Close
Back
Download NATO’s broadcast-quality video content free of charge
Log in
No account?
Forgot your password?
NATO MULTIMEDIA ACCOUNT
Access NATO’s broadcast-quality video content free of charge
Create an account
Check your inbox and enter verification code
We have sent a verification code to your email address.
.
Enter the code to verify your account. This code will expire in 30 minutes.
You have successfully created your account
From now on you can download videos from our website
Subscribe to our newsletter
If you would also like to subscribe to the newsletter and receive our latest updates, click on the button below.
Reset password
Enter the email address you registered with and we will send you a code to reset your password.
Reset password
We have sent a verification code to your email address.
Enter the code to verify your account. This code will expire in 30 minutes.
Create a new password
The password must be at least 12 characters long, no spaces, include upper/lowercase letters, numbers and symbols.
Your password has been updated
Click the button to return to the page you were on and log in with your new password.
Good afternoon. Let me say a few words about the progress we made today at the North Atlantic Council ministerial. Then I will be happy to take your questions.
Today's meeting was an important step in achieving the goals set out by President Clinton and the other NATO leaders at the 1994 NATO summit. That summit set the stage for historical decisions on the shape of a New Atlantic Community. Just an hour ago, I spoke with President Clinton about the results of today's ministerial. I told him that the NATO ministers had agreed to his proposal for another summit meeting, this one to be held in Madrid on July 8th and 9th, 1997. The summit will consolidate our effort to build a new NATO in an undivided Europe.
Spain was the last nation admitted to NATO, admitted in 1982. At that time, it was a new democracy; its membership in the Alliance helped to secure its place in a democratic Europe. Today we agreed that at the Madrid summit in July, we will invite some of Europe's newest democracies to begin negotiations to join NATO by 1999, the 50th anniversary of the Alliance. Enlargement will bring these nations fully, finally, and forever into history's most successful military alliance.
Today's meeting strongly reaffirmed NATO's policy that in today's Europe, we have no intention, no reason, and no plans to station nuclear weapons on the territory of future members. The Alliance has also pledged today that NATO will remain open to additional members; those we invite at the summit must not be the last. The enlargement process has already played a tremendous role in encouraging democracy and stability in central and eastern Europe; it will continue to play that role into the next century.
Today, we also approved major new enhancements in the Partnership for Peace that will allow all our partners to enjoy deeper cooperation with the Alliance. We agreed that our partners will be able to participate in the planning and execution of the full range of NATO missions, from peacekeeping to peace enforcement.
NATO has also agreed to work with our partners on our initiative to establish the Atlantic Partnership Council. The Council will be the collective voice of the Partnership for Peace; it will give its members a chance to work with us to shape the Partnership's future.
The Alliance also signaled today that we seek a fundamentally new relationship between the new NATO and a new Russia. We are ready to develop with Russia the substance and details of a truly cooperative relationship that will build upon the splendid cooperation that we have had with Russia in Bosnia. We have given Secretary-General Solana the authority to represent NATO in discussions with Russia to achieve this goal. NATO's door is open; Russia should walk through it to achieve the relationship with NATO that it deserves and that will benefit all of Europe. At the same time, NATO will remain steady in moving forward with the elements of its overall strategy.
NATO also agreed today to move forward to define a distinctive relationship with Ukraine. I believe that Ukraine can be, must be, and will be fully part of the European mainstream.
Of course, another important task that we had today was to give our final approval to NATO's Stabilization Force in Bosnia. We paid tribute to the success of IFOR and we reaffirmed our determination to hold the parties in Bosnia to all their Dayton commitments.
We made it very clear today that the nations of the former Yugoslavia can rejoin Europe only as open, democratic societies. NATO's 16 allies were united today in condemning the Serbian government's decision to overturn the results of the November 17 elections. NATO's message to those countries must not be ignored, and especially must not be ignored by Serbia. There is no place in the community we are building for an unreformed dictatorship that refuses to heed the will of its people.
In all the areas I have discussed, the progress NATO has made in the last four years has been one of the most gratifying results of my tenure as Secretary of State. We have made a great deal of history in the last four years, and with today's developments, we are poised to make much more.
A half century after NATO's creation, seven years after the Cold War ended, we can finish the task of building a secure and democratic Europe, this time with no divisions and no one left out. This goal has been central to President Clinton's vision for a more secure and prosperous world in the next century. As he has said, and as he repeated to me today in our conversation, achieving it will be a central priority of his second term in office, which he will begin by devoting a good deal of time to preparation for and attendance at this year's summit.
Thank you very much.
QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, I wonder if you would discuss a little bit the deliberations on the follow-on force for Bosnia. The Secretary-General has told us that the mandate has not changed, and indeed will be a smaller force. Naturally, we are wondering whether it will be active in apprehending war criminals, assisting refugees, etc.
SECRETARY CHRISTOPHER: The force will have the same mandate, as the Secretary-General said, as the prior force did. The capacity that it has to take on additional tasks will depend, as it did in the past, on whether or not it has time in addition to its central core duties to undertake additional tasks. As you know, the structure of Dayton is that there are certain obligations that the NATO force has. But the force is also authorized to take other actions if it has the capacity to do so. So it will depend upon events in Bosnia if the NATO force is able to move beyond its prescribed tasks. As you all recall, IFOR had the capacity to be tremendously helpful in connection with the elections in Bosnia. I am sure they would not have been effectively held without the assistance of NATO. That was an authorized, but not required, task. So as the next eighteen months unfold the NATO commanders will have the authorization to assist in additional tasks of the kind you have mentioned, but it will depend on events. The one thing that I would stress from this podium today is that we are very concerned about the situation of the war criminals. We are very anxious to see the war crimes tribunal jurisdiction vindicated. We will be putting pressure on the parties, that is the Bosnian parties, to turn over war criminals within their jurisdiction to the war crimes tribunal. And as I have said, we will be seeking new ways, effective ways, to try to assist the tribunal in more effectively carrying out its responsibilities.
QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, the announcement today that NATO will not station nuclear forces in the territory of new members seems rather superfluous since there are no land-based nuclear weapons in Europe. Is this not seen perhaps by Russia as a transparent ruse to try and soften up the impact of expansion, or do you plan something more substantive and meaningful to bring Russia's cooperation to bear?
SECRETARY CHRISTOPHER: I am going to be meeting with Foreign Minister Primakov after I finish here, perhaps I could tell you more about his reaction at that time. But I have had a number of meetings with him on this subject, and let me say that I think that the decision that was taken today, that is the three no's -- no intention, no reason, no plan to station nuclear forces on the territory of new members -- will not by any means be meaningless. I think it will be taken very seriously by Russia as an important statement of the reality and intention of the Alliance.
QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, you said that there would be no place in the community of democratic nations for an unreformed dictatorship. President Tudjman has also canceled elections in Zagreb and has suppressed independent media. Would the condemnation also extend to Croatia?
SECRETARY CHRISTOPHER: Yes, it applies -- any country will not see their goals realized to become full members of the Western community of nations so long as they fail to respect the basic democratic norms. That issue is most focused at the present time in Serbia, where the November 17th elections have been disregarded, but I think it is just a statement of sheer reality that the Western nations will not fully accept into the community of democratic nations in Europe any country that denies basic democratic tenants.
QUESTION: Mr. Christopher, what is your attitude toward the recent idea of your colleague, Mr. Kinkel, to create a Council of 17? He recently proposed to create this council where Russia and NATO countries would be sitting at the round table together and have equal rights to discuss security points and peacekeeping, and so on.
SECRETARY CHRISTOPHER: Let me speak more broadly about that. Of course we always try to take into account Russian attitudes and seek consensus where we can on actions taken in Europe, as we did in Bosnia. But at the same time, NATO has to reserve the right to take actions that it deems to be in the best interest of the Alliance and the best interest of the West. On the particular suggestion of Foreign Minister Kinkel, that is one of the matters that can be discussed as these negotiations go forward, as I hope they will between NATO and Russia. Generally speaking, we hope to take into account the views of Russia, but we reserve the right to act in a way to protect the Alliance, and as I say we will be working through precisely those kind of issues when the negotiations begin in earnest.
QUESTION: Following on from the previous question: are there any areas at all that you would be comfortable for there to be co-decision between Russia and NATO? Some delegations here have talked about certain narrowly defined areas. I wondered if you would be comfortable with any co-decision in any areas at all?
SECRETARY CHRISTOPHER: I would not be comfortable trying to define in advance the negotiating positions. As the Secretary-General said, if these negotiations begin, then the permanent council here at NATO will have to, in conjunction with its members, formulate various negotiating strategies. Certainly at the present time it would be unwise for me to speculate in advance exactly how those negotiations would move forward. I can tell you that they will certainly be conducted in good faith on our side because we are very anxious to develop a satisfactory structure between NATO and Russia. As we move forward, as the Secretary-General said, the summit has several very important tasks: internal adaptation, enlargement, hopefully an agreement of some kind between NATO and Russia, but each of those is an independent goal and we will pursue each of them avidly.
QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, you have mentioned that you have set a time-table now, a deadline of July. How serious will be it be for relations between Russia and the West if the Russians do not seize the opportunity and pursue this dialogue now?
SECRETARY CHRISTOPHER: We do not want to forecast a negative decision. We hope that dialogue will be effective and I think we will be hearing more about that in the next few days. We have provided the opportunity, the choice is now up to Russia. We have offered them good-faith negotiations; we have identified the Secretary-General to be the point person as far as representing NATO in those negotiations. I think we are ready to get underway. Frankly, we wish they had begun earlier, but we are where we are. This is an important step that NATO has taken. We have specified the facts that enlargement would be commenced in July by the identification of one or more of the Partnership for Peace countries for negotiating purposes. That does set an important date ahead and we hope that between now and July it will be possible to work out an arrangement with Russia that gives it the kind of reassurance it desires, but the choice is Russia's.
QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, in the last four years you have participated in the new construction of Europe. I would like you to say your personal view concerning the future of Europe, enlargement and, of course, the consequences for NATO and for Eastern European countries.
SECRETARY CHRISTOPHER: I think this is my ninth NAC meeting here at NATO. We have come a long way during that period toward President Clinton's goal of an integrated and undivided Europe. One of the most important steps, of course, is this step towards enlargement which has been in plan and in train since 1994, but we have taken the decisive step on that front. Another very important step was taken when we found a way to operate in Bosnia with virtually every country in Europe participating. That is the first time in history anything like that has happened; certainly the first time that Russia has operated with NATO. So that was a very big step forward. We now have the prospect of full integration of both Spain and France into the NATO Alliance. There has been remarkable progress by NATO. NATO has a vocation in the sense that it did not have in 1993. There was much concern about NATO in 1993; where was it going, what was its purpose; would it be stagnant or would it come alive, and certainly it has come alive in a very powerful way. I think we see a healthy, vibrant NATO adjusting to the post-Cold War period with new vocations and a very new rationale for existence.
QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, concerning the expansion of NATO: Germany is in favor of its neighbors to become new members, Czech Republic and Poland. Italy favors its neighbor, Slovenia. France is said to be a sponsor of Romania. What is the attitude of the United States? Has it an open disposition toward one of the candidates?
SECRETARY CHRISTOPHER: I do not want to accept the premise of your question. You are telling me a lot of things I do not know about the position of other NATO members. What I will tell you is that the United States is going to make the best decision that it can in conjunction with its fellow NATO members. Looking at all of the important factors that are involved: progress toward democracy; the way countries treat their neighbors, whether they are an engine for stability, whether there is strong civilian control over the military, whether they can contribute to the Alliance, whether they can pull their oar. All of those will be important facts, and there will be group decisions made by NATO. Perhaps because the United States is at some distance I think I can assure that we will not be looking at who our closest neighbor is but what is the best choice for NATO.
Thank you very much.