Shea: Kosovo in the future part of NATO

NATO's 75th anniversary has spoken exclusively of Vv1, former spokeswoman for the trans-Atlantic alliance during the war in Kosovo, Jamie Shea. He cites Kosovo as an example where intervention of NATO has been both successful and necessary to save Albanians from ethnic cleansing.

NATO's 75th birthday feels strong in Kosovo as well.

As the role of the north-Atlantic alliance was key to Kosovo's liberation from the Serbian occupant a quarter century ago.

This 78-day military organisation bombed over Serbian military and police targets to prevent ethnic cleansing that Serbs were causing Albanians in Kosovo.

This anniversary of the alliance, former senior official of Tvve1 NATO, Jamie Shea, who considers NATO a unique institution.

“NATO really is a unique institution because for the first time in its creation NATO, the US and Canada offered a permanent security commitment to Europe. Not only by interviewing for short periods during the wars with troop delivery, but also the presence on the European continent to protect European democracy was a massive historic change of”, says former senior official of the U.S. NATO.

Shea, who received worldwide attention during the recent war in Kosovo when serving as spokesperson NATO, says NATO's intervention in Kosovo is a historic success of the alliance.

“One of NATO's most successful periods was the organisation of the air campaign in 1999, which also has the 25th anniversary this year, saving Kosovars from Milosevic's troops. It was massive progress because it indicated that NATO had first learned from Bosnia. You remember the tragedy in Bosnia when we intervened very slowly and too late, only after three years of war when 100,000 people were already killed. There had been terrible massacres in Sreberenice, and we had a complicated agreement with the United Nations. We also had disagreements between our allies. Kosovo was very important because it showed NATO's capacity to learn and be more efficient in the future”, he has said.

The British expert says confident that in the future Kosovo will become a NATO member.

He is still assessing it as an important step that NATO has deployed additional troops in Kosovo following the terrorist attack on Banjska.

Sweden's “Membership recently shows that NATO's door is still open and that NATO is not finished with 32 states, there will be other new members, and I hope Kosovo will soon be part of that future enlargement. I am pleased that last year after the tragic event in Banjska NATO reinforced Kosovo, members of Kosovo forces with those of Turkish forces now in command, with British forces and several other forces. This is important because security today is complicated, you have to do more than you think at first”, he says.

Since its establishment on 4 April 1949, the transatlantic Alliance has grown from 12 founding members to 32 member states.