their votes.
And just as consistently American, European Union and even NATO officials issued the diktat that not only could the HZDS not form, it could not join, a federal cabinet.
It took five more years before NATO considered the country sufficiently tamed and broken in to join the Alliance.
The genuine, violent and horrific, meaning of what the new expansionist NATO portended for Europe and the world didn't take long to manifest itself.
Only twelve days after Albright's conclave in Missouri, with herself as arguably the prime mover, NATO launched its first sustained campaign of all-out military aggression, the 78-day Operation Allied Force onslaught against Yugoslavia.
The Czech Republic, Hungary (which then bordered Yugoslavia) and Poland hardly had time to catch their collective breath when they were plunged into the first war against a sovereign European nation since Hitler's blitzkrieg assaults of 1939-1941.
Unremittingly and with increasing ferocity NATO unleashed an almost three month attack on a small nation with 1,000 warplanes flying over 38,000 combat missions (which included the return of the German Luftwaffe to the skies of Europe for the first time since the defeat of the Third Reich) and, along with cruise missiles launched from warships and submarines in the Mediterranean, spared nothing in an aerial avalanche of cluster bombs, graphite weapons and depleted uranium: Factories, apartment complexes, broadcasting facilities, hospitals, power grids, passenger trains, refugee columns, religious processions and the Chinese embassy.
A month into the conflict the NATO 50th anniversary jubilee summit was held in Washington, DC, where the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland were formally inducted into the bloc, one now at war for the first time.
There can be little doubt that the timing of the attack on Yugoslavia on March 24 was coordinated with the scheduled NATO summit on April 23-24 and that the second was planned to celebrate an anticipated capitulation by Yugoslavia and the unveiling of the new, global NATO as the world's preeminent arbiter of internal as well as international disputes, the redrawing of national borders and the use of military force.
This in contraposition to the United Nations and international law, both of which had been circumvented, subverted and supplanted by a Western military bloc with the war against Yugoslavia with neither yet recuperating from the blow.
NATO underestimated Serbian resolve, as Hitler had done in 1941, delaying the arrival of his Wehrmacht to the gates of Moscow for several critically important weeks.
The NATO summit then, far from dragging the pennants of a subjugated nation cum conquered province through the dust and conducting a triumph reminiscent of those of the Rome of the Caesars, was on April 24 rather confronted with considering a ground invasion of the nation it had failed to bomb into submission.
The three new NATO members, none of whom had deployed troops for combat missions since World War II, were close to discovering what joining the "alliance of free nations" actually entailed.
Largely through the treachery of Finland's Maarti Ahtisaari and the complicity of Russia's Viktor Chernomyrdin they weren't provided that opportunity in 1999 but neither did they have to wait long for another.
One of the catchphrases employed at the time that the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland were being integrated into NATO was mutual defense; that is, by joining the world's sole remaining military bloc the three countries would acquire powerful protectors - the United States, Britain, France and Germany most notably - in the event any or all of the three were victims of armed aggression.
This means the activation of NATO's Article 5, which obliges all Alliance member states to offer military assistance to any other that requests it.
In 1999 Washington and Brussels had a compliant Yeltsin government in power in Russia, one that would have ceded the West anything it asked for short of Cathedral Square in the center of Moscow's Kremlin, so it was evident that Article 5 in fact had nothing to do with defense but everything to do with joint military action of another nature.
This was two and a half years before NATO and the US seized upon the alleged war on terrorism (prior to that they were inclined in the opposite direction), so mythic threats by non-state actors couldn't be employed as a pretext for an urgent need to take the three new members under NATO's collective defense - and nuclear - umbrella.
Other motives were behind doing so, including moving NATO military hardware, surveillance, air patrols, training centers and operational contingencies further eastward up to the Russian border.
But NATO first implemented its mutual military assistance clause because of events and against targets in parts of the world never expected by most: The bloc used the events of September 11, 2001 in the United States to launch a full 19-member military operation in Afghanistan.
In thirty five years as members of the Warsaw Pact the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland had never been called upon to send troops to a war zone; in only 30 months as NATO members they were pulled into what is soon to be an eight-year war in South Asia.
All three nations have troops deployed in Afghanistan and all three have suffered combat fatalities there.
The seven other Eastern European nations that followed them into NATO - Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia - and the three that are to follow the above ten - Albania, Croatia and Macedonia - also have troops stationed in the world's most dangerous war zone, and most all of them, including the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, had troops stationed in Iraq after March of 2003.
The last three countries have all lost troops there also.
Shortly after the invasion of Iraq and the deployment of a US military headquarters in Baghdad and a British counterpart in Basra, a third, middle zone around the ancient city of Babylon and Karbala was under Polish military command (consisting of 7,000 troops) with NATO assistance.
The main Polish base was called Camp Babylon in fact and was the site of desecration and destruction of some of the world's most treasured artifacts at the hands of new NATO's occupation forces.
Collectively the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland had not lost a single troop in combat operations since World War II, but now all have done so in two nations, with the Polish death toll in Iraq at 21 and in Afghanistan at 9.
Serving NATO at the expense of one's nation and people is not limited to killing and dying overseas, however, as the Alliance has endangered the three states at home in addition.
The US intends to station an X-Band radar transferred from the Marshall Islands to the Czech municipality of Brdy as part of a global missile shield system and NATO has constructed a radar installation in the city of Slavkov near the site of the Battle of Austerlitz.
There is fierce and committed local opposition to both deployments, two of many and illimitable obligations of NATO membership.
A comparable campaign exists in Hungary to stop the deployment of a NATO radar facility on Tubes Hill near Pecs.
Poland is slated for the most provocative and threatening projects: Ten US interceptor missile silos at or near the Redzikowo airport in Slupsk near the Baltic Sea coast and a Patriot missile battery not too far from Russia's Kaliningrad enclave.
Redzikowo formerly housed a Nazi German airbase, from where Luftwaffe warplanes took off to bomb Poland itself in World War II.
....
A decade later the 1999 NATO accession was marked by expensive celebrations and hollow speeches in Budapest, Prague and Warsaw with Madeleine Albright condescending to visit the three capitals - recall she had summoned the foreign ministers to Missouri to recruit them ten years earlier - and Polish Defense Minister Bogdan Klich opening a "NATO village" on the grounds of the University of Warsaw and decking the capital with NATO flags.
The EU's Javier Solana, NATO Secretary General during the three nations' absorption, boasted of his own accomplishment while waxing enthusiastic over the prospects of the bloc moving yet further east into former Soviet space.
Ex-Czech president Vaclav Havel used the occasion to call for NATO to continue the trend by dragging in Belarus and Ukraine.
Hungarian Defence Minister Imre Szekeres was ordered to Washington during the anniversary to get his latest marching orders from Pentagon chief Robert Gates and current National Security Advisor and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander James Jones.
Ten years ago there was only one NATO state bordering Russia, Norway with a narrow corridor linking the two nations.
Now there are four new full members on Russia's borders - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland - and four former Soviet Republics with NATO Individual Partnership Action Plans also abutting Russia - Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
Finland, a former neutral sharing a 1,300-kilometer border with Russia, is being prepared for further NATO integration and has proven its bona fides in this respect by deploying troops under the Alliance's command in Afghanistan.
A decade after the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland were absorbed by NATO the state of the world and the landscape of Europe have changed.
Yugoslavia no longer exists, even on maps.
And other nations within or against whom NATO has attacked or conducted other military operations - Bosnia, Macedonia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Pakistan and Somalia - may suffer the same fate.
March 12 is not an occasion for celebration but a cause for the deepest concern and a spur to oppose history's first attempt at creating a worldwide military bloc ahead of its 60th anniversary summit beginning in less than three weeks.
Source: Stop NATO
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato
=== 2 ===
CounterPunch March 13 / 15, 2009
French Kissing
NATO's Global Mission Creep
By DIANA JOHNSTONE
NATO, the main overseas arm of the U.S. military-industrial complex, just keeps expanding. Its original raison d'être, the supposedly menacing Soviet bloc, has been dead for twenty years. But like the military-industrial complex itself, NATO is kept alive and growing by entrenched economic interests, institutional inertia and an official mindset resembling paranoia, with think tanks looking around desperately for "threats".
This behemoth is getting ready to celebrate its 60th birthday in the twin cities of Strasbourg (France) and Kehl (Germany) on the Rhine early in April. A special gift is being offered by France's increasingly unpopular president, Nicolas Sarkozy: the return of France to NATO's "integrated command". This bureaucratic event, whose practical significance remains unclear, provides the chorus of NATOlatrous officials and editorialists something to crow about. See, the silly French have seen the error of their ways and returned to the fold.
Sarkozy, of course, puts it in different terms. He asserts that joining the NATO command will enhance France's importance by giving it influence over the strategy and operations of an Alliance which it never left, and to which it has continued to contribute more than its share of armed forces.
The flaw in that argument is that it was the totally unshakable U.S. control of NATO's integrated command that persuaded General Charles de Gaulle to leave in the first place, back in March 1966. De Gaulle did not do so on a whim. He had tried to change the decision-making process and found it impossible. The Soviet threat had diminished, and de Gaulle did not want to be dragged into wars he thought unnecessary, such as the U.S. effort to win a war in Indochina that France had already lost and considered unwinnable. He wanted France to be able to pursue its own interests in the Middle East and Africa. Besides, the US military presence in France stimulated "Yankee go home" demonstrations. Transferring the NATO command to Belgium satisfied everyone.
Sarkozy's predecessor Jacques Chirac, wrongly labeled "anti-American" by US media, was already willing to rejoin the NATO command if he could get something substantial in return, such as NATO's Mediterranean command. The United States flatly refused.
Instead, Sarkozy is settling for crumbs: assignment of senior French officers to a command in Portugal and to some training base in the United States. "Nothing was negotiated. Two or three more French officers in position to take orders from the Americans changes nothing", observed former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine at a recent colloquium on France and NATO.
Sarkozy announced the return on March 11, six days before the issue is to be debated by the French National Assembly. The protests from both sides of the aisle will be in vain.
There appear to be two main causes of this unconditional surrender.
One is the psychology of Sarkozy himself, whose love for the most superficial aspects of the United States was expressed in his embarrassing speech to the U.S. Congress in November 2007. Sarkozy may be the first French president who seems not to like France. Or at least, to like the United States better (from watching television). He can give the impression of having wanted to be president of France not for love of country, but in social revenge against it. From the start, he has shown himself eager to "normalize" France, that is, to remake it according to the American model.
The other, less obvious but more objective cause is the recent expansion of the European Union. The rapid absorption of all the former Eastern European satellites, plus the former Soviet Republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, has drastically changed the balance of power within the EU itself. The core founding nations, France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries, are no long able to steer the Union toward a unified foreign and security policy. After France and Germany refused to go along with the invasion of Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld dismissed them as "old Europe" and gloated over the willingness of "new Europe" to follow the United States lead. Britain to the west, and the "new" European satellites to the East are both more attached to the United States politically and emotionally than they are to the European Union that took them in and provided them with considerable economic development aid and a veto over major policy issues.
This expansion effectively buried the longstanding French project to build a European defense force that could act outside the NATO command. The rulers of Poland and the Baltic States want U.S. defense, by way of NATO, period. They would never accept the French project of an EU defense not tied to NATO and the United States.
France has its own military-industrial complex, totally dwarfed by the one in the United States, but the largest in Western Europe. Any such complex needs export markets for its arms industry. The best potential market would have been independent European armed forces. Without that prospect, some may hope that joining the integrated command can open NATO markets to French military products.
A slim hope, however. The United States jealously guards major NATO procurements for its own industry. France is unlikely to have much influence within NATO for the same reason it is giving up its attempt to build an independent European army. The Europeans themselves are deeply divided. With Europe divided, the United States rules. Moreover, with the economic crisis deepening, money is running short for weaponry.
From the viewpoint of French national interest, this feeble hope for marketing military hardware is vastly outweighed by the disastrous political consequences of Sarkozy's act of allegiance.
It is true that even outside the NATO integrated command, France's independence was only relative. France followed the United States into the first Gulf War – President François Mitterrand vainly hoped thereby to gain influence in Washington, the usual mirage that beckons allies into dubious U.S. operations. France joined the 1999 NATO war against Yugoslavia, despite misgivings at the highest levels. But in 2003, President Jacques Chirac and his foreign minister Dominique de Villepin actually made use of their independence by rejecting the invasion of Iraq. It is generally acknowledged that the French stand enabled Germany to do the same. Belgium followed.
Villepin's February 14, 2003, speech to the UN Security Council giving priority to disarmament and peace over war won a rare standing ovation. The Villepin speech was hugely popular around the world, and greatly enhanced French prestige, especially in the Arab world. But back in Paris, the personal hatred between Sarkozy and Villepin has reached operatic heights of passion, and one can suspect that Sarkozy's return to NATO obedience is also an act of personal revenge.
The worst political effect is much broader. The impression is now created that "the West", Europe and North America, are barricading themselves by a military alliance against the rest of the world. In retrospect, the French dissent accomplished a service to the whole West by giving the impression, or the illusion, that independent thought and action were still possible, and that someone in Europe might listen to what other parts of the world thought and said. Now, this "closing of ranks", hailed by the NATO champions as "improving our security", will sound the alarms in the rest of the world. The empire seems to be closing its ranks in order to rule the world. The United States and its allies do not openly claim to rule the world, only to regulate it. The West controls the world's financial institutions, the IMF and the World Bank. It controls the judiciary, the International Criminal Court, which in six years of existence has put on trial only one obscure Congolese warlord and brought charges against 12 other persons, all of them Africans – while meanwhile the United States causes the deaths of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of people in Iraq and Afghanistan and supports Israel's ongoing aggression against the Palestinian people. To the rest of the world, NATO is just the armed branch of this enterprise of domination. And this at a time when the Western-dominated system of financial capitalism is bringing the world economy to collapse.
This gesture of "showing Western unity" for "our security" can only make the rest of the world feel insecure. Meanwhile, NATO moves every day to surround Russia with military bases and hostile alliances, notably in Georgia. Despite the smiles over dinner with her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, Hillary Clinton repeats the stunning mantra that "spheres of influence are not acceptable" – meaning, of course, that the historic Russian sphere of interest is unacceptable, while the United States is vigorously incorporating it into its own sphere of influence, called NATO.
Already China and Russia are increasing their defense cooperation. The economic interests and institutional inertia of NATO are pushing the world toward a pre-war lineup far more dangerous than the Cold War.
The lesson NATO refuses to learn is that its pursuit of enemies creates enemies. The war against terrorism fosters terrorism. Surrounding Russian with missiles proclaimed "defensive" – when any strategist knows that a shield accompanied by a sword is also an offensive weapon – will create a Russian enemy.
The Search for Threats
To prove to itself that it is really "defensive", NATO keeps looking for threats. Well, the world is a troubled place, thanks in large part to the sort of economic globalization imposed by the United States over the past decades. This might be the time to be undertaking diplomatic and political efforts to work out internationally agreed ways of dealing with such problems as global economic crisis, climate change, energy use, hackers ("cyberwar"). NATO think tanks are pouncing on these problems as new "threats" to be dealt with by NATO. This leads to a militarization of policy-making where it should be demilitarized.
For example, what can it mean to meet the supposed threat of climate change with military means? The answer seems obvious: military force may be used in some way against the populations forced from their homes by drought or flooding. Perhaps, as in Darfur, drought will lead to clashes between ethnic or social groups. Then NATO can decide which is the "good" side and bomb the others. That sort of thing.
The world indeed appears to be heading into a time of troubles. NATO appears getting read to deal with these troubles by using armed force against unruly populations.
This will be evident at NATO's 60th anniversary celebration in Strasbourg/Kehl on April 3 and 4.
The cities will be turned into armed camps. Residents of the tranquil city of Strasbourg are obliged to apply for badges in order to leave or enter their own homes during the happy event. At crucial times, they will not be allowed to leave home at all, except under emergency circumstances. Urban transport will be brought to a standstill. The cities will be as dead as if they had been bombed, to allow the NATO dignitaries to put on a show of peace.
The high point is to be a ten-minute photo op when French and German leaders shake hands on the bridge over the Rhine connected Strasbourg and Kehl. As if Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy were making peace between France and Germany for the first time. The locals are to be locked up so as not to disturb the charade.
NATO will be behaving as though the biggest threat it faces is the people of Europe. And the biggest threat to the people of Europe may well be NATO.
Diana Johnstone is author of Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Monthly Review Press).
She can be reached at diana.josto@...
=== 3 ===
( Dieser Aufruf auf deutscher Sprache: NEIN zur NATO
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/6265 )
---
http://www.lsmetropolis.org/2009/02/no-alla-nato/
NO alla NATO!
Posted By rino On 22 Febbraio 2009 @ 9:56 pm In Internazionale, NO WAR | No Comments
Solidali con tutti coloro che manifesteranno nell'aprile del 2009 a Strasburgo e a Baden-Baden contro il summit della NATO il giorno del 60 anniversario della sua creazione, facciamo un appello affinché tutte queste proteste diventino il punto di partenza di una campagna permanente contro la NATO e la militarizzazione dell'Unione Europea, concentrandoci innanzitutto sui seguenti punti:
In Afghanistan: ritiro di tutte le truppe straniere;
In Iraq: ritiro di tutte le truppe straniere; cessazione del sostegno militare tedesco all'occupazione;
Solidarietà con la legittima resistenza di tutti i popoli del Vicino e Medio Oriente alla guerra e all'occupazione;
Rimozione dell'assedio imposto a Gaza, demolizione del Muro di separazione e degli insediamenti ebraici illegali;
Cessazione delle minacce di guerra contro l'Iran;
NO all'ingerenza della NATO nei Balcani e ritiro delle sue truppe; il riconoscimento del "Kosovo" è dichiarato immediatamente nullo e mai avvenuto;
Scioglimento dei tribunali ad hoc per il Ruanda e la Jugoslavia: sono contrari al diritto internazionale e servono solo alla propaganda a favore della NATO e al lavaggio del cervello;
No all'allargamento a Est della NATO (Ucraina, Georgia);
Solidarietà con la resistenza allo scudo anti-missile statunitense nella Repubblica Ceca e in Polonia.
Le nazioni alleate all'interno della NATO rappresentano un ostacolo alla risoluzione pacifica di quasi tutti i conflitti presenti nel mondo. La NATO impedisce ai popoli di evolvere verso la democrazia e di disporre di sé stessi, e distrugge così le basi del benessere sociale e di una gestione rispettosa dell'ambiente.
Dopo la lunga serie di aggressioni contro l'Iraq (1991), la Somalia (1992), la Jugoslavia (1999), l'Afghanistan (2001) e ancora l'Iraq (2003), nonché di guerre per procura: quelle delle milizie contro la Repubblica Democratica del Congo (1998), di Israele contro il Libano e della Georgia contro la Russia (2008), ci si chiede con inquietudine cosa si debba ora temere dagli Stati Uniti e dai loro alleati. Un'intensificazione dell'occupazione in Afghanistan? Una destabilizzazione dell'India e del Pakistan? Un bombardamento dell'Iran? Un annientamento con la forza delle armi del cammino intrapreso da Cuba, dal Venezuela e da un numero sempre maggiore di altri paesi latino-americani?
Davanti all'estensione della crisi economica mondiale, si ricorda che gli imperialismi avevano tentato di risolvere quella degli anni Trenta del Novecento con la corsa agli armamenti e la guerra che condussero all'esito catastrofico della Seconda guerra mondiale.
La risposta del movimento pacifista alla politica della NATO dev'essere proporzionata alle dimensioni del pericolo sempre più grave. Per questo motivo facciamo appello a tutte le persone che amano la giustizia: organizziamo una campagna permanente, vasta e decisa contro la NATO.
Elaboriamo strategie coordinate per mobilitare azioni di opposizione in tutti i teatri e in tutte le zone in cui la NATO spiega le sue attività. Impariamo a riconoscere per tempo i pericoli più gravi e diamo l'allarme perché il maggior numero di persone possa reagire e difendersi.
Smascheriamo le menzogne che servono a giustificare le guerre e opponiamo al lavaggio del cervello l'informazione e la pedagogia.
Cerchiamo ostinatamente di ottenere dagli Stati membri della NATO il ritiro individuale dalla struttura.
Tutto quello che indebolisce la NATO consolida le forze della pace e del progresso in tutto il mondo. Vent'anni dopo lo scioglimento del Patto di Varsavia è ben ora di procedere a quello della NATO.
***
L'Unione Europea si è estesa verso l'Est e il Sud-Est dell'Europa parallelamente all'allargamento a Est della NATO. Ma è stata ancora una volta spaccata da nuove frontiere esterne. Viene strumentalizzata nel nuovo scontro tra la Russia e la Bielorussia. La dottrina della «guerra preventiva» comune alla NATO e agli Stati Uniti è stata ripresa in ambito europeo. Sono state create «Forze di intervento rapido» europee per intervenire militarmente in tutto il mondo in coordinamento con la NATO sotto il pretesto di «missioni umanitarie» di «lotta contro il terrorismo» o di «risoluzione dei crisi». A fini di addomesticamento politico, di controllo sui mercati e di spoliazione delle risorse naturali di paesi terzi, la collaborazione tra l'Unione Europea, gli Stati Uniti e la NATO si è notevolmente intensificata. L'Unione Europea impone ai suoi membri un proseguimento della militarizzazione e della corsa agli armamenti. In perfetto accordo con la NATO e gli Stati Uniti e con i meccanismi dell'Unione, i governi europei hanno messo in atto delle misure mirate a limitare i diritti civili, annullare le conquiste sociali e sviluppare delle strutture repressive contro i movimenti popolari. L'Unione Europea sta assumendo sempre più i tratti di un'unione imperialista di governi europei, e questo impedisce di parlare di autonomia europea e di rottura con la tutela della superpotenza imperiale, nonostante occasionali deleghe di potere.
Ma le contraddizioni interne dell'Unione Europea, il consenso tra tutte le potenze imperialiste, lo scacco della politica europea, il NO francese, olandese e irlandese al TCE, il rifiuto e la disobbedienza civile opposti alle regolamentazioni dell'Unione aprono delle prospettive su nuove forme di collaborazione tra i paesi europei, con i paesi dell'ex Unione Sovietica ma anche con i paesi del litorale mediterraneo, il mondo arabo e gli altri continenti. Solo rifiutando il ruolo di fratelli minori degli Stati Uniti e della NATO, resistendo a un'Europa imperialista e ritirandole la sua pretesa "legittimità" si potrà intraprendere appieno la lotta antimilitarista e anti-NATO.
La crisi universale che stiamo attraversando e che coinvolge l'economia, la finanza, il progresso sociale, la fornitura di materie prime e l'ambiente, è foriera di nuovi pericoli ma anche di nuove opportunità. La politica neoliberista ha già dovuto riconoscere il proprio totale fallimento. L'egemonia statunitense sul pianeta è sempre più spesso messa in discussione. Il tentativo di rimodellare in senso neocoloniale il Vicino e Medio Oriente è giunto a un punto morto, perché le forze d'affermazione nazionale della regione conducono una lotta di resistenza accanita contro il rullo compressore militare degli Stati Uniti e dei loro alleati. In America latina si sono aperte nuove prospettive socialiste. Vedono la luce nuove coalizioni, per esempio tra la Cina, la Russia, il Brasile e l'India, che spingono verso un mondo multipolare. È ormai finita l'epoca in cui si celebrava il trionfo del capitalismo sul socialismo, la "fine della Storia". Il mondo è entrato in un periodo di nuovo slancio delle lotte anti-imperialiste a favore dell'indipendenza, del progresso sociale, delle nazioni e dei popoli.
Il rifiuto categorico del patto imperialista della NATO e delle sue truppe ausiliarie dell'Unione Europea non è, come vorrebbero far credere le élite finanziarie, un ripiego isolazionista, nazionalista e autarchico, ma la riconquista della sovranità nazionale, base essenziale di un'evoluzione verso la democrazia e il socialismo. Bisogna opporre alla NATO e all'Unione Europea un NO di principio se si vuole superare la crisi e creare nuove forme di collaborazione internazionale al servizio della maggioranza dei lavoratori.
PER UN MONDO SENZA NATO – PER UN'EUROPA DEI POPOLI
Primi firmatari:
Deutscher Freidenker-Verband (Associazione tedesca di liberi pensatori)Initiativ e.V. (Associazione Iniziativa)
Antiimperialistische Koordination (Coordinamento anti-imperialista)
Vereinigung für Internationale Solidarität (VIS) e.V. (Associazione per la solidarietà internazionale)
Arbeitskreis Marburger WissenschaftlerInnen für Friedens- und Abrüstungsforschung (Comitato di lavoro degli scienzati di Marburgo per la ricerca sulla pace e il disarmo)
Arbeiterfotografie - Forum für Engagierte Fotografie (Fotografia operaia – Foro per una fotografia impegnata)
Contatto: [1] redaktion@...
Per firmare la petizione internazionale vai a
[2] TLAXCALA The Translators' Network for Linguistic Diversity- NO NATO! http://www.tlaxcala.es/detail_campagne.asp?lg=it&ref_campagne=9
Article printed from metropoLiS - Rivista Online: http://www.lsmetropolis.org
URL to article: http://www.lsmetropolis.org/2009/02/no-alla-nato/
URLs in this post:
[1] redaktion@...: mailto:redaktion@...
[2] TLAXCALA The Translators' Network for Linguistic Diversity- NO NATO!: http://www.tlaxcala.es/detail_campagne.asp?lg=it&ref_campagne=9
=== 4 ===
http://www.lernesto.it/index.aspx?m=77&f=2&IDArticolo=18040
Si è arrestata l'espansione della NATO ad est?
di Mauro Gemma
su altre testate del 03/03/2009
L'esempio dell'Ucraina
In una recente intervista concessa all'agenzia russa Interfax, il Sottosegretario statunitense per gli Affari Politici William Burns torna sulla questione dell'adesione di Ucraina e Georgia alla NATO, ribadendo la tradizionale posizione USA, secondo cui "anche Ucraina e Georgia hanno il diritto di essere membri NATO" dal momento che "ogni nazione sovrana ha diritto di prendere la propria decisione e di scegliere i propri alleati".
Allo stesso tempo però, Burns precisa che al momento "l'Ucraina e la Georgia non sono pronte per entrare a far parte della NATO", subordinando la decisione definitiva in merito alla richiesta di adesione al fatto che "tutti i membri della NATO siano d'accordo, e che i cittadini di quel paese appoggino la decisione".
Non sfugge certamente che la relativa prudenza dei più recenti approcci "ufficiali" alla questione dell'ulteriore allargamento della NATO ad est, che si coglie, oltre che in quella di Burns, anche in altre recenti dichiarazioni di politici e diplomatici statunitensi, è in larga parte dovuta agli esiti "disastrosi" per l'amministrazione USA della crisi caucasica della scorsa estate, conclusasi con il rovescio della provocazione georgiana alle frontiere della Russia, in seguito alla dura e vittoriosa reazione armata del Cremlino.
E' in particolare a partire da quel momento, che gli approcci USA all'allargamento della NATO hanno dovuto ovviamente tener conto (come, afferma Burns nella sua intervista) del fatto che evidentemente non tutti i partner europei della NATO (in particolare, Germania, Francia e la stessa Italia, che hanno svolto un ruolo relativamente autonomo nella ricerca di una composizione della crisi tra Russia e Georgia) appaiono disponibili ad acuire gli elementi di tensione con Mosca nell'attuale momento di profonda crisi economica che attraversa il "vecchio Continente" e in una situazione di acuta dipendenza dalle risorse energetiche del mercato russo.
Ma tutte queste considerazioni ci permettono di affermare con sicurezza che ci troviamo di fronte a una frenata o, addirittura, al definitivo arresto dei piani di allargamento ad Est del sistema di alleanze militari e politiche imperialiste, che ebbero proprio in esperti e potenti sostenitori delle amministrazioni democratiche USA passate e presente (Brzezinski, Soros, Albright) i principali ispiratori e strateghi?
Uno sguardo più attento all'evolversi della situazione nelle aree interessate, dovrebbe indurre a maggiore prudenza molti entusiasti sostenitori di una presunta "vocazione" della nuova amministrazione USA alla composizione dei conflitti tuttora in corso con la Russia e con altri protagonisti della scena internazionale, i quali danno per scontata la sua accettazione incondizionata di un nuovo orizzonte multipolare delle relazioni internazionali, in cui non ci sia posto per le scelte avventurose che hanno caratterizzato la precedente presidenza Bush.
Se ci limitiamo, ad esempio, ad esaminare alcuni sviluppi degli avvenimenti in Ucraina, il grande paese europeo considerato da sempre strategico per gli interessi USA e oggetto, da lunghi anni, di pressioni e condizionamenti esterni, possiamo trarre la conclusione che il tentativo di "forzare i tempi" della sua integrazione nell'orbita occidentale non si è certo definitivamente arrestato, che le speranze di un'accelerazione dei progetti di "colonizzazione" e asservimento militare a suo tempo intrapresi continuano ad essere coltivate, approfittando anche della profonda crisi economica in cui versa l'ex repubblica sovietica, sull'orlo della bancarotta.
Anche il notevole sviluppo del movimento anti-NATO (per iniziativa, in particolare, del Partito Comunista di Ucraina e di altre forze di sinistra), a cui si è assistito in questi ultimi giorni, con grandi manifestazioni in diverse parti del paese (in particolare in Crimea, scenario potenziale di un pericoloso scontro tra le forze navali di Mosca e di Washington), sta lì a dimostrare che la consapevolezza del pericolo di definitivo assoggettamento al "carro americano" è ben presente in larghi strati dell'opinione pubblica ucraina, che non ha certo abbassato la guardia, neppure dopo l'avvento di Obama alla presidenza.
Rivelatrice dell'incertezza di un futuro di "distensione" della politica USA in quest'area, appare, ad esempio, l'intervista al quotidiano francese Le Figaro, in cui, nei giorni scorsi, il principale ispiratore della politica estera "democratica" verso il mondo ex sovietico, Zbigniew Brzezinski, si è espresso per l'apertura di "sedi di dialogo" con Mosca, ma ha anche precisato che l'approccio negoziale deve avvenire nel contesto di una concezione delle relazioni con la Russia e gli stati dell'ex URSS, che non lascia spazio a dubbi interpretativi: "L'inizio del dialogo con la Russia non può avvenire a costo di limitare le aspirazioni di quei paesi che vogliono aderire alla NATO – come l'Ucraina e la Georgia – soprattutto perché l'Ucraina, in quanto membro della NATO, spianerebbe la strada alla democratizzazione della Russia". Ancora una volta, Ucraina, Georgia (e altri stati dell'ex URSS) dirette da elite fedeli ai valori di "missione di civiltà" della potenza USA, integrate militarmente nel blocco imperialista, e garanti degli interessi USA contro una Russia ricondotta a più miti consigli e disposta a trattare (o meglio, a collaborare) alle condizioni imposte. E', tra l'altro, non privo di significato che l'intervista sia stata diffusa contemporaneamente al diffondersi di voci circa la nomina del figlio dello stesso Brzezinski ad ambasciatore a Varsavia, capitale di un paese che da secoli nutre velleità egemoniche sugli stati slavi europei limitrofi alla Russia (Bielorussia e Ucraina) e che, più di tutti, ha operato, negli ultimi anni, a favore di una politica aggressiva nei confronti dell'amministrazione russa, in perfetta sintonia con gli orientamenti della politica estera USA.
A metà febbraio, nel corso di una visita in Georgia, il portavoce del Dipartimento di Stato USA, Robert Wood, pur con toni meno aggressivi di quelli che caratterizzavano l'era Bush, richiesto di un parere circa un possibile cambiamento dell'atteggiamento della nuova amministrazione Obama nei confronti dell'adesione di Georgia e Ucraina all'Alleanza Atlantica, ha risposto che gli Stati Uniti "sono ancora impegnati nel migliorare e rafforzare le relazioni della NATO" con i due paesi. E ha concluso: "a quanto ne so, non c'è stato alcun cambiamento della posizione rispetto alla dichiarazione di Bucarest (dei leader della NATO, in aprile 2008): è evidente che questi due paesi saranno membri della NATO".
Un altro segnale che le manovre tendenti ad integrare l'Ucraina nella NATO non stiano subendo rallentamenti viene dalla recente visita (21 febbraio) del vice ministro degli esteri ucraino Volodymyr Handogyi in Romania per consultazioni in merito alle modalità che facilitino l'accesso all'Alleanza Atlantica e la definizione dell'agenda di impegni relativi alla realizzazione delle decisioni assunte nel vertice di Bucarest in relazione all'adesione di Kiev.
Nel frattempo, prosegue incessante la stretta collaborazione degli USA con il governo di Kiev (peraltro alle prese con una drammatica crisi di credibilità presso l'opinione pubblica del proprio paese) per garantire, come sottolinea il 21 febbraio l'analista politico ucraino Viktor Pirozhenko nel sito russo del "Fondo di Cultura Strategica" (http://www.fondsk.ru/article.php?id=1936), "un'adesione silenziosa, non formale alla NATO dell'Ucraina", che viene considerata "membro de facto dell'alleanza, anche in assenza di una formalizzazione giuridica". A tal scopo, sottolinea Pirozhenko, è previsto un drastico incremento del numero degli osservatori statunitensi e una sostanziosa crescita dell'appoggio finanziario da parte USA a innumerevoli organizzazioni non governative ucraine (quelle, tanto per intendersi, che hanno svolto un ruolo decisivo nella vittoria della "rivoluzione arancione" alla fine del 2004).
In effetti, pur non essendo formalmente membro della NATO, con la presidenza di Juschenko, l'Ucraina assolve praticamente agli stessi obblighi previsti per i membri a pieno titolo dell'alleanza militare. Ad esempio, lo spiegamento ai confini della Russia di parte consistente delle formazioni militari di Kiev, ha rappresentato, come ha dichiarato, nel dicembre 2008, il Capo di Stato Maggiore S. Kirichenko, "il rafforzamento delle frontiere della NATO, fino alla linea di confine ucraino-russa". Un altro passo che sancisce l'adesione di fatto alla NATO si è registrato con l'accordo, siglato dal ministro della difesa Jekanurov, che permette il transito e la dislocazione delle forze e del personale dell'alleanza su tutto il territorio nazionale.
Un altro esempio viene dalla ratifica, il 18 febbraio, da parte del parlamento ucraino dei "protocolli aggiuntivi" al "Memorandum di intesa" siglato dal governo e dalla NATO, che prevede l'installazione di un "Centro di Informazione e Documentazione della NATO" e la dislocazione in tutto il paese di ufficiali di collegamento del blocco militare.
"Se l'Ucraina continuerà ad adempiere fedelmente agli obblighi previsti per tutti i paesi membri della NATO, pur continuando a stare fuori dall'alleanza" – conclude l'analisi di Pirozhenko – "alla fine, i partners europei (riluttanti) degli Stati Uniti si convinceranno che l'Ucraina dovrà essere ammessa, senza osservare le procedure normalmente richieste, ma semplicemente legittimando la situazione esistente".
=== 5 ===
http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=3971666&c=EUR&s=TOP
Defense News
March 3, 2009
NATO Official Keen To Bring Balkans Into Alliance
By JULIAN HALE
BRUSSELS - A NATO official has said he strongly favors bringing Balkans countries into NATO structures.
"We have a political debt to finish what we begun in the 1990s," said Jamie Shea, NATO's director for policy and planning, at a debate, "Could Balkan Newcomers to NATO and the EU Affect the Security of the West?" organized by the Security and Defence Agenda think tank here March 2.
Arguing that the West tends to deal with countries too much on a bilateral basis, Shea said a strategic dialogue with the Balkans as a whole is needed. He suggested creation of a Balkans historical commission to address nationalistic tendencies in some countries.
In addition, he recommended examining the networks of corruption that fuel nationalism, and expressed hope that Albania and Croatia would join NATO at the April summit.
Doris Pack, the chairwoman of the European Parliament's delegation for relations with South East European countries, said questions remain about Croatia joining NATO because of its border dispute with neighboring Slovenia, but she believes this should be dealt with bilaterally.
"If a country fulfills the conditions to join, it can't be blackmailed by a member with other interests using its membership to deal with bilateral political problems," she said.
She argued that an EU country could have used the border dispute to prevent Slovenia from joining the European Union but did not do it. "Germany had problems with the Czech Republic but didn't burden the EU accession process of the Czechs with these bilateral problems," she said.
She said Croatia should enter NATO as it would be "a good signal" for other countries in the region.
The Turkish ambassador to NATO, Tacan Ildem, stressed the importance of NATO's open-door policy with regard to enlargement. Addressing the dispute between the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Greece over the name of the former country, which calls itself Macedonia, he said it is "incumbent on Greece and Macedonia" to reach an agreement. "I fear that if we can't reach an agreement expeditiously, then Macedonia will feel abandoned."
With regard to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Shea argued that linking aid to multi-ethnic cooperation could help the situation.
Shea said that, while additional NATO troops would be helpful in Afghanistan, "we can't withdraw them from Kosovo for now."
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http://www.jungewelt.de/2009/03-06/011.php
06.03.2009 / Schwerpunkt / Seite 3
Neue Vision vom Krieg
Jamie Shea und die Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung: NATO-Bombensprecher als Gastredner auf grüner NATO-Jubelfeier in Berlin
Von Werner Pirker
Sechzig Jahre NATO – für die Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, das von den deutschen Grünen unterhaltene Zentrum für schlichtes Denken, ist das Grund genug, eine internationale Konferenz mit relativ prominenter Besetzung zu veranstalten. Neben Claudia Roth und Jürgen Trittin als Vertreter der Gastgeber werden sich an diesem Freitag und Samstag mehrere im Auftrag des westlichen Machtkartells tätige Forschungsleiter in Berlin-Mitte die Ehre geben: Dimitri Trenin, Direktor des US-gesponserten Carnegie Mos cow Centers zum Beispiel oder der Director for Transatlantic Relations an der Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Dan Hamilton. Überstrahlt wird die Runde von Jamie Shea, inzwischen Direktor für »Policy Planning« im Büro des NATO-Generalsekretärs, berühmt-berüchtigt geworden aber als Sprecher der Allianz während ihres Bombenkrieges 1999 gegen Jugoslawien.
Auch wenn es sich um eine eher ungewollte Symbolik handeln dürfte: Mit Sheas Teilnahme an der Veranstaltung zum 60. Jahrestag der Gründung des Nordatlantikpaktes rückt das zehnjährige Jubiläum des ersten Kriegseinsatzes des westlichen »Verteidigungsbündnisses« – der Überfall auf Jugoslawien am 24. März 1999 – zwangsläufig in den Mittelpunkt der grünen NATO-Jubelfeierlichkeiten. Das Wiedersehen mit Jamie Shea ist ein für die Grünen eher peinliches Déjà-vu-Erlebnis, das sie sich auch noch selbst ins Haus bestellt haben.
Jamie Sheas eingefrorenes Lächeln prägte das Gesicht eines Krieges, in dem Feigheit und Verlogenheit mit ideologischer Anmaßung einhergingen. Es war ein vom UN-Sicherheitsrat nicht mandatierter und damit illegaler Krieg. Weil fast ausschließlich und bewußt gegen die Zivilbevölkerung gerichtet, erfüllte er generell den Tatbestands eines Kriegsverbrechens, wobei der Einsatz international geächteter Waffen erschwerend hinzukam. Das Kriegsziel bestand in der Unterwerfung eines seine Souveränität gegen das imperialistische Globalisierungsregime verteidigenden Landes. Als Kriegsgrund wurde ein Nationalitätenkonflikt vorgeschoben, von dem es auf der Welt mehr gibt als Nationalitäten. Ungeachtet der Tatsache, daß in Jugoslawien Nationalitätenfragen stets auf höchstem Niveau der nationalen Gleichberechtigung verhandelt wurden, wovon auch ein im Februar 1999 vorgelegter Plan zur Selbstverwaltung des Kosovo zeugte, wurde Belgrad brutaler ethnischer Säuberungen und einer systematischen Vertreibungspolitik bezichtigt.
Der NATO-Krieg bildete die Fortsetzung der Blockadepolitik des Westens gegenüber Jugoslawien. Jamie Shea war die Aufgabe übertragen, die von NATO-Bomben verursachte Vertreibung der Kosovo-Albaner – die Fluchtbewegung war wegen der Bombardements um ein 30faches angestiegen – den Serben anzulasten. Wo das nicht glaubhaft zu vermitteln war, führte Shea grinsend den Begriff der Kollateralschäden ein. Damit waren getötete Zivilisten gemeint.
Je ruhmloser sich die Auftritte des promovierten Historikers an der Kriegspropagandafront gestalteten, desto mehr fühlten sich Berlins rot-grüne Politiker zu Heldentaten berufen. Joseph Fischers Erfahrungen aus dem Frankfurter Häuserkampf – legal, illegal, scheißegal – fanden ihre völkerrechtsnihilistische Entsprechung in den Schluchten des Balkans. Die Pflicht zur Verhinderung eines Völkermordes rangiere vor dem Völkerrecht, machte Deutschlands grüner Außenminister der Welt klar. Mit »Nie wieder Auschwitz« gab er gleich auch noch den vermeintlich antifaschistischen Ton der mörderischen Bombenkampagne an. Nicht »Nie wieder Krieg«, sondern »Krieg!«.
Die pazifistische Grundströmung bei den Grünen reagierte darauf leicht irritiert. Doch abstrakte Postulate wie die absolute Gewaltfreiheit lassen sich nun einmal schwer durchhalten. Es ist freilich längst nicht mehr das Recht auf gewaltsamen Widerstand, welches grünes Gewissen bewegt. Die Grünen haben mit dem von oben ausgeübten Gewaltmonopol längst ihren Frieden geschlossen. Das soll auch ihre Konferenz anläßlich des NATO-Jubiläums zum Ausdruck bringen. Das imperialistische Kriegsbündnis als grüne Projektionsfläche für »globale sicherheitspolitische Herausforderungen«. Und so suchen heute abend Jamie Shea und Jürgen Trittin im »strategischen Dialog« »eine neue Vision für die NATO«.