Internaional Herald Tribune

by Judy Dempsey 

MUNICH: Unwilling to wait until a new U.S president is elected in November, the Czech government intends to complete negotiations with the Bush administration this spring over deploying part of the Pentagon's antiballistic missile system in Central Europe.

"We will be ready to end the negotiations by spring," Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg said in an interview in Munich, where he was attending an annual security conference. "Talks are going well. It seems we could get the support from our Parliament. I am confident the talks can be wrapped up very soon."

The government, which intends to base several radars near villages about 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, from Prague, does not want the missile talks to be dragged out, fearing that whoever wins the U.S. elections would take time to settle in, and could even abandon plans to install elements of an antimissile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Moreover, with public opinion in the Czech Republic already against the project, the government does not want the opposition to increase.

The Czechs' determination to conclude talks as quickly as possible coincides with a shift in the negotiating stance of Poland's new center-right government.

Last month, Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, said that Warsaw was in no rush to conclude talks with the United States on deployment of more than 10 interceptors on Polish territory before all of its conditions were met. Those include a U.S commitment to modernize Poland's air defenses and to maintain the elements of the system in Poland as well as provide security for it. Earlier, Tusk had suggested it would be better to wait until a new administration was installed in Washington.

But after several rounds of meetings in Washington between Poland and the United States over the past few weeks, the pace of the talks between those two countries has picked up. The United State appears ready to meet most of Poland's demands, said Radek Sikorski, Poland's foreign minister.

Not all NATO countries are convinced of the need for a U.S. missile defense system in Central Europe to protect the region against threats, particularly from Iran, let alone for sharing the costs of NATO developing its own system, which analysts said could cost billions of dollars.

Sikorski, however, tried to convince participants at the Security Conference, that missile defense "could be a factor for unity within the alliance and beyond."

After much criticism over the U.S. plans, particularly by Germany, most NATO allies have become reconciled to the project, said the NATO secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. He said in Munich that the U.S and NATO missile-defense systems could complement each other in a way that "the indivisibility of allied security" would not be threatened.

Sikorski and Schwarzenberg said they wanted NATO's own missile defense system to be able to operate alongside the U.S. system so that all of the allies could be protected.

"While the U.S. project goes on, NATO should also set its missile defense programs on track so that interoperability and complementarity of the systems can be achieved," Sikorski said. He added: "We would not like either of them two to become hostage of the other. Similar levels of security for all allies can be guaranteed only if the two are property integrated."

Russia is staunchly opposed to having any part of the U.S. system based in Eastern Europe. President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly asserted that the missile defense system would threaten Russia's security and could lead to a new arms race.

But de Hoop Scheffer said he could not "intellectually understand" how a few interceptors could pose a danger to Russia, whose own defenses dwarf the missile shield.

Still, Sikorski acknowledged that "more needs to be done to reassure Russia that the missile-defense project does not threaten her."

The Polish government has made a big effort to improve relations with Moscow after ties between the two countries reached a low under the previous conservative nationalist Polish government led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski. On Saturday, Tusk and Sikorski held talks in Moscow with Putin and Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister.

"The talks were very interesting indeed," Sikorski said. "Poland wants to be part of the solution, not the problem."

Even though the decision on the basing of the interceptors would be made by Poland and the United States, he said, Poland would reach out to Russia. "It would be willing to consider a mix of monitoring and inspections that would reassure everyone that the proposed facility need be of concern only to the bad guys," Sikorski said.

Sergei Ivanov, the Russian deputy prime minister and former defense minister, who spoke at the security conference, did not respond to Poland's offer.