BRUSSELS (AFP)--Croatian and Albania urged NATO Tuesday to leave its door open to other Balkans hopefuls, at a ceremony marking the entry of the two countries into the military alliance.
Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader and his Albanian counterpart Prime Minister Sali Berisha both stressed the importance of expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization eastwards.
"Bosnia-Hercegovina...too has the right to an Atlantic future," said Sanader at NATO headquarters in Brussels, after the Albanian and Croatian flags were raised alongside those of their 26 partners.
"It's the same with Kosovo, which Croatia also fully supports," he said.
Sanader, who described NATO membership as "a strategic objective of Croatia since our independence" in 1991, also voiced support for tiny Macedonia.
Macedonia narrowly avoided a civil war with ethnic Albanian separatists in 2001. Peace was restored after a Western-backed peace deal was signed and NATO supervised the disarmament of the rebels. It has met all the criteria to join the world's biggest alliance, but its entry has been held up by a row over its name with Greece, which as a member holds a veto.
Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha, who described the NATO ceremony as his country's "greatest day after the declaration of independence", backed Sanader's call.
"An enlargement of NATO to the Balkans is fundamental, and very important for the stability of the region," he told AFP.
In a speech, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer underlined "the accession of Albania and Croatia is of enormous significance for these two new members, for their wider region, and for the alliance as a whole."
The prospect of membership of both NATO and the European Union has been a powerful force for reform in the volatile Balkans, where conflict raged for much of the 1990s.
But Russia has been angered by NATO's expansion, which has brought the alliance right to Russia's borders.

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