BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
The expansion of NATO into Eastern and Central Europe and the extension of the occupation of Bosnia by troops of the Atlantic imperialist alliance topped the agenda of the December 16 meeting of foreign ministers of NATO member states.

At the Brussels gathering, NATO officials signed agreements with the governments of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to bring them into membership of the reactionary military bloc by 1999, pending approval by the parliaments of NATO members.

The foreign ministers also approved plans for extending the mandate of the NATO forces in Bosnia, which currently number 34,000 troops led by 8,000 U.S. soldiers. The formal decision to prolong the occupation of the Yugoslav republic is still ahead, but all the groundwork is being carefully laid, above all by Washington.

"Over the coming months, President [William] Clinton will continue to make the case that our engagement in Bosnia serves U.S. interests," said U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright at the Brussels meeting.

At a press conference the same day in Washington, D.C., Clinton said he would make an announcement on the future of the deployment of U.S. forces in Bosnia before leaving for a visit to the republic on December 21. The White House has invited top congresspeople to accompany Clinton on the trip to build support for his plan to keep U.S. forces in the Balkan country well beyond the June 30, 1998, deadline for withdrawal set last year.

"The real debate inside the Administration now is over what the mandate of a new international force should be - and its size," said an article in the December 16 New York Times. "The Pentagon .. wants to insure that the United States has enough troops in Bosnia to retain an overwhelming deterrent, as it does now with 8,000 troops."

It is also becoming clear that Washington will not set a new date for withdrawal, most likely, but will try to extend the occupation indefinitely until it deems its goals are met. These include reestablishing the domination of capitalist property relations throughout the formerly federated Yugoslav state and increasing, or at least maintaining, U.S. military and economic hegemony in Europe. "Rather than setting a new `exit date,' " noted the December 16 Times article, "the Administration intends to develop a set of benchmarks, officials said. One official said: `This time we want strict but doable sets of criteria that will let us draw down and exit. Exit strategies aren't just dates but must be tied to goals.' "

At his December 16 press conference at the State Department, Clinton stated that one of the goals of his government is implementation of the Dayton accords. Washington rammed these agreements down the throats of the rival regimes in Yugoslavia in late 1995. It did so as the culmination of a three-year-long plan that ensured the fueling of the Yugoslavia war, the failure of all the "peace" agreements its imperialist allies attempted to broker under the aegis of the United Nations, and the most sustained bombing raids in Europe by NATO forces since World War II. The Dayton accords laid the ground for the partition of Bosnia and the 1995 invasion by NATO troops. One of the main goals set in them is the reestablishment of the "free market" in Bosnia and elsewhere in Yugoslavia.

Dayton registered a new level of domination by the U.S. rulers in Europe and the humbling of many of their imperialist allies, who are also competitors. This was especially true of Paris, which has pushed a foreign policy in the Balkans, the Middle East, and elsewhere that contradicts Washington's interests. Albright referred explicitly to this conflict at the Brussels meeting of NATO foreign ministers.

Washington-Paris conflict flares up
"I know there is a sense among some Europeans that the United States is too inclined to act unilaterally and too quick to pull the sanctions trigger," she declared. "There is likewise a sense among some Americans that too often the United States takes the heat for dealing with difficult issues while others take the contracts." She was referring to the recent conflicts between Washington and Paris over policy toward the Iraqi regime and the U.S. embargo on Iran, which French energy companies like Total have openly flaunted by signing business agreements with Tehran.

At the Brussels meeting Albright also called for Paris, Bonn, and other imperialist powers to pay for a bigger share of the costs of the U.S.-led occupation of Bosnia, but got no such commitments from either the French or the German rulers. The U.S. government provides 90 percent of the funds for training and equipping the Bosnian police currently. It got commitments only from the governments of Canada and Norway, for the paltry sums of $100,000 and $400,000 respectively, towards this fund.

This interimperialist conflict flared up most vividly during a December 15 visit to Paris by Louise Arbour, a Canadian who is the chief prosecutor of the so-called war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands. Washington and some of its allies - mostly London and Ottawa - have used the tribunal as a club in their drive to defeat those opposed to the Dayton accords in Yugoslavia. These governments have argued more forcefully for using NATO troops to pursue and arrest alleged "war criminals," which could provoke military confrontations with chauvinist Bosnian Serbs and other forces in Yugoslavia.

Arbour said that the largest number of "war crime" suspects in Bosnia reside in the section of the republic occupied by French troops where these individuals are "perfectly safe," as she put it, because French troops are unwilling to lift a finger. "There are opportunities for significant action in the French sector," Arbour said in an interview with the French daily Le Monde, "but we have had to face total inertia."

No power is better placed to arrest those accused by the tribunal, said an editorial in the December 16 Financial Times of London, "than France, which controls the Pale sector where Radovan Karadzic and other indicted Serb leaders notoriously reside."

The same editorial stated, "French officers have consistently failed to appear as witnesses at the trials in The Hague. They submit only written testimony, usually after long wrangles between Mrs. Arbour's office and the French defence ministry. Ten days ago, Alain Richard, the defence minister, confirmed that this was government policy. He also accused the tribunal of `show justice.'"

In her remarks, Arbour praised the actions by British commandos in Bosnia who last July hunted down and arrested one Serbian man and killed another in Prijedor, Bosnia. The two had been indicted by the imperialist tribunal in The Hague.

Arbour's remarks caused a furious reaction by government officials in Paris. French foreign minister Hubert Védrine called her statements "scandalous" and counterproductive.

French generals who have done time in Bosnia have refused to testify as witnesses at The Hague tribunal, because their government says the distinction between witnesses and the accused is blurred under cross-examination by defense counsel -which Paris describes as an unfamiliar "Anglo-Saxon" custom.

"Apparently it fears that, if not excused from this ordeal, they might be obliged to talk too much about their role as commanders of the hapless UN `protection force' during the Bosnia war," chimed the December 16 Financial Times editorial. "It is, you might say, a case of qui s'excuse, s'accuse."  
 
 
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