Sir, - Garret FitzGerald's paean of praise to NATO (The Irish Times, April 28th) contained a number of highly misleading statements. First, NATO actions in Bosnia did not, as Dr FitzGerald claims, bring "peace to the area". The NATO-enforced settlement legitimised and rewarded ethnic cleansing, and has sown the seeds for likely further conflict and partition. The unjust and unsustainable nature of this "peace" is comprehensively documented in, for example, David Chandler's book Bosnia: Faking Democracy After Dayton (Pluto Press, 2000).
To achieve this unsatisfactory outcome, NATO itself wreaked enormous damage, including through the usage of cluster bombs and weapons containing depleted uranium. Robert Fisk has highlighted the fact that 300 residents (out of a total of 5,000) of the Sarajevo suburb of Hadjici have died of cancers and leukaemias since NATO planes bombed it in the summer of 1995. The pattern was repeated by NATO in 1999 during the Kosovo campaign.
A grim sequel to the Kosovo war relates to another of Garret FitzGerald's claims, namely that there is now a common security objective in the Balkans "of preventing Albanian guerillas from destabilising the pluralist Macedonian state". Are these the same Albanian guerillas armed and trained by NATO forces in Kosovo in 1999 and 2000 (as documented by journalists writing in the Guardian and Observer newspapers last month)? There would be humour in this irony were it not so tragic.
As for Dr FitzGerald's argument that NATO is viewed positively by Russians, this is highly debatable. NATO's expansion eastwards is opposed by almost all political parties in Russia, and has the effect of pushing the Russian authorities towards greater reliance on nuclear defences and hardening Russian parliamentary opposition to nuclear weapons reduction treaties.
Finally, Garret FitzGerald states that the new European Rapid Reaction Force will be "linked to but separate from NATO". This is, at best, an understatement. For example, all EU countries (except France) that are also members of NATO send the same representatives to the new EU military committee (which will advise on the usage of the Rapid Reaction Force) as they do the NATO military committee. There is little separation between NATO and the new EU military structures in practice.
The Treaty of Nice has important things to say about these new EU military structures, including as the Minister for Foreign Affairs Brian Cowen has acknowledged (Irish Times, 28th April), the granting of treaty status to the EU's new Political and Security Committee. The Treaty therefore formally confirms, for the first time, the assumption of EU responsibility for military entanglement between the member-states, and for prospective military action to be undertaken by them. It is for this reason that Afri is calling for a No vote in the forthcoming referendum on the Nice Treaty, and for insertion of a protocol in a renegotiated Treaty to ensure Irish non-participation in the dangerous militaristic adventures of the EU and NATO. - Yours, etc.,
Andy Storey, Afri, Grand Canal House, Dublin 6.