Albania and Croatia now into NATO, interesting additions, says the world

TIRANA, April 14 – Albania and Croatia became the newest NATO members earlier this month taking the total number of its members to 28.
Naturally that was highly celebrated in Albania but now comes the hard time, the alliance has many requirements for its members, be it big or small. And first of all, to Albania the question has been very clear _ holding free and fair elections remains the top priority to the new NATO member.
One action taken during the NATO summit that President Barack Obama recently attended was the ratification of the addition on April 1 of the two new countries, Albania and Croatia, to the alliance, wrote US Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper.
It started in 1949 with 12. now with 28, Russia didn’t seem to mind. That would not be the case with Ukraine and Georgia, whose membership is a much more sensitive subject for Russia.
Croatia and Albania are both interesting additions in themselves.
Croatia is the second country of the former Yugoslavia to be admitted to NATO. During World War II Croatia signed on as an ally of Hitler’s Germany in hopes of achieving independence from Yugoslavia if the Axis powers won the war. Its cooperation with Berlin and Rome included major persecution of Jews in Croatia.
As recently as 1995 Croatia was engaged in a bloody, ethnic and religious-based war with two of its former partners in Yugoslavia, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The fighting in that part of the Balkans pitted Catholic Croatia against Orthodox Serbia and Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic Bosnia-Herzegovina. Casualty rates were high. The nature of the fighting, which included ethnic cleansing and other savage practices, was certainly not what one would expect of a NATO member country’s military in 2009.
It is to be fervently hoped that Croatia has put that sort of activity behind it.
Albania during the Cold War was the bizarre of the bizarre. Its government was Communist, but after 1960 it did not ally itself with the Soviet Union and was not a member of the Warsaw Pact. Albania was fiercely — some would say, blindly — independent, with equal disdain for the Soviets and the West. For a time it was allied with faraway Communist China, but that relationship, too, went on the rocks in 1978.
Since the early 1990s it has been ostensibly democratic, although it remains notably corrupt and crime-ridden. Albania retains an active interest in neighboring Kosovo, where Albanian Muslim ethnics are the majority, opposed to the Orthodox Serbs.
It is not entirely clear what NATO gains by adding Croatia and Albania, except two more countries.
Naturally Albania earns the total security for its territorial integrity. That is also considered as the first step toward the European Union. Tirana has made it clear it is to apply for the candidate status membership talks this first half of the year.
Tirana also hopes that NATO membership will increase the amount of the foreign direct investment in one of Europe’s poorest countries.