BY ERDAL SAFAK
SABAH- The Caucasus is the world's most sinister region, and also its most critical. As long as instability dominates the region, which holds the key to nearly half the world energy reserves as producer or carrier and thus has become an area for great powers to settle scores, the world can never be at peace. Remember then President Suleyman Demirel's 1999 proposal for a Caucasus stability pact made at an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) summit in Istanbul ? Demirel also championed a similar Balkan stability pact, which became a reality.
Today I'll tell you how that pact has transformed the Balkans. In June 1999, when the United Nations Security Council ended the Kosovo conflict and the NATO bombings of Belgrade , the foreign ministers of 38 countries, including Turkey , and representatives of 15 international organizations met in Cologne at the urging of the European Union and accepted the establishment of a Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe (the Western Balkans). Representatives of the same parties met in Sarajevo that July and officially laid the pact's de facto foundation. The pact covered Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Moldavia, Montenegro and Serbia.
The pact was designed not as an international institution, but a framework agreement envisaging a comprehensive initiative to prevent future conflicts. The striking principle of the agreement was ensuring that it benefit all parties on the basis of transparency and equality. Its basic aim was to establish the desire and will to live together, because without this, the Balkans will have neither democracy nor peace. Another important point is that countries and international organizations funding democracy and safety there didn't tie the use of these funds to any precondition such as providing improvement in this or that area.
The pact covered three areas:
1. Democratization and human rights: cooperation among parliaments in the region, local democracy, and projects for cross-border cooperation.
2. Economic reconstruction, cooperation and development: energy, regional infrastructure, commercial legislation, investment and employment.
3. Security issues: fighting crime and corruption, migration, and cooperation in the face of natural disasters.
The pact, which tightly bound the Balkan countries together through cooperation agreements at every level and in every area, had many consequences. I'll run down the most important ones:
1. Under one of its most important aims, eliminating customs barriers, 32 free trade agreements were signed and later integrated into the Central European Free Trade Agreement.
2. Many initiatives to fight organized crime and strengthen border controls were implemented to improve justice and security.
3. Important investments were made to improve the region's transportation network.
4. The legal groundwork was laid to tie together regional countries' electricity and natural gas networks.
Now, thanks to the pact, the Balkans is more politically and economically stable. The importance of regional cooperation at every level and in every area has been internalized by the region's governments and societies. As a matter of fact, thanks to this success, the pact completed its mission and was superseded by a regional cooperation council. So why shouldn't this magic formula, which brought democracy, stability and welfare to the Balkans, be tried in the Caucasus ? What's more, countries of the Caucasus have an advantage: 20 years ago they lived under one state, the Soviet Union , and spoke the same language and shared the same fate, and there were no borders between them.