TIRANA, February 21 /ATA/ – By Maela Marini/ “The Western Balkans has started to write a new chapter bringing at a round table its countries to speak about our future opportunities.”
This is what PM Edi Rama stated on Friday at an event hosted at the House of Europe by the Regional Cooperation Council (RCC) and World Economic Forum (WEF) on acceleration of competition and innovation in the Western Balkans.
PM stated that discussions and cooperation among the countries of the region are necessary to ensure our children a better Balkans, better interconnected with the EU.
Rama took the opportunity to thank German Chancellor Angela Merkel for supporting the initiative to bring together the Western Balkans’ countries.
“It was in Berlin in 2014, under the support of Chancellor Merkel, who is deserving of our thanks for her forward-looking vision, when we started to write a new chapter bringing together the countries of the Western Balkans for the first time, sitting at a roundtable, talking about our opportunity of the future. This is something that is easier in words than in deeds, but we are witnessing a work in progress that runs in parallel to the challenges and obstacles arising from the past, which times and again comes before us in the shape of politicians or analysts of the present,” Rama said.
Regardless of impediments of this kind down our pathway, PM Rama expressed his conviction that we will move ahead because this is what we owe to our children, making our region better than it is and more inter-connected with EU and the West.
“We owe it to our country to make our country a better place in the Western Balkans. At the end, the quality of life is not based on how much we agree with one another, but on how disagreements help us better understand one another and move ahead with no impediment to coming together,” Rama said.
PM went on saying that it is high time to unlock the potentials of the Western Balkans’ economies, citing the good initiative in Albania to support startups in a streamline world.
“We are in the process of these relations and unprecedented digitalization of our services to make sure that by 2020 95 percent of all services will be available online,” Rama said while speaking about the digital revolution in the state offices.
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