Video background briefing

Hello this is James Appathurai, the NATO Spokesman and this is the fourth in my series of monthly briefings on NATO and its agenda for the upcoming months. This is taking place in a room that is close to my heart and one that may be familiar to some of you. This is the Luns Press Theatre where NATO holds its press conferences when they take place here at NATO Headquarters. Some of you who may have been watching television during 1999 and the Kosovo War may remember seeing one of my predecessors here, Jamie Shay, giving his press briefings during the 78-day air campaign. Now it's a little bit more quiet and we're happy about that but since then, and prior to then, this room has also held many press conferences for ministerial meetings and the summits that were held here at NATO Headquarters in Brussels and we are now looking forward to... next NATO's next summit which will take place in Istanbul at the end of June and this will be my last briefing to you before then.

Because of that, I'd like to take this opportunity therefore to look forward to the Istanbul Summit. To brief you on the issues that are on our agenda, what the Heads of State of Government plan to be discussing now, there at the Summit in about one month from the time that I'm reporting this and then of course to look forward beyond a little bit the Summit and see where the Alliance will go from there.

The Istanbul Summit will be a key opportunity for NATO to demonstrate that it is increasingly defending our common security by projecting stability through our operations, through our cooperative relations and through our transforming military capability. To build security where it's needed today in the 21st century and with that the Alliance is going out to address modern security challenges.

Of course, as we've said from the moment this new Secretary General took office, Afghanistan is NATO's number one priority. The Secretary General is confident that he will be able to stand up in Istanbul next to the 26 NATO Heads of States and Government and announce that the Alliance will meet its commitment to Afghanistan. That it will take over provincial reconstruction teams outside of Kabul, the capital, and that it will be able to meet its commitment to assist in the electoral process, to help the central government in Afghanistan to take an important indeed historic step forward to help establish central control over the country and help ensure that Afghanistan is at peace, is as stable... is stable and is contributing to regional security and to international security rather than being a threat to it and the Secretary General is very confident that he will be able to make that commitment; that NATO nations will meet their commitments to the Afghanistan government.

But of course Afghanistan is not the last such operation that NATO will take on. Afghanistan demonstrates the new kind of operation that NATO will have to tackle, often far away from home, very demanding, very draining on the resources of NATO countries and different from the kinds of operations for which we have prepared in the past.

That is why the Secretary General intends to put on the table, in front of Heads of State and Government, some ideas to improve the predictability of the availability of NATO forces. He wants to be able to ensure, as do all NATO allies, that when NATO makes a political commitment, the military capabilities necessary for those commitments to be met are available and are available when we need them. So he will put new ideas on the table in relation to generating forces, in relation to having longer term and more coherent force planning, in terms of the financing and making sure that we have the money to pay for the assets when we need them and where we need them. And those ideas will certainly be debated amongst Heads of State and Government in Istanbul.

Staying with operations, Heads of State and Government will also certainly want to discuss the Balkans. Areas where NATO has two major operations, one in Bosnia and Herzegovina and one in Kosovo. NATO Heads of State and Government could come to a decision in Istanbul to announce the successful end of the SFOR operation in Bosnia by the end of 2004. In other words to conclude that, after quite a few years--almost a decade--NATO's operations there have been successful and that peace and security has reached a self-sustaining level or a level of self-sustainment that makes NATO's presence, in such large numbers through SFOR, no longer necessary.

They may also wish to draw conclusions for a continuing NATO presence beyond the end of 2004 in a smaller form to carry on some key military tasks such as continuing to assist defence reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina and perhaps continuing to assist in the apprehension of those indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia that's based in the The Hague.

NATO nations may also wish to discuss what assistance NATO could provide to a follow-on European Union force under the Berlin Plus arrangements. This would be one area which they will certainly tackle.

Another will be a discussion of Kosovo. Clearly the political process in Kosovo must move, it must move forward and it must move forward more quickly than it has done. Violence a few weeks, a few months ago now in March, demonstrated that we have not reached enough progress. NATO is now associated more fully, not only with the security side of what happens in Kosovo, but also with the political process in particular with the Contact Group Plus as it is now called. NATO nations will debate together how they can continue to assist to ensure that Kosovo meets the standards that are set by the international community and by the United Nations before we move to discussions of status.

But of course NATO's operations--and those include of course Operation Active Endeavour, the naval operation in the Mediterranean--are not the only way in which NATO is projecting stability. It is a very important part but equally important are NATO's partnerships. NATO's principle partnerships of course include--with our partners in the Partnership for Peace and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council--20 countries who will also be represented in Istanbul at the Head of State and Government level and all of these 46 countries--NATO nations and partners--will sit down together in Istanbul to discuss how to strengthen our partnerships which are already delivering so much to NATO's operations and to our common security. They may well decide to focus more directly on key areas of Europe and beyond including in particular the Caucasus in Central Asia to improve regional cooperation, to address security challenges which these regions face in particular including terrorism, including proliferation, including the kind of instability where NATO could provide assistance and where regional cooperation is absolutely essential.

We look forward to a meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council at this... the level of Heads of State and Government, where NATO nations will certainly press for further democratic reform, for further military reform in Ukraine while also stressing the importance of Ukraine to Euro-Atlantic security and of the importance to NATO nations of this relationship between NATO and Ukraine and stress their commitment to continuing to assist Ukraine to meet its targets as it has set out in its annual target plan and elsewhere to meet Euro-Atlantic standards, Euro-Atlantic democratic values.
We can also anticipate a discussion between NATO nations and Russia in the context of the NATO-Russia Council; to discuss the very important agenda of activities that NATO nations and Russia have worked out together in the NRC and to continue to move that relationship forward.

These are areas where NATO's partnerships are long-standing and well developed.
Another long-standing set of partnerships is that that NATO has with the Mediterranean Dialogue countries--seven countries on the other side of Mediterranean. We can anticipate that NATO Heads of State and Government will move to deepen the Mediterranean Dialogue, to move it from a dialogue more towards partnership. To have more practical areas of cooperation with our Mediterranean Dialogue partners in such areas as countering terrorism, for example perhaps having Mediterranean Dialogue countries participate in Operation Active Endeavour in the Mediterranean to improve interoperability, to improve joint training and perhaps even to enhance the participation of Mediterranean Dialogue countries in NATO-led operations.

But in Istanbul we can also anticipate that NATO governments will reach farther. They may well set a platform to open a dialogue with countries of the wider Middle East region.

For the first time to open a dialogue with countries that wish to have dialogue with NATO on subjects where all parties feel that there is a fruitful way forward, that there are issues that we need to discuss and perhaps even begin to lay the groundwork for partnership. Areas of cooperation where all parties feel a sense of ownership, a sense of participation and where mutual cooperation could benefit all parties. This is very much seen as a two-way street, as something in which joint ownership by all parties is absolutely essential and this "Istanbul Cooperation Initiative" should be launched next month at the Summit.

NATO's relationships with other international organisations will also, of course, be stressed. In particular with the European Union where NATO will have a very fundamental relationship... already has a very strategic partnership, but will have a fundamental relationship in the Balkans under Berlin Plus assisting the European Union in its operation in Bosnia if the NATO operation SFOR is brought to a successful conclusion by the end of 2004 and a new EU mission is deployed.

Of course the OSCE is a very important partner as well and Heads of State and Government will certainly recognize that in Istanbul.

All of these various initiatives, both in terms of operations and in terms of enhancing our operational capability and our partnerships will be important but NATO's transformation of course extends to its military capabilities more broadly and in Istanbul, we will recognize some of these transformations.

Transformations that are now coming online, coming on stream and beginning to deliver results. The NATO Response Force will hold a Change of Command ceremony in Istanbul. We will also have a demonstration, a display by Allied Command Transformation. Allied Command Transformation which is helping to drive the transformation process throughout the Alliance and will be represented there in Istanbul. We will also have a demonstration of our New High Readiness Forces, NATO has now many more High Readiness Headquarters than it has had in the past and this is a demonstration of the speed with which we may need to react in future. The NRF of course is one such capability but we have now more and more coming on stream.

We will have a Port visit, a ship visit of NATO's Standing Naval Forces. These are the Standing Naval Forces which are conducting operations to help deter terrorism in the Mediterranean and they will be there simply to demonstrate some of the new roles that the Alliance has taken on continues to take on to defend our common security.
We will also unveil a package of measures to enhance NATO nations' abilities to counter terrorism. Terrorism clearly is a threat that is affecting us all, all of our countries and the threat is not diminishing. NATO as one of the world's pre-eminent security organisations must and is playing its role and in Istanbul we will unveil a package of eight terrorism measures to help enhance our capability to do that.

Finally of course the Istanbul Summit will take place just a few days before a transfer of authority in Iraq. The June 30th deadline is in all headlines and of course sixteen NATO nations are present on the ground on Iraq. NATO is supporting Poland in its leadership of the Multinational Division South and it makes sense that of course NATO Heads of State and Government will have an informal discussion of the Iraq situation and what the Alliance position is on continuing to support the evolution of Iraq as it moves towards, one hopes, a more peaceful and stable future.

This will be a challenging but very important Summit. It will give new impetus to NATO's transformation but it will also demonstrate that the transformation agenda that had been put in place over previous years is already delivering results to help build our security through our new operations, through our new cooperative relations and through the transformational agenda; helping to create the kind of military capabilities that NATO nations will need today, tomorrow and into the future to continue to play a very important role in defending our common security.

I will look forward to our next briefing after the Summit where I can tell you what happened and how we will move forward.

Thank you.