Stakes high as Balkan states await NATO invite

By Douglas Hamilton

BELGRADE, March 28 (Reuters) - The big iron spikes in the vineyards of Stalinist Albania never did spear any invading capitalist paratroopers. And when Yugoslavia's arsenal of Soviet weaponry was ultimately used, it was against its own people.

Most Balkan states are no longer potential military adversaries of NATO. Next week, Croatia, Macedonia and Albania hope to join the Western alliance, further expanding its embrace of eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

All three regard accession as a badge of democratic maturity, of military responsibility, and of acceptance as equals in the partnership of Western powers and post Cold-War additions who were happy to quit the former Warsaw Pact.

Their invitations are expected to be issued by a summit of NATO's 26 leaders in Romania's capital, Bucharest, on April 2-4.

"It shows we've already done a lot to embrace values shared by NATO members," said Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader. He cited "democratic standards, rule of law, respect of human rights and a functioning market economy."

"It would also help our European Union membership bid as most of the countries that joined the EU first entered the NATO alliance," Sanader told Reuters.

In the Balkans, where the scars of war from the breakup of Yugoslavia are still fresh, joining NATO can also be a guarantee of lasting independence.

Support in Croatia for NATO has risen from 40-45 percent to close to 60 percent in the past two months, a fact political analysts attribute to worries over instability in the region.

It is a far cry from the days when Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha sowed the borderlands and valleys with 800,000 concrete pillboxes to make a defence against land forces.

The concrete stakes in state vineyards and orchards farms were spiked in case of an air assault. Much of this remains today, a useless relic of military thinking that modern forces would have no trouble overcoming.



FIRST BLOOD

NATO first bloodied its hands in the Balkans 14 years ago against the Bosnian Serbs and bombed parts of Serbia in 1999 to try to halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo province in NATO's first real war after half a century of perpetual readiness.

Although Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was toppled in in 2000, nationalism is never far below the surface in the Balkans and Kosovo's secession last month revived bitter anti-NATO feelings among Serbs.

It may sound like a fading echo of Cold War rhetoric, but Serbian hardliners now speak of inviting Russian military bases into their country to counter what Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica calls "the world's first NATO state" in Kosovo.

NATO heads a force of 16,000 peacekeepers in Kosovo and the EU has 2,200 in Bosnia. The Balkan peninsula remains a political earthquake zone.

The former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, which has 2 million people, teetered near all-out civil war in 2001 until NATO and EU arm-twisting extinguished a guerrilla war between the Slavic Macedonian majority and the Albanian minority.

"For Macedonia it (joining NATO) will consolidate stability and EU integration," said Macedonian Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki. "The more Balkans in NATO, the less NATO in the Balkans."

The alliance would be freed up to "increase its capacity for other places, such as Afghanistan".

If Macedonia were to stumble seriously on the way to European integration, it could deepen ethnic strains, with Albanians again looking wistfully to independent Kosovo.

That's why the allies vehemently hope to overcome a threat by NATO-member Greece to veto its invitation unless the republic adopts a name that Athens deems less of an affront to Greece's own, myth-shrouded Macedonia, home of Alexander the Great.



FAULT LINES

To Macedonia's north, Albanians in southern Serbia speak of secession if Kosovo is ethnically partitioned, as is now suggested by Serbia.

On Croatia's eastern border, the restive Bosnian Serb Republic edges slowly closer to a vote on secession from Bosnia and union with Serbia, with whom it collaborates closely. If the Kosovo Albanians can do it, Bosnian Serbs ask: "Why not us?"

For major Western powers, the trick is to get these fragile states in under the EU-NATO roof quickly, so that secessionist urges lose their meaning and disputes their bellicose potential.

NATO's leverage has worked in all three candidate states.

Croatia gave up hardline nationalist support for the ethnic Croats in Bosnia's western Herzegovina. Macedonia's feuding communities signed a treaty extending minority rights. Albania kept a promise not to interfere in Kosovo.

"NATO has played the main role in an epochal change in the Balkans, where countries once unfriendly are cooperating openly, seriously and honestly in all fields," said Prime Minister Sali Berisha of Albania, the most pro-NATO state in the Balkans.

But this is only half the story. For years it seemed the westward political current would prevail indefinitely in the Balkans but that was before Russia backed Serbia in its battle to overturn the West's support for Kosovo's independence.

In May, Serbia is to hold its most significant election since the end of the Milosevic era. It is in effect a referendum on whether Serbia should pursue EU membership or turn its back on the West.

Polls put hardline nationalists in the lead, and they rule out ever joining the Western alliance. This could encourage NATO to see admitting all three candidates next week as a necessary step to maintain the Balkans' westward momentum. (Reuters)