Nato summit

Politics threatens to overshadow Nato Summit

by Marco Chown Oved

Article published on the 2009-04-04 Latest update 2009-04-04 09:24 TU

(L-R) Nato Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Polish President Lech Kaczynski, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Iceland's Minister of Foreign Affairs Ossur Skarphedinsson, and US President Barack Obama walk on the "Two Banks" bridge over the Rhine river in Kehl, 4 April 2009
(Photo: Reuters)

At the lavish working dinner that officially opened the Nato Summit in Baden Baden, Germany, on Friday evening, music and niceties were to set a positive tone. But as soon as the leaders of Nato’s 28 member states sat down, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to veto the consensus candidate for the alliance’s next Secretary General, Danish Prime Ministerh Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

Erdogan said that he would not support the Danish leader because of Denmark’s failure to punish those responsible for publishing anti-Islamic cartoons in a Danish newspaper in 2005.

The current Secretary General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, is to relinquish his post on 31 July, and months of back-room negotiations had all but settled on Rasmussen to replace him.

Turkey’s voice carries a special weight at the meeting since US President Barack Obama is due to visit the country early next week to discuss its role in stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan: two wars taking place in its backyard. 

This sour start could prove to complicate the more controversial issues that are to come up for discussion at the summit, such as troop commitments in Afghanistan and member states’ contributions to military actions abroad.

Leaders closed the opening dinner with a pledge to continue discussions Saturday, after a friendship ceremony on a bridge over the Rhine River and the traditional ‘family portrait’ group photo.

The dinner came on the heels of a busy day of bilateral meetings, including one between Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Strasbourg, just over the border in France.

As the two leaders met, their very popular wives, Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, were mobbed by locals as they went sightseeing.

Obama later addressed a crowd of 4,000 high school students in a local basketball arena. The students, who were carefully selected for their high level of English, waited four hours for Obama to arrive, but were not disappointed.

He spoke of the importance of trans-Atlantic relations, saying that Europe’s anti-Americanism ignored their shared values of “liberty, equality and fraternity.”

Some 24,000 gendarmes are on hand to lock down the Strasbourg city centre. Fears of further violence went largely unfulfilled following Thursday’s violent clashes between police and anti-Nato protesters, though a small group of about 100 black-clad demonstrators who attempted to cross police roadblocks into the centre were met with several volleys of tear gas.

Anti-Nato protesters in a cloud of teargas after being stopped from entering downtown Strasbourg, 4 April 2009
(Photo: Reuters)

Another group of protesters, disguised as clowns, approached police lines carrying water guns and cardboard bazookas. They said they were trying to establish a "joyful pink zone" in the city, which has been divided up into orange and red security zones.

But most protesters were not on the street. They took Friday off to discuss alternatives to Nato at a counter-summit held in the suburbs of Strasbourg. Anti-nuclear activists from as far away as Japan said Nato maintains one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals, and condemn its “first strike” policy.

¨It is an artefact of the cold war. It should have been wound up in 1991¨, said Kate Hudson, chair of the British campaign for nuclear disarmament. ¨Instead, it’s expanded. It’s changed from a supposedly defensive organisation to one with ‘out of area’ activities across the entire Eurasian landmass.¨

Hudson said that Nato has become an ¨aggressive organisation¨ that maintains a large nuclear arsenal on permanent high alert.

Also present at the counter-summit was a delegation of Iranians based in France who warned of the implications of turning the war in Afghanistan into a regional conflict. Spokesperson Bijan Rastegar said that many Iranians would like to see a regime change in their country, but no one wants it to come about with a foreign military invasion as it did in Afghanistan and Iraq.