NATO Chief Upbeat on Membership Plan

NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner declared Friday that he believes Russia and other Eastern European nations will accept a plan that would eventually admit the former Communist states as members.

Such acceptance would guarantee a success for next week’s summit meeting of the 16-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization--and for President Clinton’s first European appearance as leader of the Western alliance.

The NATO summit meeting in Brussels next Monday and Tuesday will result in approval of the controversial “Partnership for Peace” program, Woerner said, which offers to East European nations, including Russia, closer military ties with the West and the prospect of eventual NATO membership.

Though Clinton will travel to Eastern Europe after the summit to reassure various leaders, including those in Moscow and Ukraine, Woerner predicted that the summit results will satisfy most of them.

Other European officials have suggested that Clinton must demonstrate leadership qualities at Brussels and sell the new plan to East European leaders if NATO is to have a serious future as an alliance.

In Warsaw on Friday, American envoys and Polish leaders met to try to win support for the partnership.

As an incentive for Poland to accept limited NATO membership, one of the U.S. delegates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. John Shalikashvili, said the alliance is willing to hold joint exercises with Polish forces in Poland, the New York Times and The Washington Post reported in today’s editions.

Partnership for Peace is the centerpiece of the NATO summit--considered by many the most important in its 45-year history because of the complexity of creating a new role for the organization by offering East Europeans a security blanket without offending Moscow.

The East Europeans insist that they need NATO’s security guarantees to pursue democratic, free-market policies unhindered by Russian threats.

But Russia objects to an extension of NATO’s protective borders alongside the former Soviet Union, creating what Moscow says is a new line dividing East and West.

Woerner, a former German defense minister, said he believes that opening the door to future NATO membership for East European nations--including Russia and former Soviet countries such as Ukraine--could resolve the current alliance argument as to NATO’s new role in the wake of its success during 40 years of the Cold War.

But he admitted that some East European leaders “might not be fully satisfied”--or might even be disappointed by--the NATO offer.

The Partnership for Peace plan does not set a definite timetable or specific set of guidelines for full NATO membership.

Woerner, in a telephone interview with American correspondents in London, Bonn and Washington simultaneously, was asked whether Bosnia-Herzegovina would belatedly be included on the summit agenda. He said the French had asked to discuss the problems of the U.N. peacekeeping and humanitarian force there.

Further, he said U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali held a private conference with the U.N. commander in the former Yugoslavia, French General Jean Cot, who complained that the military force is ill equipped to act effectively.

Woerner said he favored a stronger Western reaction to the bloody events in former Yugoslavia but that NATO had not been called upon by the United Nations to provide one. Nevertheless, the secretary general said NATO is still prepared to launch air strikes against warring factions in Bosnia--if requested to do so by the U.N. Security Council.