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SARAJEVO, June 28 (FENA) - The National Committee on American Foreign Policy (NCAFP), the Nizami Ganjavi International Center (NGIC) and the Foundation "Shared societies and values" organized a forum in Sarajevo today which gathered former leaders of the region and beyond to discuss the European future.
The gathering is of a hybrid format and is the last in a series of forums prepared and led by NGOs as a continuation of the project called "Western Balkans - the way forward" started at the first NCAFP roundtable held on the sidelines of the 2019 UN General Assembly.
NCAFP President Susan Elliot and NGIC Secretary General Rovshan Muradov opened the forum today. The former chairman of the Council of Ministers of BiH Zlatko Lagumdžija addressed the gathered, announcing that a document should be presented today as a result of these meetings, which will offer proposals and policies that should be considered in the future.
“One of them is a new Euro-Atlantic policy that should put human rights at the center with a decisive confrontation with corrupt structures and with the fight against dangerous ideas of border changes, genocide denial and religious radicalism,” explained Lagumdžija.
Member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Šefik Džaferović, supported the meeting and emphasized that the issue of progress in the Western Balkans region is extremely important, not only from the point of view of the countries of that region but it is also in the interest of the whole of Europe.
“Security and stability of the Western Balkans is one of the cornerstones of the entire Europe. Every time the Western Balkans was the focus, the entire European continent could not feel safe, and historical experience shows that negative processes affected the entire European area,” he added.
Undoubtedly, he said, a stable and prosperous Western Balkans is in the interest of the whole of Europe, and that European political structures, embodied primarily in the European Union, have a responsibility to be strongly engaged in the Western Balkans and to support positive and constructive processes.
He stressed that in recent decades the process of European and Euro-Atlantic integration has been a crucial framework for stabilizing, strengthening peace and implementing reforms in the Western Balkans, because when it comes to guidelines for moving the region forward, the European and Euro-Atlantic perspectives are a key issue and it is of the utmost importance that they remain so.
“In that process, we need the strong support of our European and Euro-Atlantic partners due to the existence of certain retrograde forces, but also due to the complex Dayton decision-making system, which enabled these forces to obstruct and block,” said Džaferović.
He is of the opinion that this requires regional cooperation and the improvement of mutual relations between the Western Balkans countries, because those relations are burdened with unresolved issues, interethnic mistrust and the consequences of the wars of the 1990s.
The meeting was also attended by former Montenegrin President Filip Vujanović, former President of the North Macedonia Branko Crvenkovski, former BiH Presidency member Mladen Ivanić, former Croatian Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor, former Croatian President Ivo Josipović and many others.
(FENA) A. B.
