Prime Minister Edi Rama and Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti appeared at a joint press conference following a joint session of the governments of both countries and the signing ceremony of a string of intergovernmental cooperation agreements in Prishtina on Monday:
Prime Minister of Kosovo Albin Kurti:
Honourable Prime Minister Rama, dear Edi, honourable media representatives, dear citizens of both our countries,
In less than a year, we held two joint meetings of our governments, a solid evidence of the bilateral cooperation. With almost full implementation of the agreements we signed last November, I am happy that we agreed on a new set of a total of 19 accords today aimed at further boosting bilateral cooperation on education, security, energy and infrastructure, common economic market, tourism, defence and other areas.
Bilateral agreements between the two countries are always reached to further strengthen relations and bring citizens closer. Under the bilateral agreements we preserve and advance our close relations, as we stand united as today around the need, wish and goal for development, equality, justice and well-being.
It is not only the interest that unites our countries, but it is in our interest to stay united.
Kosovo and Albania are currently pursuing a very positive trend of trade cooperation and such a trend will advance further. In the last five years only, our trade exchanges with Albania have multiplied. Today we import from Albania more than ever before and export to Albania more than ever before. Meanwhile, we are currently talking about projects that have never been done before and we are delivering for the first time, with the Durrës-Prishtina railway project undoubtedly being one of the biggest and most important projects. This railway will connect Kosovo with the corridor traversing the area near us, but that has yet to be connected to Kosovo, and the project will bring our economies even closer and it will increase the mobility and connectivity between our two countries.
Thank you!
Prime Minister Edi Rama:
Thank you Albin! Dear prime Minister,
Today we agreed that a joint Assembly of the two republics, a jubilee session be held for the first time ever, with the presidents of both countries to address the Albanian nation together as part of the events to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Albania’s national independence. We also agreed on publishing the first intergovernmental magazine by the end of this year, a document that will serve all of you and all those interested to see all the facts and figures of cooperation, all agreements and the level of their implementation.
The volume of trade cooperation between Albania and Kosovo when we started cooperation was estimated at a ridiculous amount of 136 million euros. The trade exchanges between our two countries are now valued at over 433 million euros, a figure that doesn’t actually represent the trade volume we aspire to reach and it is our ambition that the bilateral trade exchanges grow to over one billion euros, which can no longer be called insignificant and it is no longer a less significant figure, but it is the outcome of the hard work and the ambition of the Albanian entrepreneurs on both sides of the border, as well as a result of the facilities and the incentives we have already succeeded in providing.
With the current government we have the highest rate of implementation of signed agreements, including agreements signed in the past.
On the other hand, today we also witnessed very concrete presentation of a project that is unquestionably the most ambitious strategic project ever launched by the governments in Albania and Kosovo, namely the new Durres port and the Prishtina Dry Port, a project which not only will radically transform the entire infrastructure of trade exchanges and relations between the two countries, not only stimulates like nothing else before the economy of the two countries, but also puts Albania together with Kosovo at the very centre of a regional gravity and turns Durrës into one of the most strategic economic gates in the Mediterranean.
The next thing I think is very important on this 110th anniversary, in the last meeting in Elbasan we agreed on a joint children’s reading and spelling book for beginners.
The last and not least is the agreement to jointly contribute to the writing of the Albanian encyclopaedia, namely 10 volumes that will summarize the entire encyclopaedic corpus of the Albanian people, the Albanian world, of the Albanian history and of the Albanian life.
Thank you very much!
