© 1999 Global Beat Syndicate. All Rights Reserved.

NATO's SWAT Team

 
By By Dan PLESCH and Robert BULLOCK*
April 7, 1999
 
One way to think about the current disaster in the Balkans is to compare it to gang warfare in a very tough section of a city.
 
Think of the Balkans as one of Europe's poorer neighborhoods, long disputed and blighted by rival developers, each favoring their own ethnic groups. Now violent evictions are under way. A powerful landlord wants to clear out one of his buildings in the neighborhood by terrorizing its tenants, one apartment at a time. He kills those who resist.
 
At first, local officials ignore the situation. The local tenants association is marginalized, locked out of talks dealing with similar situations in other neighborhoods. The local youths form vigilante groups. Response from the local police is non-existence. The rest of the city looks on and shakes its head.
 
Eventually, a heavily armed private security force, complete with SWAT team, is called in to deal with the situation. But the security force is afraid of suffering any casualities, so instead of storming the building and driving out the landlord, it stands outside, taking shots at his thugs, and trashes the landlord's office and other properties.
 
This only heightens the landlord's resolve and he begins to drive the tenants out faster and more violently. The SWAT team, without trained negotiators, is reduced to shouting threats about what will happen if the landlord does not surrender.
 
This allegory illustrates NATO's dilemma as it tries to deal with Yugolsav President Slobodan Milosevic's efforts to clear the tenants out of the Kosovo neighborhood in the city of Europe.
 
The alliance would like to be Europe's police force, gaining the legitimacy and public trust that a private security firm simply does not possess. However, NATO is woefully lacking in the breadth of capabilities that would make this imagined role reality.
 
No effective police force is composed entirely of its SWAT team. The job of crime fighting calls for a variety of approaches that produce a safer community where residents can live and prosper without fear of a thuggish few. Police walking the beat, neighborhood-watch patrols, community outreach, summer basketball, efforts to rebuild the economy and other crime-prevention activities form the mosaic that secures our cities. We need a similarly sophisticated approach to European security. But today only the SWAT team is ever considered.
 
Meanwhile mechanisms for lowering tensions and controlling hostilities before they break into armed conflict, such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, are disregarded by a jealous NATO that sees itself as the only viable peace keeper in a dangerous neighborhood.
 
The OSCE, a kind of community policing organization for Europe, has an annual budget of only $40 million -- less then one tenth of one percent of NATO's military spending. Because it can call on nothing more than ad hoc, non-specialized observers during times of crisis, the conflict prevention functions that might have prevented the nightmare in Kosovo never had a chance.
 
At NATO's 50th anniversary summit in Washington later this month, it is imperative that the alliance address the weaknesses in its relationship with the OSCE and commit to truly supporting and enhancing its capabilities. Without a clear focus on conflict prevention and early crisis management, the NATO alliance will do little more than chase the Balkan crisis from province to province, producing further tragic results.
 
Ultimately, preservation of the peace in Kosovo will not be the responsibility of the NATO SWAT team. Only the "town council" possesses the legitimacy and ability to take possession of the troubled apartment complex and best serve the interests of the residents.
 
And only the United Nations can perform this role, by making the province into a U.N. protectorate. NATO must show the imagination and willpower that will enable such an option to succeed. Otherwise the neighborhood will never attain the security it so desperately needs.
 
*Dan Plesch is the director, and Robert Bullock is a research associate for the British American Security Information Council, an international research organization based in London and Washington.

Click here for more analyses of NATO Expansion from the Global Beat

© 1999 Global Beat Syndicate. All Rights Reserved. The Global Beat Syndicate, a service of New York University's Center for War, Peace, and the News Media, provides editors with commentary and perspective articles on critical global issues from contributors around the world. For more information, check out http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/syndicate/.

Home | About | Archives | Advisors | Staff