Bulgarians, Slovaks, Uzbeks invade upstate New York

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 22, 2002 | by John Elvin

You'd need a dictionary compiled by doublespeak expert George Orwell to decipher the little-noticed news about a contingent of military officers from 20 foreign countries who gathered in late June at Fort Drum in upstate New York for a NATO battle-simulation training exercise.

The press releases say the three-day event was part of NATO's "Partnership for Peace" program aimed at developing "improvements in good neighborly relations" between European countries. It seems fair to wonder why that would require military officers from countries such as Bulgaria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan to venture to the remote highlands of New York state near the Canadian borden The answer is buffed beneath official statements about "coalition building" and "humanitarian peacekeeping efforts."

The exercises involved NATO member nations as well as "nonaligned partners," a phrase that may explain how Tunisia, located on Africa's Mediterranean coast, found its way into the North Atlantic military establishment. Billed as "Cooperative Nugget" and held every two years, earlier exercises stirred alarm among citizens and groups concerned about globalism and sovereignty issues. Those concerns were first triggered in 1995 when 4,500 foreign troops arrived at Fort Polk, La., for the first-ever NATO exercise on U.S. soil.

A review of past exercises in the series shows an emphasis on dealing with low-intensity conflicts such as guerrilla warfare in urban situations, often involving nontraditional hostilities such as car-bombings, sniper attacks on refugee checkpoints, hostile or unruly protesters and other forms of civilian unrest. Basically it's about multinational military units acting as cops to enforce international peace.

In this year's computer-assisted war game, developed at the Swedish Defence Wargaming Centre, members of an international NATO-led "peace operation" stepped in to establish a zone of separation between two belligerent forces on a fictional island, "Aragon."

A little-noticed sidelight is that orders to separate the antagonists in the game scenario were issued by the United Nations. While U.N. involvement is hardly mentioned in official statements on the exercise, a careful reading of reports on prior "Cooperative Nugget" operations in Louisiana and Colorado reveals that U.N. monitors routinely are on hand to observe the war games.

Some people in the region where the games were held this year are a little leery of anything involving U.N. participation. Fort Drum is "about five miles from the biosphere boundary," according to Carole LaGrasse of the Property Rights Foundation of America, referring to the Adirondack-Champlain Biosphere Reserve, one of UNESCO's largest.

LaGrasse is a resident of the Adirondack park, a 6-million-acre mix of public and private lands where property owners are concerned about the implications of the U.N. "bio-region" designation. The United Nations isn't legislating land use in the region, but its suggestions carry a lot of weight with activists and government planners who are shaping the future of the Adirondacks. It can't be too reassuring to those who fear international control of their local affairs to have Tunisian, Uzbek and Macedonian troops running around in their woods.

Steve J. Medve is a dairy farmer and staunch foe of world-government schemes who, like his neighbors, often travels through Fort Drum. He told nation in brief there was little local news about the war games, but that didn't surprise him.

"They want to keep people out of there," Medve said of the military site. Two rural county roads through Fort Drum are being closed permanently to outsiders "for security reasons." That prompted him to ask "Why am I losing my freedom to travel on my own roads?"

Medve doesn't seem to find much solace in the fact that, while those roads are off-limits to local dairy farmers, during "Cooperative Nugget" they were elevated to side streets of the global village, serving military visitors from Albania, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, Tunisia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.