MUNICH - The 40th Munich Security Conference which was held in Munich, Germany ended on Sunday.
National Defense Minister Vecdi Gonul who attended the conference said that NATO Summit which would be held in Istanbul was very important.
Noting that the summit in Istanbul would be the first one after the summit in Prague, Gonul said that seven countries would join NATO in this summit.
Gonul said that those countries would take part in decisions as full members of NATO in the summit in Istanbul and noted, ''this will be the biggest expansion of NATO in its history. Decisions on transformation process of NATO will be taken in the summit in Turkey.''
Stating that Afghanistan, Iraq, Balkans, Israel-Palestine problem and fight against terrorism were brought onto the agenda in the conference, Gonul added that but a consensus could not be reached on definition of terrorism.
Gonul said that he met with defense ministers of Slovenia, Romania, Norway, Ukraine, Georgia, Lithuania and Russia during the conference.
When he was reminded of the statement of Russian Defense Minister Sergey Ivanov who said that Turkish citizens were seen in Chechnya, Gonul said, ''he said those people were Turkish citizens. It is a determination rather than an accusation. It is known that there have been passages of people between Turkey and Russia from time to time. Are those called as militants or someone else? Their definition should be made by taking into consideration the incidents.''
Gonul said that they were in great effort to carry the relations between Turkey and Russia in the best way and noted, ''we have commercial and political relations with Russia, it is the biggest neighboring country of us. The security issues are discussed between the Interior Ministries of the two countries, I don't have detailed information about these issue.''
National Defense Minister Gonul will return to Turkey the same day.
(EÖ-Öª) 08.02.2004