Federal Councilor Burkhalter – a compliant NATO-helper?

Politicians from left to right have reservations about his approach

thk. Whereas the USA’s plan to bring Libya down to her knees militarily together with NATO narrowly succeeded, she was hindered by Russia and China from waging a new war of aggression – this time against Syria. As a reaction to this resistance NATO aimed at achieving an involvement of non-NATO-states and international organizations at the summit in Chicago. For this purpose many countries that are not NATO member states trotted up to the Chicago summit and so did Switzerland.

That Federal Councilor Burkhalter submissively followed the call to Chicago, delivered a speech there and pleaded the cause of a closer cooperation between Switzerland and NATO seems to have been a put-up job. In his speech Didier Burkhalter emphasized, how important a closer cooperation with NATO was: “We are convinced that only a strong partnership will allow us to face new threats in the future. For this reason we welcome the establishing and usage of more flexible forms of partnership with NATO”. Likewise his proposal to intensify the cooperation between NATO and OSCE in 2014 when Switzerland’s chairmanship will start originates from the NATO-strategy-box to gain influence on world policy via international organizations and to circumvent the UN if necessary, quite in the sense of Bill Clinton.
The unauthorized approach of Federal Councilor Burkhalter unleashed great apprehension and displeasure among Swiss politicians of different political parties and even more among Swiss citizens.

“PfP was the Fall of Man”

When responding to Hans Fehr’s the parliamentary question concerning his visit to NATO and how this was compatible with neutrality Burkhalter did not refer to this objection even with one sentence; instead he emphasized that it had been an “excellent occasion to present our values and priorities”. Later in his statement before Parliament he explained that “Switzerland had appealed to the states present at Chicago to join our efforts to achieve a closer observation Humanitarian Law”. In his answer he referred to his speech delivered to NATO. It is obtainable only in English and French.

However in this speech there is no sentence of the above mentioned contents, but primarily there is a listing up of the Swiss engagements in the context of NATO-operations that had become possible because of the PfP membership. Exactly the membership in the NATO sub-organisation PfP is considered extremely problematic among politicians from left to right. Switzerland joined PfP as a member in 1996 at the instigation of Federal Councilor Adolf Ogi and Flavio Cotti in a cloak-and-dagger operation – neither subjected to compulsory nor optional referendum, nor to consultation of Parliament. Actually it should leave this organization as soon as possible because a membership is not compliant with neutrality and NATO has degenerated to an intervention force of the ailing empire.

That Burkhalter wants to teach NATO a “lesson” in humanitarian law is more than naive and not oriented towards reality. Either he does not know the statutes of NATO or the whole thing is his attempt to blurr the closer cooperation with NATO that he is aiming at. Both is not worthy of a Member of the Federal Council and of our country. Burkhalter’s positive attitude towards the war-alliance NATO and its wars is more than questionable viewed within this context and cannot be explained by ignorance. Burkhalter’s argument that Switzerland would be safer at the side of NATO in the cyber war is ridiculous, if one knows, who launched this cyber war (compare article page 6).

For this reason one cannot be satisfied with Burkhalter’s response to Parliament. Obviously strong guardrails are here required that the sovereign will have to set the Federal Council, if Parliament doesn’t.    •