By Jürgen Wagner
Nukewatch Spring Quarterly 2019
NOTE: This report is excerpted from an article in 360⁰-NATO: Mobilization on All Fronts, edited by Sabine Lösing, Member of the European Parliament, April 2017.
[I]n March 1999, without a UN Security Council mandate and thus in clear violation of international law, NATO began an offensive air war against the independent state of Yugoslavia. The Alliance had emphasized its readiness to intervene “out of area,” by acting independently of the UN Security Council and therefore avoiding the veto power of Russia and China. …On April 24, 1999, just one month after the first air strikes on Yugoslavia, NATO adopted a new strategy that interpreted similar interventions as its core task… [and] included the telling statement: “NATO will seek, in cooperation with other organisations, to prevent conflict, or, should a crisis arise, to contribute to its effective management, consistent with international law, including through the possibility of conducting non-Article 5 crisis response operations… In this context, NATO recalls its subsequent decisions with respect to crisis response operations in the Balkans.” [NATO Strategic Concept, April 24, 1999, Item 31] …
The reference “consistent with international law,” while the line of action in the Balkans was addressed as being a model for future operations, was quite disturbing. The entire statement, in fact, runs contrary to the NATO [Charter] itself, as there is no provision in the treaty for military interventions outside the territory of the Alliance. [emphasis added] The member states make a mockery of their own treaty, which had remained unmodified since 1949, by inventing so-called “non-Article 5 operations.” …
Article 5 of the NATO [Charter] does not include an obligation for military assistance by the member states; the NATO states are held to exhibit solidarity in case of an attack against another NATO member state. [emphasis added] Individual states are allowed to determine their own course of action in following this provision. Nevertheless, a case for extra-territorial operations was made following the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. The invasion of Afghanistan by NATO began less than a month later. …
Offers by the Taliban, Afghanistan’s de facto ruling party, to extradite Osama bin Laden were ignored. In August 2003, NATO took over the governance of Afghanistan with its International Security Assistance Force. With… more than 130,000 troops, Afghanistan became the central setting for NATO to prove that it was capable of permanently seizing control of a conflict area. …
[T]he NATO summit in Warsaw in July 2016 … gave the go-ahead for NATO’s AWACS warplanes equipped with radar and communication technology to control the airspace above Syria (and Iraq) and, thus, to join the fight against the so-called Islamic State group. …A study in March 2006 funded by the German Marshall Fund [NATO in a World of Disorder] … puts special emphasis on the revitalization of the role of nuclear weapons. …
On April 4, 2019, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will celebrate its 70th anniversary in Washington, D.C. In view of NATO’s post-Cold War crime spree in Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, peace activists are organizing
“Unwelcome” events between March 30 and April 4. For info on scheduled events in D.C., see:
<worldbeyondwar.org/notonato/>
<Email: contact@No2NATO2019.org>
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