Speaking at the fourth ECO Ministerial Meeting in Tehran on Tuesday, President Pezeshkian called the organization the heir to decades of efforts, synergy, and practice of its members for economic convergence.
“Success in regional economic cooperation requires, among other things, solid, predictable, stable, and resilient common frameworks and platforms,” he added.
He urged the countries of Central Asia, the Caucasus, South Asia, West Asia, and the Persian Gulf, including the ECO member states, “to establish and implement a coherent, endogenously stable and development-oriented security architecture.”
Founded in 1985 by Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan, the ECO has since expanded to include Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Today, it serves as a major platform for regional economic integration.
Elsewhere in his speech, President Pezeshkian stated that the nations of the region are a “valuable platform for dialogue, exchange of experiences, and synergy in all fields.”
One of the unfinished tasks in ECO, he said, “is the creation of an ECO police force called ECOPOL, the process of which has not yet been finalized.”
According to the president, the ECO region is “one of the few regions in the world that does not have a joint police force.”
“This gap, in addition to intra-regional vulnerabilities, has prevented the optimal use of cooperation with other regional police forces and international police,” he said.
“Our region and surrounding areas have not been immune to foreign attacks,” he said, adding that the largest foreign intervention in contemporary history has taken place in this region.
Referring to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Pezeshkian lamented that the “largest occupation of the century” continues near our region after about 8 decades.
“The most heinous genocide and crime against humanity in the world has occurred in the West Asia region and in Gaza by the occupying regime in the last two years,” he added.
The president warned that “there is a great thirst among the international extremists and norm-breakers for presence and intervention in our region and our peripheral regions.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: ifpnews.com
