ShareThisBy DOUG SAUNDERS
Toronto Globe and Mail
Thursday, May 17, 2007
In the thick pine forests just outside this village in western Bohemia, U.S. military officials are busy clearing trees in the patch of land that has become the flashpoint in tensions between Russia and the United States.
Wednesday, as the team of 38 soldiers and technicians prepared Brdy military base to be turned into a key part of a $3.5 billion anti-missile installation, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in Moscow, unsuccessfully trying to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin that the high-tech defense was not a threat to Moscow.
The base, which will feature a high-powered radar installation in the Czech Republic and 10 interceptor missile launchers in Poland, is described as a defense against Iranian nuclear-missile attacks on the United States. But Putin sees it as a Cold War-style menace, and his generals have threatened to point their nuclear weapons at the Czech Republic if the base is installed.
In the villages around this 80-year-old military base, it all has an alarmingly familiar ring.
"The Americans are telling us that they have to come in alone, and the Russians have warned that their missiles will be pointed at the Czech Republic if this is built; I don't want to be in that position again," said Jan Neoral, a 65-year-old retired electrician in the village of Trokavec who likes to gather wild mushrooms in the area where the high-powered radar will be based.
"I feel a little like the piece of sand caught between two large gears," he said. "It turns us into the biggest target in Europe."
He led a municipal referendum campaign in which Trokavec's 97 residents voted overwhelmingly against the radar installation. On Sunday, the 240 residents of neighboring Skorice voted against it by a margin of 70 percent.
The villagers, like most Czechs, are not at all anti-American. They were liberated from Nazi rule by U.S. troops, and the period of Soviet control over Czechoslovakia has left people here with a permanent distaste for Russia. But the base has raised fears of a return to the Cold War tensions that turned this part of Central Europe into a high-security fortress, constantly prepared for a superpower showdown.
"We were glad when the Russians left," said Skorice Mayor Miroslav Suchy, 46. "Now to have another superpower come in, bring their technology in and start building up tensions, that's something we oppose. We don't want that to happen to us again."
"We're not against the Americans at all," he said. "We don't mind having a foreign base here _ if it's soldiers and tanks, that's fine. What bothers us is the radar, and the danger created by such a target. We don't want to be caught between Washington and Moscow."
These villages have found themselves at the center of almost every major world conflict. Built in 1927 for the Czech army, the base was taken over in the 1940s by occupying Nazi troops. It was used as an artillery range and as a concentration camp. Then, under communist control, it was used by the Warsaw Pact soldiers who seized control of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The villagers have been expelled from their homes on several occasions, and now they are once again fearing for their homes, their health and their safety.
U.S. officials argue that the base will be necessary should Iran develop nuclear weapons and long-distance missiles, a capability that they believe could exist by 2015.
But Putin and his generals say that no imminent security threat exists from Iran, and that the installation is capable of being aimed at Russia, a violation of post-Cold War treaties prohibiting short-range missiles in the region.
In talks between Rice and Putin in Moscow this week, they agreed that they would tone down increasingly bellicose rhetoric, but they failed to break their impasse over the anti-missile installation.
Rice stressed to Putin that Russia will not be allowed any veto or input in the plan.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
