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NATO Diary: A Chaotic Start In Bucharest

By Brian Whitmore

BUCHAREST -- The annual summit of the NATO military alliance begins in earnest on the evening of April 2 with a working dinner attended by the leaders of the 26 member states. For journalists covering the summit, the main activity so far has been the simple pursuit of getting from point A to point B.

Day One: The first sign of trouble came on April 1, April Fool's Day, at the airport.

One day before hundreds of heads of state, government officials, and NATO authorities were due to land, there was not a single taxi in evidence at Henri Coanda International Airport. Nor, we were told, would there be any.

Finally, a helpful young man at a NATO information kiosk told me and my colleagues to take a special bus to the accreditation center, get credentialed, and then take another bus to the hotel. That sounded like a good plan -- at least until we got to the accreditation center.

After passing through a chaotic security gauntlet and metal detector, we lined up to get our media credentials. My colleagues from the Ukrainian and Russian services sailed through. I, meanwhile, was told there were problems.

What problems? How long would it take? I couldn’t get a straight answer. Brussels was working on it. Three hours later, I was told that everything was okay with my accreditation, but that the printer that produced the press badges was now broken.

Yes, that's one printer -- in the singular. It had been sent out to another building for repair. How long would that take? Maybe five minutes, maybe hours. There was no way to know for sure.

I settled in and acquainted myself with colleagues in the same unhappy boat -- a woman from the BBC, a man from Voice of America, a Swede, a Dane, and a woman from U.S. National Public Radio.

At least we were in good company. I later found out from my colleague in the Ukrainian Service that two members of President Viktor Yushchenko's own press corps had likewise been denied accreditation.

At 7 p.m., I finally had my prized press badge -- but the media center was closed. So much for filing an early dispatch. I found a bus to my hotel and then spent 30 minutes on the street, waiting for a massive motorcade to crawl its way through the city.

A phalanx of Romanian police officers kept us glued in our places. "Stay here! Stay here!" they shouted. Finally, one annoyed reporter shouted back: "We are here! We are here!"

Day Two: The press center was silent as U.S. President George W. Bush delivered a morning address on April 2 from the Palace of the Deposit and Savings Bank. The president was visible on the live television feed, but it was hard to understand what he was saying. The sound wasn't working.

Security guards are ubiquitous. Two were stalking the floor of my hotel, occupied mainly, I thought, by fairly nonthreatening journalists. Their uniforms were startlingly reminiscent of Soviet-era train conductors. Will they offer me tea? I wondered.

Guards are also a constant presence in the media center, located in the cavernous, 3,000-room Parliament Palace. I keep getting lost. Every room looks the same.

As I was trying to find our studio, I wandered into a stairwell to call my colleagues. I noticed one of these vigilant uniformed men leaning over me. “Can I help you?” I asked. “No,” he retorted. “Can I help you?”

No thanks.

A funny joke is making the rounds among Georgian journalists. Since Greece is blocking Macedonia’s NATO bid over its name, maybe Georgia will run into the same problem. The U.S. state of Georgia, as part of the United States, has been part of NATO since 1949, after all. Will Washington block Tbilisi’s bid over this?

Matthew Bryza, a State Department official responsible, in part, for the South Caucasus, spoke to a group of Georgian journalists. The one question in those quarters, of course, is whether Tbilisi will be offered a Membership Action Plan (MAP) in Bucharest.

Bryza spoke moments after a fiery speech by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who hotly disputed the wisdom of offering Georgia a MAP. Bryza was just as dismissive of Lavrov's concerns.

"Foreign Minister Lavrov is entitled to his own opinion and so is the Russian Federation," Bryza said. "But Russia is not a member of NATO and Russia has absolutely no possibility, no right to veto the membership or even the Membership Action Plan of any candidate. Georgia is a European country. Georgia has fulfilled the requirements to become a recipient of the Membership Action Plan, so Russia should have no impact at all on that decision, which has to be taken by the members of the alliance."

Copyright (c) 2008. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. www.rferl.org