Thursday, July 12, 2012 -
The European Union’s newly-appointed Special Representative for Central Asia said on Wednesday the EU plans to ramp up cooperation on security with countries in the region.
“My mission is to deepen the EU-Central Asia relations,” the Kazakh-based news agency Kazinform reported Patricia Flor as saying in Brussels.
Flor, a German diplomat, said her task is to build on the basis of an EU five-year strategy for Central Asia, launched in 2007, “and further develop our relations in all fields, be they rule of law, water, and environments economic, and security issues.”
She said one of the goals within that mandate is to develop a senior-level security dialogue between the Central Asian republics and Europe linked to unfolding events in Afghanistan and beyond the 2014 pullout of NATO military forces there.
“The region is coming more into focus and if we want to have a positive development in the region, and security and stability both the Central Asian states and Afghanistan, we need to take a regional approach,” Flor said.
The European official urged the importance to energy-hungry Europe of building the trans-Caspian pipelines that would source natural gas from vast fields in Central Asia.
The EU is also willing to propose projects in the fields of energy efficiency, renewable energy, and energy conservation, said its Special Representative for Central Asia.
“We can become a good and reliable partner for Central Asia in this regard,” she said.