Black-clad Czech riot police patrolled the streets of Prague and US warplanes roared overhead last night as Nato leaders prepared for an historic summit dominated by the crisis over Iraq.
The Czech president, Vaclav Havel, was hosting George Bush, Tony Blair and fellow alliance leaders at a lavish black-tie dinner before today’s announcement that seven more ex-communist countries are to join the transatlantic club — completing its transformation in the post cold-war world.
About 90% of the summit’s business is ”pre-cooked,” diplomats admit, but the crucial question is what will be said about the looming war in the Middle East, and whether the new 26-member Nato will play any role in it.
Plans will be agreed to create a tough new ”response force” to fight terrorists and ”rogue states”, to streamline command structures and bridge the yawning US-European gap in capabilities and equipment.
But fears that Nato is being transformed into a loose political alliance serving American interests are being lost in the headlong rush for relevance to the US-led ”war on terrorism.”
The tight security around Prague castle and the congress centre where the leaders are meeting underlines concerns that demonstrations or a terrorist attack could disrupt the proceedings, which end tomorrow.
With Prague barely recovered from the devastating summer floods, central Europe’s ”city of a thousand spires” yesterday looked as if had been hit by a new calamity, man-made this time. Roads around Ruzyne airport, where Soviet transport planes began the invasion of 1968, were eerily deserted, and the normally throbbing area near Wenceslas Square was subdued, the shops boarded up.
Some 14 000 troops and police have been mobilised and schoolchildren and students have been given three days off. Thousands have fled town for the duration, creating an unseasonal mini-boom for travel agents.
The Czech security authorities are hoping that damp weather will head off trouble from thousands of anarchists and anti-war protesters who see an expanding Nato as part of a US bid for world hegemony. Lessons learned in the anti-globalisation riots at an International Monetary Fund meeting two years ago have been applied, with tighter controls on the Austrian border keeping some away.
The police expelled several protest organisers from their headquarters, though an umbrella group called AntiNato vowed to regroup. In the event, by last night there had been nothing more threatening than a few hundred protesters gathering peacefully in the Old Town Square.
President Bush’s speech to the Atlantic Youth Council was relocated from an auditorium at Radio Free Europe — once the headquarters of the Czechoslovak Communist party — to a nearby hotel in response to a potential terrorism threat.
On Tuesday, rail workers found an explosive device as they checked sections of track that appeared to have been sabotaged. Last week four people were arrested on suspicion of planning to cut power lines.
Havel said that his forces had ”done the maximum — but 100% certainty cannot be found in the world today”.
The summit makes history as the first such gathering to be held behind the former iron curtain, though the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary joined Nato in 1999, just in time for the Kosovo war.
Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia will enter in 2004, creating an alliance of 26, weeks before the European Union grows from 15 to 25 members.
Lord Roberston, Nato’s British secretary general, is hoping that the summit will revive the alliance’s fortunes after its offers of military involvement in the Afghan campaign were spurned by Washington. Pentagon hawks are still deeply suspicious of Nato, arguing that the mission should determine the coalition, not the other way round. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001