That NATO Meeting.

On Thursday (14/4/11) and Friday (15/4/11) of last week NATO foreign ministers held a meeting in which the operation against Libya was discussed at great length. However the meeting was not called specifically to discuss Libya. It was actually meant to be a routine meeting to discuss eastern Europe - NATO's traditional area of operations. So I think it's worth looking at what the meeting would have discussed if Libya hadn't forced everything else off the agenda.

The most pressing topic would have been the situation in Belarus. Here the President, Alexander Lukashenko is still refusing to acknowledge let alone investigate claims that he stole last December's election. There has been no let up in the state security crackdown on opposition supporters with more and more of the over 700 arrested being found guilty in questionable trials and being given long prison sentences. What is more worrying though is the reaction to last weeks bombing of a railway station in Minsk. Although five men have confessed to the attack those confessions are believed to have been obtained under torture and are widely considered to be false leaving the finger of suspicion still pointing at Lukashenko and his supporters. This fits into a pattern of behaviour that saw similar bombings in 2005 and 2008.

The NATO foreign ministers should also have discussed the situation in Bosnia & Herzegovina. Having come into being with the support of a NATO bombing campaign during the break up of the former Yugoslavia Bosnia & Herzegovina is currently in the grip of a deep political crisis. The predominately Serb Repubika Srpska region wants to see the entire country break apart so it can be free to join Serbia proper. The Bosniak-Croat Federation which makes up the other part of the country and is home to a mix of Bosniaks, Bosniak-Muslims and Croats is not doing any better. In October 2010 the mainly Bosniak Social Democrats won a disputed election but have been unable to form a government because the Croat parties refuse to recognise the election result. With no end to the stalemate in sight Bosnia & Herzegovina have been suspended by the European Football Association (UEFA) and seasoned Balkans watchers are warning that the international community may have to intervene again in the country to avoid it breaking apart and a possible repeat of the ethnic violence of the 1990's.

Tensions in the area are not being helped by the fact that on Friday (15/4/11) the International Criminal Court (ICC) convicted two senior Croat generals, Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Yugoslav civil war. The convictions relate to a NATO sanctioned operation to drive Serb forces out of Krajina. Although Operation Storm as it was known was carried out with NATO air support it saw Croat forces under the command of Gotovina and Markac kill at least 150 civilians as they purposefully shelled residential areas in order to ethnically cleanse over 200,000 Serb civilians from the region.

In Serbia itself opposition political parties are trying to bring down the government in order to force an early election. Tension is expected to rise further when 9 top commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) go on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during and after the 1999 Kosovo war. The charge is that while NATO was bombing Serbia to protect the Kosovars the KLA were routinely killing both military and civilian Serb prisoners. Then after NATO helped Kosovo break away from Serbia the KLA decided to start making money by kidnapping and murdering civilians of all ethnicity's in order to harvest their organs and sell them on the black market in incidents that gave rise to the infamous Israeli blood libel. So I guess the guys NATO were backing in that fight weren't exactly the good guys either.