With Kosovo Strife, Celebrations Are Out

Members of a color guard prepare to welcome arriving diplomats at Andrews Air Force Base. (Robert A. Reeder – The Washington Post) Related Links NATO Summit Set to Begin 50th Anniversary Marked With Muted Fanfare

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 23, 1999; Page A34

As the U.S. Marine Band plays in a ceremonial hall of gilt and stone this morning, a soldier from each of the NATO alliance's 19 countries will carry the country's flag to a carpeted stage. Presidents and prime ministers will take seats on the dais, ready with brief remarks.

"Simplicity and dignity," said Thomas E. Gorman, events and media director of the three-day NATO gathering, which stretches from today until Sunday afternoon.

A thunderous flyby of NATO fighter jets has been scrapped as an overly cinematic touch no longer befitting an alliance at war. So have the colorful military formations on Constitution Avenue and the grand arrivals of the NATO leaders at the banner-draped Old Customs Building.

At an uncertain moment in the alliance's history, with bombs falling on Yugoslavia and ethnic Albanian refugees streaming from burning villages, this is an inconvenient time to crow. Celebration is out. Commemoration is in.

The stagecraft of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 50th anniversary meeting is a persistent challenge, a target that refuses to keep still. Conceived as a party with a purpose, the largest-ever gathering of foreign leaders in Washington will now be more work than play.

For organizers, the shifting context creates a need to style a conference that hits the high notes but doesn't linger on them. Attire at the two White House dinners will be business dress, not black tie. Musical selections will be restrained, not jaunty.

On the original schedule, today's ceremony commemorating the 50 years of NATO was intended as the summit's centerpiece. The White House, which counts the extension of NATO membership last year to three former Soviet bloc countries as a significant foreign policy triumph, once intended to go all out.

Hence the banners, the galas, the jets with their vapor plumage. Mining for themes and symbols, historians researched the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on April 4, 1949, down to the pink hydrangeas and the Marine Band's play list, which included "I've Got Plenty of Nuthin" and "It Ain't Necessarily So," from Porgy and Bess.

Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who signed the treaty for the United States, called the ceremony "dignified and colorful." In his prize-winning memoirs, he said the two Gershwin songs "added a note of unexpected realism" at a time when the Soviet threat was serious and the fledgling Atlantic alliance was unproven.

Although the landscape has changed dramatically, certain parallels exist between Europe 1949 and Europe 1999 – and NATO then and now. Diplomatic negotiations that led to the alliance's creation took place amid a communist takeover of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet blockade of Berlin. Allied airplanes were supplying Berlin even as the foreign ministers of the 12 original NATO countries gathered to sign the treaty.

Doubts about NATO's role and the difficulty of maintaining unity were real and public. In his signing ceremony address, President Harry S. Truman insisted that NATO was a defensive alliance intended to "prevent aggression against our own peoples."

"There are those," Truman said in the first such event broadcast live on national television, "who claim that this treaty is an aggressive act on the part of the nations which ring the North Atlantic. That is absolutely untrue."

Monteagle Stearns, a junior Foreign Service officer in 1949 who became U.S. ambassador to Greece and an expert on the practice of diplomacy, said ceremonies and commemorations "both conceal and transcend."

"They give some sense of gravitas to the occasion – even, very often, occasions that don't deserve it," said Stearns. "So many of these negotiations, even if they result in an agreement between states, result in sharp fractures, fissures and abrasions between individuals."

During the Carter administration, the Camp David peace negotiations between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat were as tense as they were historic. After the early days of the 13-day marathon, said University of Virginia professor William Quandt, Begin and Sadat were no longer speaking to one another. Yet they signed an agreement and publicly smiled.

"The staging masked some realities that were much harsher than one would have concluded from the quite elaborate ceremony and friendly goodwill among the leaders," Quandt said. "What you get is a public representation that may raise expectations too high. People saw Sadat and Begin looking friendly and cooperative, but it turned out to be very difficult to get the next stage of agreement."

At this moment in NATO's history, when the alliance is fighting an aggressive war outside its territory for the first time, the questioning of NATO's actions and intentions is again at a high, both inside and outside the alliance.

Summit leaders, confronting real-time conundrums in Yugoslavia and hoping to rally support at home, aim to project themes of unity, strength and high principle. Also, the sense of sleeves rolled up and work being accomplished.

"How do you pull this off against the backdrop of Kosovo?" asked Charles Kupchan, a Georgetown University professor and former European director at the National Security Council. "There's no way around the fact that on some level it's inappropriate to have this summit while war is going on and the ethnic Albanians are getting killed. The image coming to my mind is not the 1949 signing of the treaty but the meetings among the Allied leaders during World War II – Potsdam, Yalta."

Today's commemoration will be significantly shortened. The 19 presidents and prime ministers, along with NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, will meet for three hours to discuss Kosovo before walking to the Mellon Auditorium and a ceremony expected to last no more than 90 minutes.

Each of the leaders will speak before an audience of about 800 dignitaries in the same room where the NATO leaders will gather for a plenary session on Saturday and a second meeting Sunday, when they will be joined by the leaders of 23 partner countries.

"People feel it's appropriate to take time out to acknowledge NATO's 50th anniversary," Gorman said. "It's an impressive historic gathering, a chance to acknowledge how much they've accomplished in 50 years, show their unity, stand together. It's really not much more complicated than that. Simplicity, dignity, done."