BRUSSELS, April 2 (Hina) - The door to NATO remains open to all countries which share the values of the alliance, NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said at a ceremony welcoming seven new members at the alliance's
headquarters in Brussels on Friday.
BRUSSELS, April 2 (Hina) - The door to NATO remains open to all
countries which share the values of the alliance, NATO
Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said at a ceremony welcoming
seven new members at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels on
Friday.#L#
My message to those countries (aspiring to become NATO members): it is
worthwhile to take the path of reform. NATO's door is open, Scheffer
said at the joint news conference with the foreign ministers of the
seven new members - Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia,
Slovenia and Slovakia. Present at the ceremony of lifting the
countries' flags in front of NATO's headquarters this morning were the
foreign ministers of all 26 NATO member-states.
Scheffer reiterated that the main challenges of NATO were terrorism
and proliferation of weapons for mass destruction. The struggle
against those threats requires the defence of security far from our
homes, but we shall succeed in the end, he added.
Asked to comment on the latest operation of the NATO-led Stabilisation
Force (SFOR) to find Bosnian Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic, the
NATO Secretary-General said that war criminals could hide for some
time but not for ever.
For the region it is important for them to go where they belong,
namely to The Hague, he added calling on south-eastern European
countries to cooperate with the Hague-based UN war crimes tribunal.
(Hina) ms