By DPA,
Prague : Eastern European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization want the alliance to provide them with a security reassurance at a time when the organization seeks ways to reinvent relations with Russia, officials said Tuesday.
Ex-Soviet satellites that joined NATO in the years after Communism fell in Europe in 1989 want the alliance to make a renewed commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty’s Article 5 in its new Strategic Concept, a NATO document that outlines key security goals.
The Article 5 of the organization’s 1949 founding treaty obliges members to defend each other if under attack.
“There is no question that an important concept is a reassurance that Article 5 is essential to the NATO alliance, and at the same time it is also very important to reset our relations with Russia,” said the former US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who heads an expert group involved in drafting the document.
Albright was in Prague Tuesday for a conference pondering how the updated strategic blueprint should address the concerns of NATO’s ex-Communist member states that fear a newly assertive Russia.
“It is critical for us that the level of security is the same for all members,” Czech Foreign Minister Jan Kohout told a joint press conference. “Meaning that Article 5 … is somehow re-confirmed.”
Albright said that the 60-year-old alliance needed to make “a renewal of vow” so “a centrality of the Article 5” is not questioned.
A 12-member expert group chaired by Albright is to make recommendations for the NATO’s secretary general, Andres Fogh Rasmussen, who is due to present the final draft at a NATO summit expected to take place in Lisbon in late 2010.
Seven members of Albright’s expert group attended the Prague seminar, organisers said. The experts are next set to debate the NATO’s strategic update in Oslo Thursday.