Greece races for its Balkan credibility
THESSALONIKI – Athens has begun to speed up efforts to activate the long-delayed Greek plan for Balkan reconstruction, which it announced in 1999 in an effort to help the countries of southeastern Europe that were most affected by the Yugoslav crisis. Greece then promised 550 million euros (about 187 billion drachmas) in funding for Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Yugoslavia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. But the long delay has harmed the credibility of Athens’s foreign policy. The law on the plan will most probably be passed by Parliament tomorrow and the Foreign Ministry is pushing ahead at great speed so that the signing of the first bilateral agreement for the withdrawal of funds can coincide with Prime Minister Costas Simitis’s visit to Belgrade on May 8 and 9. Deputy Foreign Minister Andreas Loverdos has been in Thessaloniki over the past two days for meetings with Greece’s ambassadors to the Balkan countries and business representatives on the best ways to apply the reconstruction plan. The conviction was widespread that Greece’s unfulfilled promises had harmed it. «Greece lost its credibility,» said the Foreign Ministry’s Balkan department’s director, Ambassador Alexandros Mallias. He cited Albania as an example, which had been given considerable amounts to salvage the government after the collapse of 1997, without purpose and without development targets. The former president of the Federation of Industrialists of Northern Greece, Nikos Efthymiadis, stressed that «the delay in applying the plan has stripped it of 30 percent of its effectiveness.» Macedonia-Thrace Minister Giorgos Paschalidis said «we should not jeopardize the trust of our Balkan friends for the sake of any expediencies.» Yiannis Magriotis, another deputy foreign minister, projected a sense of optimism, saying that the time that had been lost was not significant. As yet, it is not known how the money will be distributed among the recipient countries. Officials involved speak of the modernization of infrastructure and the promotion of productive investments, but few more specifics have been provided.
