Bush may visit Poland to calm fears over missile base

With unease growing in Poland over possible plans to site an American missile defence system there, US President George Bush said he may visit the country in June to assure Polish leaders and citizens the base is needed.

Poland’s Dziennik daily reported on February 21 that Poland is expected to respond within two weeks to a formal US request for negotiations on the installation of the bases on Polish soil.

Visiting Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek said in Warsaw both his country and Poland would likely respond positively to the US request. US plans reportedly call for the installation of missile shield radar bases in the Czech Republic and anti-ballistic missile silos in Poland.

Poland wanted the speedy conclusion of negotiations on the possible installation of the US anti- missile shield silos, but their outcome was still undetermined, Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski said on February 21.

“We’d like to end them quickly, because it is always good to end such matters quickly,” Kaczynski told reporters in Warsaw. He however also stressed it was equally impossible to predict their outcome at this time.

“We’ve been presented a proposal which is interesting from our point of view, but we obviously have our conditions - conditions which I hope will be accepted and which will be the subject of talks, but which from our point of view are very important,” Kaczynski said.

The Polish prime minister went on to say the security of EU and NATO member Poland could not suffer if the anti-missile shield silos were to be deployed on its territory.

Despite assurances by the US any possible anti-missile installations in Poland would serve exclusively to protect the US from attack by rogue states, Russia has slammed the US proposal as a threat to Russian national security.

Kaczynski insisted any eventual US missile shield bases in Poland would not be aimed against any “normal” state. “They would only safeguard against those states that don’t want to accept the rules of the modern world,” Kaczynski said.

Any suggestion that the shield will "change the order" in Europe is a misunderstanding, he stressed, addressing Russian and Western concerns that the proposed shield could prompt a new Cold War.

“We will try to convince the Russians about the obvious; this in no case is an installation directed against them - the technical parameters themselves prove this,” Kaczynski said.

Commenting on the issue of whether approval for the shield should be put to a public vote, Kaczynski said, “I see no need for a public referendum on this issue - this is not a matter for a referendum.”

Kaczynski said there was “no rush” to adopt any such EU-wide treaty and criticized an existing draft as “not the most fortunate,” but declined to specify an alternative proposal.

Czech Greens agreed at a party congress that its ministers would urge the government to secure “a binding guarantee from the US administration that its planned anti-missile shield be incorporated under the NATO command” in future.

According to Ondrej Liska, a Green MP and co-author of the adopted position, the unilateral US security doctrine goes “against our understanding of common security.”

“The only place where we could debate such defence is NATO,” Liska said, adding, “Only there it can become clear whether something like this is needed.” The congress agreed that their ministers would be urged to press the government to debate the issue at NATO and at the Council of the European Union.

Congress rejected proposals for six Green MPs and four ministers to push for a referendum on the US radar. According to Liska, it would have been populistic “to persist on a referendum that will never happen,” as the senior coalition Civic Democratic Party strongly opposes it.

The foreign minister for the Greens, Karel Schwarzenberg, who supports the US military installation, said he agrees with the position of congress. But he finds incorporating the US missile shield under NATO “hypothetical.”

“It was said in Riga that NATO should build its own anti-missile defence,” Schwarzenberg told Deutsche Presse Agentur (dpa.) “But it will require some time. The European side is not that far. That is the problem.”

Source:neurope.eu