NATO Sets July Summit on Expansion

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Tuesday scheduled a summit for July in Madrid to open the Western alliance to at least some of the new democracies that have replaced Communist regimes in Central Europe.

At the same time, the foreign ministers of the alliance promised not to deploy nuclear weapons in any new member countries--a step intended to placate Russia’s opposition to NATO expansion, which Moscow fears will hem in and isolate it in a redivided Europe.

The foreign ministers also ordered Secretary-General Javier Solana to negotiate with Russia on a new, formal structure that would link Moscow with an enlarged alliance.

But the ministers failed to agree on that structure, leaving it to NATO ambassadors who meet regularly in Brussels to hammer out details of the Western negotiating position.

Solana said he hopes to begin talks in the next few weeks and complete them by the beginning of the Madrid summit, so the alliance could approve the relationship when it approves new members. But NATO officials emphasized that the expansion could go ahead whether or not a NATO-Russia agreement was ready.

Although NATO officials have been careful not to name any candidate countries before the July 8-9 summit, the new members are expected to be Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

The foreign ministers also approved plans for a NATO-led follow-on peacekeeping force for Bosnia-Herzegovina. They deplored Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s annulment last month of municipal elections that the opposition apparently won.

None of the decisions came as a surprise, but their sweeping implications set the stage for the transformation of the alliance--a Cold War adversary--into a new force in the next century. U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, at what was his last NATO session, said the decision to take in new members will bring them “fully, finally and forever into history’s most successful alliance.”

NATO’s pledge not to station nuclear weapons in any new member nations met a demand made a year ago by Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov. Christopher conferred with Primakov on Tuesday for almost 1 1/2 hours after the NATO meeting ended. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said the Russian renewed his opposition to NATO expansion, but without commenting directly on the nuclear promise or on the alliance’s call for a NATO-Russia treaty.

“NATO countries have no intention, no plan and no reason to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new members nor any need to change any aspect of NATO’s nuclear posture or nuclear policy--and we do not foresee any future need to do so,” the official communique said.

The meeting pulled back from a more significant initiative on the Balkans that some members clearly had hoped it would launch. The alliance’s statement on Serbia’s disputed elections, for example, consisted of just two sentences at the bottom of a document devoted primarily to Bosnia. It fell short of Christopher’s call for a tough demand for Milosevic to talk with his opposition, uphold the election results, allow free assembly and end media restrictions.

“We strongly deplore the decision of the Serbian government to annul results of the Nov. 17 municipal election and call on the Serbian government to respect the democratic will of the people by reversing that decision,” the statement said. “We are dismayed that the Serbian authorities have ignored the calls of the international community to respect internationally recognized democratic principles.”

On Bosnia, the ministers ratified the decision to replace the current, year-old NATO force with a new, smaller contingent that will remain in the country for 18 months more, until mid-1998. Despite the preference of some ministers, the alliance made no change in the force’s rules of engagement, all but guaranteeing that the troops will not try to find and arrest accused war criminals.

At a news conference, however, Christopher said the alliance “will be seeking new ways and more effective ways to support the [international war crimes] tribunal” in The Hague.