US President George W. Bush ushered seven eastern European allies into NATO on Monday as "full and equal partners," and appealed to the alliance for unity in Iraq and the war on terror after the Madrid bombings.
The entry of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia increased the number of NATO members to 26, but the expansion could slow deployments and has angered Russia by shifting the 55-year-old trans-Atlantic alliance to its borders.
"Today our alliance faces a new enemy, which has brought death to innocent people from New York to Madrid. Terrorists hate everything this alliance stands for. They despise our freedom, they fear our unity, they seek to divide us. They will fail. We will not be divided," Bush said.
PHOTO: AP
Bush, criticized for paying scant attention to alliance-building, said the seven new NATO entrants were already "allies in action" because they aided the US in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"They understand our cause in Afghanistan and Iraq because tyranny for them is still a fresh memory," Bush told the nations' prime ministers at a South Lawn ceremony after they formally handed over their accession documents.
"Today they stand with us as full and equal partners in this great alliance."
In an immediate reflection of the shift eastward of an alliance forged to fight the Cold War, NATO fighter jets headed to the Baltics under a plan to begin regular patrols, Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were republics in the former Soviet Union, NATO's Cold War foe, until the Soviet breakup in 1991.
Russia protested the patrols and a parliamentary deputy said Moscow may respond with "corresponding measures."
Despite fears the enlargement could hamper timely deployments because of NATO's need for consensus on military action, Bush said he also supported the ambitions of Albania, Croatia and Macedonia to one day join the alliance. "The door to NATO will remain open," he added.
Bush's appeal for unity follows the deadly Madrid train bombings on March 11. Spain's new leader has pledged to pull his country's 1,300 troops out of Iraq unless the UN is given much greater control there by the end of June.
The new members exulted in joining an organization which ensures military protection to the 26 nations.
"Today, it is a really fantastic day for Slovakia.... I consider this a very big success," Foreign Minister Eduard Kukan told reporters.
Forty percent of NATO will now be former communist states, and Washington has welcomed them as a counterweight to the "old Europe" of France and Germany, who opposed the Iraq war.
A Russian parliamentary deputy dismissed the Washington ceremony as a "show."
Konstantin Kosachev, representative of a Russian parliamentary committee on international affairs, said a NATO plan to patrol Baltic airspace was an "unfriendly" move. Estonia and Latvia border Russia, while Lithuania has a frontier with Moscow's Kaliningrad enclave.
"It can not be ruled out that Russia ought to look at the possibility of taking corresponding measures," he said.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said, "The main thing that could improve the state of European security is a fundamental change in the very nature of NATO ... including a joint fight against new and real threats and challenges."
Monday's expansion has brought NATO nearer to the Balkans, the south Caucasus, the Middle East and Central Asia, all potential breeding grounds for the West's post-Sept. 11 enemies: terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
But the expansion could hinder NATO's ability to respond quickly to such threats because of its consensus decision-making.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS