Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader met with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan during an official visit to Ankara on Wednesday.
Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader met with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan during an official visit to Ankara on Wednesday.
"I am grateful to Turkey for the strong support it extended to Croatia for entry into NATO. We are cooperating with Turkey in the defence sector and will continue to do so in the future," Sanader said after the meeting.
Speaking of the process of ratification of Croatia's NATO accession protocol and an initiative launched in Slovenia for a referendum on Croatia's NATO entry, Sanader said that Croatia considered the ratification process to be over after Greece ratified the protocol on Tuesday evening.
The Croatian PM said that NATO could not wait for the Slovenes to decide whether they would hold a referendum or not, stressing that he expected the Slovene President to sign a ratification document.
On the subject of Croatia's European Union membership bid, Sanader said that it was "realistic and feasible" for Croatia to wrap up accession negotiations in 2009 and that Croatia was doing its utmost to meet the required criteria for membership.
Sanader and Erdogan agreed that EU membership was the strategic goal of both Croatia and Turkey, and called for closer cooperation between all countries of Southeast Europe.
After the talks, the two governments signed a number of documents on cooperation, including an agreement on economic cooperation, an agreement on investment promotion and a memorandum on energy cooperation.
Erdogan said that during Sanader's visit he had talked with Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha and that they both supported a project to build a trans-Adriatic natural gas pipeline that would run from the Caspian region via Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina to Croatia.
"We will be working on it and cooperation between Southeast European countries will contribute to progress in the energy field," Erdogan said.
The two prime ministers said that economic cooperation between Turkey and Croatia was not so good as political cooperation, noting that trade between the two countries was a mere USD 500 million.
Sanader said that there were a number of areas for the further promotion of trade and that the matter would be discussed at a business forum in Istanbul on Thursday. He said that Croatia would like to see more tourists from Turkey and that Croatian seaports were interested in providing services to Turkish partners.
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