Iliescu: EU must deliver on Göteborg promises

Date: 16/07/01

By John Shelley

ROMANIAN President Ion Iliescu has called for the EU to set up a special fund to train his country's civil servants in a bid to help it catch up in accession negotiations.

He says the "special efforts" to help Romania promised by EU leaders at the Göteborg summit should begin with aid to bring the country's administrative structures up to scratch. "We have to build up a professional corps of civil servants with the necessary skills and abilities for effective performance in the accession process," he told the Centre for European Policy Studies think-tank this week. "It would be desirable, and it would indeed make a lot of sense, to provide for a separate chapter of funding, explicitly allocated to such agreed measures."

Iliescu said that his countrymen were increasingly despondent about their nation's poor performance in accession negotiations; Romania is bottom in the league table of enlargement chapters closed. "True, the attachment to the values of the West and to the prospect of EU and NATO membership has never slackened," he said. "But I also see signs of frustration, sometimes degenerating into self-flagellation, illustrated by questions like 'Is there something wrong with us as a nation?'"

Iliescu also complained Romania was being blocked from joining NATO because it is behind in EU accession negotiations. The criteria for Union membership were also being applied to countries vying to join NATO, he said, meaning his country was being prevented from joining one until it was ready to enter both. "With all respect I think that such an approach is fallacious, and it simply misses the point," he said. "The European Union and the Atlantic alliance may have convergent views and practices in many respects, but they are different organisations by their nature, object and consequently, requirements for membership."

Romanian President Ion Iliescu has called for the EU to set up a special fund to train his country's civil servants in a bid to help it catch up in accession negotiations.