Under the auspices of the EAPC, a Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Centre was created in the spring of 1998, on the basis of a Russian proposal. The Centre participated in the coordination of emergency aid for relief operations following major flooding in Ukraine and played an important role in the coordination of efforts to relieve the plight of the refugees fleeing from the repression and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Another example of its role was the coordination of aid for the victims of the earthquake that hit Turkey in August 1999.

Both Allies and Partners alike regard the EAPC as an important expression of NATO’s commitment to openness and cooperation and to extending the benefits of peace and stability to all European nations.


THE PARTNERSHIP FOR PEACE (PfP) PROGRAMME

The Partnership for Peace (PfP) was launched by Allied leaders at their summit meeting in Brussels in January 1994 to promote greater stability and security throughout Europe. In the wake of the end of the Cold War, the initiative expressed NATO’s desire to reach out to all European states with an offer of close cooperation in defence and security affairs and represented a far-reaching response to the desire of growing numbers of European governments to participate in NATO’s security system.

An invitation to join the Partnership was addressed to all states participating in the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) and other states participating in the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) able and willing to contribute to the programme. The NACC, which was created in 1991, had already provided a forum in which such countries could discuss security issues with NATO Allies. The Partnership added a way for individual countries to tailor their relationship with NATO to meet their national needs and circumstances. These countries were at different stages of political, economic and military development, so any programme of association with NATO had to be sufficiently flexible to accommodate such diversity. Each Partner was therefore invited to identify the extent and intensity of the cooperation it wished to develop within a bilateral Partnership programme with NATO. Each individual programme focuses on defence and security-related cooperation and forges a real partnership between each Partner country and NATO in areas ranging from the purely military to cooperation in areas such as crisis management, civil emergency planning, air traffic management or armaments cooperation. Along with the invitations to join the Partnership, the Allies issued a PfP Framework Document.