1. On January 13-14 1996, in Prague, the Nino Pasti International Foundation organized an international conference for peace and against the enlargement of NATO.
The meeting, which hosted representations from 32 organizations in 21 countries and three continents adopted the following appeal:
2. Current efforts to expand NATO eastward and southward have nothing to do with strengthening the security of any country in Eastern Europe or the Mediterranean. Their sole purpose is to protect what the major Western Powers, notably the United States and Germany, conceive to be their vital interests abroad. They are part of a new and aggressive imperialist threat in Eastern Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Middle East.
3. The enlargement of NATO will lead to the introduction of Western military and covert forces on the territory of new members. It is also likely to lead to the introduction of nuclear weapons on their territories. Such actions redivide and destabilize Europe. They will undermine world peace and the vital interests of all nations.
4. NATO has never been a defender of human rights. It has, in its first major military actions, taken sides in the Yugoslav civil wars. Its actions against the Croatian Serbs and the Bosnian Serbs demonstrate what NATO is capable of. There are clear signs that NATO is considering interventions elsewhere in Europe already, notably in the Transcaucasus. Even western analysts are saying that the purpose of such intervention is to begin another and tighter encirclement of the countries of the former Soviet Union.
5. It should be made clear that the expansion of NATO is not fundamentally aimed at ensuring the security of the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. Rather it is aimed at stabilizing the market system in Eastern Europe. This means ensuring the permanence of economic disintegration and decline there. It means locking the peoples of Eastern Europe into a state of underdevelopment.
6. We call upon the peoples of Eastern Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Mediterranean to join in reviving, expanding and reconstructing a world peace movement. The signers of the 1975 Helsinki Agreements undertook to disband NATO once the Warsaw Pact was disbanded. The enlargement of NATO must be stopped now, and NATO itself, which no longer has any real reason for existence, must be disbanded if peace in Europe is to be secured.