May 14, 2002	Tuesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 1, 1423

BRUSSELS: NATO stands on the brink of a “revolutionary” new relationship with Russia, which will become an active partner with its former cold war enemy in a world transformed by Sept 11, according to the NATO secretary general, George Robertson.

As an era of unprecedented security co-operation between Moscow and the west beckons, Lord Robertson said: “This is not a sentimental journey. It’s based on cold, hard-nosed self-interest on both sides and that is what will make it function.”

Lord Robertson and the alliance’s foreign ministers are meeting in Reykjavik on Tuesday to finalize documents setting up the NATO-Russia Council (NRC), in which Russia will sit as an equal partner with the alliance’s 19 members. The NRC will be formally inaugurated at a special summit in Rome later this month, with George Bush, Vladimir Putin and Tony Blair, who pioneered the idea last autumn.

The new body is being billed as a “quantum leap” beyond the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council, which was launched to great fanfare in Paris five years ago, but which failed to progress because NATO positions were always pre-cooked in the 19-against-one forum.

It was almost finished off by the Kosovo crisis in 1999, when Moscow backed the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, against ethnic Albanian “terrorists” while NATO bombed Belgrade in the first war in its 50-year history. “Even the table plan in Rome will represent a revolution,” said Lord Robertson. “The secretary general of NATO will chair a meeting of 20 nation states with the Russian president sitting between the prime minister of Portugal and the prime minister of Spain.”

If the chemistry turns out to be as good as the maths, the hope is that the NRC will build up confidence and break down taboos while Russia gets a bigger say in a setting of consensual decision-making on issues such as countering terrorism and monitoring weapons of mass destruction.

The “revolutionary” new relationship will also have a big impact on the ground. Russian diplomats - who usually have little contact with alliance staff - will move to work in the NATO compound near the airport here.

The road leading to this historic crossroads has not been free of obstacles. Pentagon hawks were at first deeply suspicious of anything that might weaken NATO.

They have insisted that Russia has no veto on alliance decisions. Russia was also denied a say on the plans to take in up to seven former communist countries - including the three Baltic states - at the Prague summit in November.

Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia are also likely to join, copying the step taken by the former Warsaw pact members Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999.

Yet the new council should help take the sting out of alliance’s enlargement and allow Mr Putin - in a way that his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, found difficult - to show his generals and nationalists in the Duma the benefits of closer engagement with the old foe.

Above all, said Lord Robertson, this is about seizing opportunities created by Moscow’s co-operative response to Sept 11 and the Afghan war, which was the product of Russian concerns about Chechnya and the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism on the country’s southern flank.

HE SAID: “After years of estrangement between Russia and the west there is an identifiable common enemy. There is unprecedented co-operation at the very highest level. The Russians and Americans are exchanging intelligence at unbelievable levels of sensitivity.”

Clearly, all this activity is good for business, although Lord Robertson is far from complacent about how much NATO needs to change and modernise to meet new challenges.

It is also the best answer to the question of whether NATO is still alive, let alone well - a query raised when the loyal invocation of its mutual defence clause was ignored by the US after Sept 11.

“I am too busy to get worried by this accusation,” he replied briskly. “NATO was never likely to be the first port of call, especially when it was the US that had been attacked. But within a week they had a shopping list of things they wanted from the allies.”

NATO’s peace support operations in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia are still serious preoccupations. Similarly, a great emphasis is placed on getting European members to spend more on costly hi-tech kit such as heavy transport planes, precision munitions and communications to narrow the “capabilities gap” with the US. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.