NATO Hopefuls Get Boost from US
by 
Mihaela Rodina

BUCHAREST - The leaders of 10 ex-communist countries received a boost Monday to their hopes of joining NATO, as a US official said Washington wants the "most robust possible" Alliance expansion later this year. US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage urged the countries, eyeing an invitation at a landmark NATO summit in November, to accelerate even further their preparations to join the Alliance.

"The US looks forward to the most robust possible accession to the NATO membership at the Prague summit," said Armitage ahead of the meeting in Bucharest, dubbed "Spring of New Allies".

"To that end I will be encouraging all of our friends here at the summit to exert their maximum efforts to sort of sprint towards the finish line, as we approach November," he added.

The leaders of the nine formal NATO candidates -- Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania --have gathered in Bucharest for two days along with their Croatian counterpart.

The NATO candidates have been meeting regularly over the last year or two, but their gatherings are becoming more frequent and more urgent as the summit in the Czech capital Prague approaches.

The geopolitics of NATO's enlargement have also been changed since September 11. Russia has long opposed NATO's eastwards enlargement, but President Vladimir Putin's new entente with the West against terrorism has tempered Moscow's criticism of the Alliance's expansion.

NATO, which last expanded in 1999 taking in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, will say nothing officially about which countries are likely to get the nod in Prague.

But diplomats say two options are gaining ground: either a five-country package of the three Baltic states plus Slo-Slo (Slovakia and Slovenia), or the same package plus Bulgaria and Romania. "The participants will send out a clear signal about the need for a substantial and balanced enlargement from a geographical point of view, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea," said Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase.

The US support for "the most robust possible" NATO expansion comes amid increasingly feverish speculation about which countries will be invited to join in Prague.

The three Baltic states plus Slovenia appear the best placed, while question marks remain over Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. Most agree that Albania and Macedonia have little hope of being given the green light in Prague. For Slovakia, uncertainty is being fueled mostly by the threat of a return of populist former prime minister Vladimir Meciar in September elections. Meciar was widely blamed for keeping his country out of the last wave of expansion, and his party is currently leading opinion polls for a comeback.

For Bulgaria and Romania the problems are more general: the two countries, which are at the back of the queue to join the European Union, remain economic weaklings struggling to upgrade their armed forces for NATO entry.

Nastase said Romania and Bulgaria are keen to stress the need for NATO's expansion into southeastern Europe, long clouded by wars in the former Yugoslavia.

Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski and the prime ministers of the Czech Republic and Turkey are also among participants in Bucharest.

The US envoy confirmed he will travel Tuesday to Brussels, where he will brief NATO's ruling body the North Atlantic Council (NAC) "to make sure that in Brussels there is no mistake about the position of the US regarding the widest possible NATO membership," he said.