H.E Dr. Zalmai Rassoul, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan
Statement
of
H.E Dr. Zalmai Rassoul, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan
at the Third Heart of Asia Ministerial
Almaty – Kazakhstan
26 April 2013
بسم الله الرحمن الرحیم
Your Excellency President Nursultan Nazarbayev,
My Esteemed Co-Chair, Your Excellency Foreign Minister Idrisov,
Excellencies Foreign Ministers, Heads of Delegation from the Heart of Asia countries and supporting countries of the Istanbul Process,
Secretaries General of Regional Organizations, Distinguished Delegates, Dear Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen:
On behalf of the Afghan government and as the permanent co-chair of the Istanbul Process, it is a great honor for me to welcome you to the Third Heart of Asia ministerial conference here in the beautiful city of Almaty. I would also like to take the opportunity to extend my special personal and our collective profound thanks and sincere gratitude to the government and people of the Republic of Kazakhstan, our present co-chair of the Istanbul Process, for hosting us today, for the excellent arrangements and for the very generous and gracious hospitality they’ve extended to all of us. Indeed, Kazakhstan is demonstrating its leadership role by hosting this third ministerial meeting and being such a dedicated participant of the Istanbul Process.
We in Afghanistan attach enormous importance to our relationship with our brotherly neighbour Kazakhstan. The Afghanistan-Kazakhstan friendship is firmly rooted in the common geography, history, culture and religion that we’ve shared for centuries, and underpinned by real mutual respect, shared interests and a common desire for peace, security and prosperity.
I would also like to especially thank H.E. President Nazarbayev for his personal support to the people of Afghanistan, including the provision of humanitarian aid and, most importantly, 1000 scholarships for Afghan students to study at Kazakh universities. Through these scholarships, Kazakhstan is helping us increase Afghan capacity in various important areas. We’re going to hear from one of these Afghan students here today.
And we keenly look forward to deepening and broadening our cooperation with Kazakhstan, including in the fields of trade, transit, and exchange of experiences in various fields.
We are keen to welcome Kazakh businessmen and companies in Afghanistan to take advantage of the exciting investment opportunities, including in the highly profitable fields of mining, agriculture, trade and transit. Your Excellency Mr. President, the strengthening of our bilateral relationship will directly contribute to the realization of our shared vision for strengthening confidence and cooperation in our region through the Istanbul Process.
Please allow me to also thank our supporting countries and organizations, all of them represented around this table today, for their valuable interest and contributions to the Istanbul Process from the start and their sustained commitment to our success.
I would like to particularly underline our supporters’ strong endorsement of the six CBMs and their expression of concrete support towards their implementation. The presence of such effective and influential supporters for our efforts in the framework of the Istanbul Process underlines the central importance of a regional solution to issues that are not only key to the future of this region but directly relevant to peace, security and development on a global level. I’d like here also to particularly thank my brother Foreign Minister Davutoglu and Turkey for his leadership.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Before I go any further and in our spirit of promoting transparency and cooperation, please allow me to give you a brief update on the situation in Afghanistan since our last ministerial meeting in Kabul, a period in which we’ve marked a number of critical milestones.
On the ongoing transition process, Afghan national security forces today are directly responsible for the security of nearly 90 percent of the Afghan population. This is a clear demonstration of the strategic as well as tactical success of the transition process that will come to completion at the end of next year, and it shows that Afghan forces today are able to independently protect the Afghan people and defend Afghanistan against both internal and external threats.
Parallel to the transition of security responsibilities, the Afghan government is pursuing a comprehensive effort to seek a political solution to the ongoing violence. It’s by now a clear fact that the vast majority of the Afghan people strongly support a political solution.
What we need now is honest and practical support of outside stakeholders, particularly the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. We hope that such honest and practical support will be forthcoming in the weeks and months ahead in the interest of peace and security in both countries.
We’re also keeping our international and regional partners engaged on our peace efforts, including on the possibility of establishing a negotiations office in Qatar to which we agree in principle.
We’re also engaged in an important economic transition. In this context, we’re grateful to the substantial pledge of assistance from the international community at the Tokyo Conference last July to fill the projected fiscal gap in the Afghan national budget through the Decade of Transformation from 2015 to 2024. This would give us the opportunity to steadily move towards self-reliance by increasing our national revenues through further development of the Afghan economy and attracting investments into our key productive sectors, including mining, agriculture, transportation and transit.
At the same time, we’re fast approaching another historic milestone with the April 2014 presidential election.
The Afghan government is doing everything necessary to ensure free, fair, transparent and credible elections where all eligible Afghan citizens can cast their ballots. The success of these elections will solidify the roots of Afghanistan’s young democracy and entrench our historic gains of the past decade.
Our collective success in Afghanistan on the transition process, peace and reconciliation efforts, elections and the economic transition will have a defining impact on our shared vision of enhancing regional cooperation.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
It has only been 17 months since the landmark launch of the Istanbul Process in Turkey under Turkish leadership, the active participation of the Heart of Asia countries as well as their ownership of the process and the strong backing of our important supporters. These seventeen months may look like a long time.
But if we remind ourselves of the much longer history of multiple, deep divisions in our region, the complexity and difficulty of advancing honest, result-oriented cooperation and then compare that with what we have achieved since that first ministerial conference in Istanbul on November 2, 2011, we can confidently claim that we’ve come a long way.
In fact, Ladies and Gentlemen, from our perspective in Afghanistan, the Istanbul Process has been and continues to be by far the most successful attempt of many, many tries to promote regional cooperation over the past decade. So I want to take this opportunity to thank all the participating countries of the Istanbul Process for your commitment and hard work in successfully guiding this process to where it is today.
Our progress so far is a testament to the fundamental soundness and urgent necessity of our vision, the main elements of which include the fact that in our region we continue to suffer from divisions, mistrust, lack of confidence, misunderstandings, lack of sincere cooperation and competing agendas – to the detriment of all of us. We realize that we suffer from the same challenges and menaces, first and foremost terrorism, violent extremism and unacceptability low levels of economic interaction.
We further know that the Heart of Asia countries’ fundamental interests – security, stability and prosperity – are organically and inextricably tied to one another. That such lasting security, stability and prosperity will come to the Heart of Asia region only through a solemn sense of shared responsibility, sincere and result-oriented cooperation among countries of the region themselves. And, finally, that it is very much within our power to build that necessary confidence and ensure the necessary result-oriented cooperation, and that this is the moment to take action.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
In this vein, the implementation plan for the six CBMs, covering a broad range of issues from disaster management, to countering terrorism and narcotics to trade and infrastructure and education, have been successfully developed and endorsed by our senior officials and are presented today for our adoption. During the development phase of these plans our technical focal points from a wide range of the relevant line-ministries and agencies got together ten times in eight different Heart of Asia capitals to develop regional plans for addressing each of these issues. Some of these plans are already complemented by specific activity plans for the current year and time-lined activities for the future.
The CBMs are indeed one of the very concrete components of this process with the highest potential for bringing us closer together to resolve our common challenges, such as terrorism and drugs, and for providing us with an opportunity to capitalize on our existing economic prospects.
Similarly, we have given considerable attention to revitalizing and strengthening our relationship with our near and extended regional neighbors through the political consultation element of this process.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
We attach significant importance to our membership in existing regional organizations and initiatives and reiterate our commitment to contribute to strengthening them and to complement them through the Istanbul Process.
Aligned with this goal, we have recently started a process of assessment of Afghanistan’s role in the regional organizations, in order to ensure that we are able to play an active role in all organizations to which we are a member and to draw synergy in the Afghanistan-related efforts of these organizations.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Now as we are moving from the conceptualization to the implementation stage of the Istanbul Process, especially with regards to the six prioritized CBMs set out in the final declaration of our conference today, it is incumbent on us all to continue to join our efforts for mobilizing our resources in the most effective and efficient ways, complemented with contributions by the supporting countries of this process, and to think of specific ways for the implementation phase.
One way, in our view, we could attempt that implementation long-term is by pooling our funding resources – from the Heart of Asia countries and our supporters around this table – into a Trust Fund.
In our view, that would allow for tangible projects under each one of these six prioritized CBMs to be undertaken in the days, weeks and months following this conference in an effective and sustainable manner. I’m pleased with the compromise language we’ve reached in the final declaration on this.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
To close, I want to reiterate here once again that nurturing the kind of honest, result-oriented, concrete regional cooperation through the Istanbul Process that we have agreed forms a fundamental and permanent pillar of Afghan foreign policy. It’s not just that Afghanistan has been, is and will be part of the Heart of Asia region in every way; more than that, we in Afghanistan are determined to reclaim our rightful place as this region’s landbridge and roundabout. And we know that without success on regional cooperation, that noble goal will one way or another stay out of reach. So we realize that Afghanistan has the most to gain from successful regional cooperation and integration; but we also know that for the countries around Afghanistan, the most effective way for long-term, shared peace, prosperity and development is through regional cooperation.
Therefore, let there be no doubt in any one’s mind about our full commitment to the Istanbul Process as its permanent co-chair. It’s also because of this high priority we attach to the region that we established a director general level department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs last year.
I also want to once again call on everyone, especially the 14 participating countries of the Istanbul Process, to maintain our firm commitment to the goals and objectives of this process and for all of us to renew our individual and collective efforts to take it to the next level of gradual but concrete, tangible results.
At this point, I would like to repeat my sincere thanks to the co-chair for hosting us today and their continued support for Afghanistan including the large scale scholarship initiative, based on the personal commitment and instructions of H.E. President Nazarbayev, to train 1000 Afghan students at Kazakh universities.
This is one of the best examples of making sustainable difference and sharing our regional resources. To bring life to such examples, with your permission Mr. President, I would like to give the floor to Razia Sarwari, a representative from this group of Afghan students studying in your country. Thank you very much!
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