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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BillCh who wrote (2931)	4/9/1999 8:44:00 AM
From: nihil	Respond to of 17770

This is one of the most statesmanlike actions in German history.

To: BillCh who wrote (2931)	4/9/1999 9:17:00 AM
From: BillCh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

The future: Ambitious plan aims to use postwar settlement to bring region into West's orbit, reports Martin Walker Friday April 9, 1999 Guardian London Europe and the United States are considering offering Yugoslavia and all other Balkan countries membership of Nato and the European Union as the incentives of a post-war stability pact for the region which seeks `to anchor them firmly in the Euro-Atlantic structures'. The highly ambitious plan for using the Kosovo war as an opportunity for the long-term stabilisation of the Balkan countries, which would include debt relief, was presented yesterday by the German presidency of the EU. `The prospect of EU membership is a key incentive to reform,' the stability pact plan says in a copy obtained by The Guardian. `Alongside accession to the EU, the prospect of Nato membership is one of the most important incentives for reform for the countries of south-eastern Europe. Therefore, it is particularly important that Nato continues its course and keeps the door open to new members in the long term.'' The broad outlines of the plan were floated earlier this week with the US and major European powers. Although British officials gasped at its ambition, there has been no outright rejection in principle and France yesterday gave public backing to the scheme for debt relief. Only the EU's neutrals Sweden, Austria, Finland and Ireland were yesterday still resisting any explicit reference to the central and enduring role of the Nato alliance in stabilising Europe. They objected in particular to a passage which states: `The international community's conflict management in the region must continue to rely on averting bloodshed, with the threat and as a last resort the use of force. The military potential of Nato thus remains indispensable to the credibility of western diplomacy in the region'. The plan seeks to blur the central role of Nato in the process by emphasising the role of the Organisations for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), of which all the Balkan states and also Russia are members. `Via the OSCE, the involvement of other member states such as the USA and Russia in a stabilisation strategy is ensured'. The plan calls for an international conference on the Balkans, which seemed designed to bring in the Russians: President Boris Yeltsin called for such meeting this week. It also calls for a separate `donor and reconstruction conference'' to sort out the costs, priorities and responsibilities of rebuilding and refinancing a region stricken by a decade of war. Council officials noted that this `learns one key lesson' from the failure of Western aid in Russia, insisting on a fixed system of rewards and punishments for Balkan countries which accept or refuse the EU and Nato-imposed rules. The plan demands `clear signals: participation paves the way into the Euro-atlantic structures, non-participation blocks it off'. The plan builds on the European Commission's own aid package of £160 million, which was agreed yesterday by foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg. The money, to come from EU reserves and existing budgets, is expected to require no new funding from member states. Most of it, £100 million, will be used to build and maintain camps and feeding and medical centres for the Kosovo refugees, and the remainder will be used to help the front-line countries of Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro cope with the social and economic shock of the influx. `If foreign, security and development policy are to amount to anything more than one crisis management cycle after another, we need to adopt a broad approach of preventing conflict in the region,' the stability pact plan says. `A negotiated solution for Kosovo, and its implementation, present both an opportunity and a prerequisite'. There are two overwhelming difficulties in the plan, whose decades-long vision of a Europeanised Balkans contrasts with the realities of air strikes and devastation in former Yugoslavia. The first is that the Kosovo Liberation Army is told that an independent Kosovo is ruled out: the principle of the inviolability of borders is to be upheld. The second hurdle is that Yugoslavia itself has to co-operate. The plan says: `It will not be possible to bring lasting peace and stability to south-eastern Europe if Yugoslavia persists in its role as an outsider and cannot be accepted as a negotiating partner by its neighbours or the international community'. The plan also seeks to shift the Balkans towards a European social-capitalist model, and calls specifically for widespread privatisation and strengthening competitive and internationally integrated private sectors in the region.