Madrid demonstrators air NATO summit concerns

MADRID－Thousands of demonstrators rallied in Madrid on Sunday to call for peace and protest against a NATO summit to be held in the Spanish capital this week.

Supporters of antimilitarist and pacifist movements from around the world came together in a show of support for a congress of an anti-NATO group that concluded in the city on Saturday, when they issued the declaration for peace.

Jose Luis Centella, president of the Communist Party of Spain, said: "Thousands of people are demonstrating today in Madrid for peace, for a multilateral world so that Spain can live in harmony."

Paloma, another protester, criticized a planned huge increase in Spain's military spending and called instead for attention to be paid to "problems such as the closure of emergency services, and outpatient clinics and hospitals which are more saturated every day".

Fellow activist Jaled, 29, said NATO was not the solution to the conflict in Ukraine.

Organizers claimed 5,000 people joined the march, but authorities in Madrid put the number at 2,200.

Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares said in a newspaper interview published on Sunday that the summit would also focus on the threat from Europe's southern flank in Africa, pointing to Russia's influence there.

On the streets, the demonstrators see an increase in defense spending in Europe urged by the US-led military alliance as a threat to peace, saying the spending should instead go to schools and hospitals.

In response to the demonstration, the Spanish government has deployed tight security ahead of the NATO summit, which opens on Tuesday.

The Finnish government said that the Finnish and Swedish leaders were due on Monday to discuss their stalled NATO bids with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

But Turkey said the four-way meeting, which will also involve NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg, did not mean that Ankara was close to lifting its objection to the two Nordic countries joining the military bloc.

The Finnish presidency said the four leaders will meet in Madrid, before the start of the alliance's summit, which will focus on the conflict in Ukraine.

Membership bids

The meeting "will be preceded by a round of talks between Finnish, Swedish and Turkish officials hosted by NATO in Brussels", the Finnish presidency said.

The Ukraine crisis saw the two Nordic countries abandon decades of military nonalignment by applying for NATO membership in May.

But the joint membership bids, initially believed to be a speedy process, has been delayed by objections from NATO member Turkey.

In a related development, two Canadian ships departed for a four-month deployment in the Baltic Sea and North Atlantic region on Operation Reassurance to enhance NATO readiness, the Canadian Defense Ministry said on Sunday.

In a statement, the ministry said HMCS Kingston and Summerside have been deployed to contribute to NATO assurance and deterrence measures in Central and Eastern Europe, adding that the Canadian Armed Forces have been maintaining a presence in European waters on a rotational basis since 2014.

Agnencies - Xinhua