SEECP: BETTER REGIONAL COOPERATION PRECONDITION FOR FASTER EU INTEGRATION

SARAJEVO, March 27 (Hina) - Parliamentary representatives from South-East European countries attending a day-long conference on European integration in Sarajevo on Saturday agreed that close regional cooperation was one of the basic preconditions for faster integration with the European Union.#L# The meeting, organised within the South-East European Cooperation Process (SEECP), was attended by parliamentarians from Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Turkey and Croatia, which was represented by Sabor vice-president Djurdja Adlesic. Addressing the meeting, Adlesic said that Croatia was fully aware of its responsibility towards the region and considered the SEECP a good formula to establish a political dialogue between member-countries. That dialogue is very important because the countries in the region are in different positions towards the EU and regional cooperation can only facilitate their integration in the EU, Adlesic said. She recalled that admission to the EU and NATO remained Croatia's most important goal on the foreign policy front and that her country this spring expected to receive a positive opinion from the European Commission about its membership application. Representatives of the Central European Initiative (CEI) and the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, Joze Tank and Giovanni Kessler respectively, called on south-east European countries to cooperate closer so that the region could become a zone of permanent peace and stability. Kessler said the latest incidents in Kosovo should be taken as an important warning, but he believed that the worst time for the region was over and that the time of coexistence and cooperation was coming. Addressing the meeting in his capacity as the vice-president of the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly, a Bosnian parliamentary deputy and influential member of the Party of Democratic Action, Hasan Muratovic, said it was obvious that the Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe, unlike some other projects, had failed and should be replaced with another form of cooperation. (Hina) rml