Agence France Presse — English
June 2, 2006 Friday 2:16 PM GMT

Black Sea summit on cooperation snubbed by Moscow

by Mihaela Rodina

BUCHAREST, June 2 2006

A summit on cooperation opening Monday in Bucharest will bring
together five heads of state and several high officials from
countries bordering the Black Sea, but none from Moscow.

“This Forum for Dialogue and Partnership aims to create a cooperation
reflex in the region. It will be a meeting between equals, an
opportunity for all the bordering countries to express their
opinions,” Romanian Foreign Minister Razvan Ungureanu told AFP.

The presidents of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine,
joined by their Romanian counterpart, as well as the Bulgarian
foreign minister and a Turkish deputy prime minister, have confirmed
they will attend the summit.

But no official will make the trip from Moscow, Russia having chosen
to be represented by its ambassador to Romania instead.

“The doors of this meeting were opened to the Russian Federation and
we hope our Russian partners will endorse the Forum’s conclusions,”
Ungureanu said.

“There is indeed an initial reluctance on Moscow’s part, but this
will not undermine the success of this meeting,” he said.

Announcing the Forum, Ungureanu had emphasised the need to “bridge an
image gap” in the region, which “suffers from a lack of confidence
between neighbours.”

According to organisers, those taking part in the summit will be
encouraged to table issues that concern them, whether it is organised
crime, energy or protection of the environment.

But with no leading Russian official present at the meeting,
discussions on energy security are likely to be less incisive than
participants, many of whom worry about their dependence on Russian
gas, would like them to be.

Following the January gas crisis between Kiev and Moscow, Europeans
have started to doubt Moscow’s reliability in terms of gas supplies,
and the need to diversify energy sources and find a way around Russia
for the supply of gas from the Caspian Sea for instance, is
increasingly being brought up.

The summit in Bucharest should also allow the presidents of Armenia,
Robert Kocharian, and of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, to meet again to
discuss the thorny issue of Nagorno Karabakh, an enclave with a
majority Armenian population, which seceded from Azerbaijan after a
bloody conflict in the early 1990s.

The last meeting between the two leaders in February, in the French
town of Rambouillet, had ended without any progress being made.

A statement by Kocharian’s office issued Friday said the foreign
ministers of the two countries would have talks first with their
Belgian counterpart Karel de Gucht, current head of the Organisation
for Security and Cooperation in Europe, before the two presidents met
face to face.

On the sidelines of the Forum, the five heads of state will also meet
at Cotroceni palace with Romanian President Traian Basescu, who has
made the Black Sea region into a major foreign policy issue.

With its “frozen conflicts” in Nagorno Karabakh, Transdniestr,
Abkhazia and South Ossetia, four separatist regions that emerged from
the shadows of the former Soviet Union, “the larger area of the Black
Sea has a high risk potential,” Basescu has said more than once,
adding that the region is “a hub for the traffic of drugs, human
beings and arms.”