2 Why is NATO
in Yugoslavia? (excerpt)Sean Gervasi
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has recently sent a large task force into Yugoslavia, ostensibly to enforce a settlement of the Bosnian war arrived at in Dayton, Ohio, at the end of 1995. This task force is said to consist of some sixty thousand men, equipped with tanks, armor, and artillery. It is backed by formidable air and naval forces. In fact, if one takes account of all the support forces involved, including forces deployed in nearby countries, it is clear that on the order of one hundred and fifty thousand troops are involved. This figure has been confirmed by U.S. defense sources (1).
By any standards, the sending of a large Western military force into Central and Eastern Europe is a remarkable enterprise, even in the fluid situation created by the supposed end of the Cold War. The Balkan task force represents not only the first major NATO military operation, but a major operation staged "out of area," that is, outside the boundaries originally established for NATO military action.
However, the sending of NATO troops into the Balkans is the result of enormous pressure for the general extension of NATO eastwards.
If the Yugoslav enterprise is the first concrete step in the expansion of NATO, others are planned for the near future. Some Western powers want to bring the Visegrad countries (2) into NATO as full members by the end of the century. There was resistance to the pressures for such extension among certain Western countries for some time. However, the recalcitrants have now been bludgeoned into accepting the alleged necessity of extending NATO.
The question is: Why are the Western powers pressing for the expansion of NATO? Why is NATO being renewed and extended when the "Soviet threat" has disappeared? There is clearly much more to it than we have so far been told. The enforcement of a precarious peace in Bosnia is only the immediate reason for sending NATO forces into the Balkans.
notes to excerpt
(1) Defense News, 25 November 1995; see also Gary Wilson, "Anti-War Activists Demand: No More U.S. Troops to the Balkans," Workers World News Service, 7 December 1995.
(2) As of 1996, the Visegrad countries were the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, Hungary, and Poland.
This chapter is based on a paper presented to a conference in Prague, Czech Republic, on 13-14 January 1996.
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The full text of this chapter is available in the book, NATO in the Balkans. Link here for order information.
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