THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, December 5, 1994 TAG: 9412050057
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
LENGTH: Short : 22 lines
At 6 p.m. Sunday, a cannon blast sounded the beginning of the
holiday season at Colonial Williamsburg - and the Grand
Illumination. Fireworks filled the sky above the Governor's Palace
and more than 1,000 candles began to flicker in each window in the
historic district. Above, visitors gather around the steps of the
Courthouse on Duke of GlMIRAL AND AN EDUCATOR OFFER DIFFERENT VISIONS FOR THE ALLIANCE'S
ROLE.
Still mired in Bosnia but resolved they can no longer help, NATO allies are looking beyond the bloody ethnic conflict to the lessons they may learn from it.
Discussion of the right course, now in full swing with President Clinton visiting Europe this week, revolves around a central question: Should NATO, the 16-member military partnership formed to counter the Soviet threat, grow or just go away?
``As an alliance being used by people to abate arguments, it brings enormous utility to both sides of the Atlantic,'' said Vice Adm. Sir Peter Abbott, the No. 2 man with NATO's Atlantic component in Norfolk. ``Bosnia is one of a series of varying difficulties'' during NATO's 45 years - most of which, Abbott said, ``the alliance has overcome.''
Bringing former Soviet bloc nations into this forum would expand the prospects for peaceful settlement of conflict throughout Eastern Europe, said Abbott, an officer in the British navy. NATO moved toward expansion at its meeting in Brussels last week.
But an international studies expert at Old Dominion University said a bigger NATO offers false hopes at a time when civil wars pose a greater threat than wars between nations - the kinds of wars NATO was designed to prevent.
``The need for security in the eastern half of Europe should be filled by something else,'' said Daniel Nelson, director of ODU's graduate program in international studies. ``The kind of threats the region faces now are not invasion, not something that tanks and a carrier battle group out of Norfolk can defend against.''
Nelson sees a role for NATO still, but as a military force subservient in the region to a new group - a collective security arrangement to be created not by NATO or the United Nations but by nations within the region.
As a military alliance, NATO has limited value in settling disputes involving individual members, Nelson said.
``How would expansion of NATO have done anything in the former Yugoslavia? Would NATO have sent in forces, if Croatia were a member nation, to defend it against Serbia? I don't think so.''
Nelson also sees little hope of peace and stability from another powerful alliance, the 53-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. President Clinton was scheduled to attend the alliance's meeting today in Budapest, where it will discuss prevention of new conflicts.
Critics of NATO focus on the relevance of the original North Atlantic Treaty, which declared that an attack on one member constituted an attack on all. But Abbott noted that the organization has revisited that mission in the wake of the Cold War and is updating it.
A threefold plan that has emerged offers great promise for peace, he said: Creating combined joint task forces, in which the militaries of several nations operate together as one; the Partnership for Peace program, opening NATO affiliation to 23 former Soviet bloc nations; and working to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
The Bosnia crisis hit, he said, at a time when NATO still was wrestling with this mission.
Abbott agreed that Bosnia presents a crisis unlike any the alliance has ever faced.
Bosnia marks the first time in 45 years that NATO fired shots in anger. In addition, the standing naval force that's under NATO's command in Norfolk has remained on station without breaks since the Bosnian crisis grew violent.
He said he wondered after the fall of the Soviet Union whether NATO should expand its mission to global peacekeeping, as the United Nations has done. He has discarded that idea - ``We need to remain permanently focused on Europe'' - but pointed to a growing new crisis that may have implications for NATO's future: the geographical separation of Europe into the haves and have-nots.
He drew a line from northern Europe, through the Balkans and the Black Sea into the coastal regions of northern Africa. To the east, he said, lie poverty and political instability, and to the west, ``wealth and a people who benefited from 50 years of peaceful life.''
``History is very clear in its lessons about what happens in this situation,'' he said. ``The imbalance must be leveled, and traditionally, that has happened through war. We must prepare ourselves to massage away this strain.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Sir Peter Abbott, left, and ODU director Daniel Nelson.
by CNB