Greek official visits minority areas, meets with top Albanian officials

TIRANA, April 14 – Deputy Foreign Minister Theodoros Kassimis held a four-day tour of Albania which included visits to minority area villages following his talks in Tirana with Albanian leaders.
His first stop was in two villages in the Sarande region.
Kassimis and the Greek delegation visited a Greek-language school, appropriately named “Homer”, in the coastal area of Himare, where75 local children learn Greek.
He also met with Bollano.
Kassimis had earlier met with Albanian prime minister Sali Berisha and with labor, social issues and equal opportunity minister Koco Barka, who is of Greek descent, shortly before leaving Tirana to tour Greek minority villages.
Berisha thanked the Greek government for its assistance to Albania and for undertaking the publication of text books for the Greek minority schools, and pledged that dialogue would begin soon on replacing or amending the geography and history books taught in Albanian schools, which have been deemed unacceptable by Greece, stressing that “education must help us look to the future rather than the past”.
He also expressed appreciation for Greece’s contribution to the Sagiada-Konispol-Sarande Corridor road project, which is co-funded by the Hellenic Plan for the Economic Reconstruction of the Balkans (HiPERB), under which nearly 50 million Euros are earmarked for Albania with some 30 million to fund the Corridor project.
Berisha further asked Kassimis to convey to Greek prime minister Costas Karamanlis an invitation to pay a formal visit to Albania.
Berisha expressed satisfaction with “the progress in our bilateral relations also in matters concerning both the Greek minority in Albania and the Albanian economic immigrants in Greece” adding, “we will, as friends, jointly continue this progress in the future”.
Kassimis said it had been ascertained once again that the two governments reflect the desire of their two peoples for a common future, adding that one of the top items of discussion had been the strengthening of the education activity of the Greek minority in Albania and “we noted with pleasure that a solution to the few problems of the past has already been set in motion, so that, unhampered by the past, we can head together to an optimistic and auspicious future”.
Officials from both countries had also discussed Albania’s EU aspirations.
Kassimis later met with education and science minister Genc Pollo, with whom an agreement was reached to move ahead with an inventory of the infrastructure needs of minority schools so improvements can be made with Greece’s assistance, and with Parliament Speaker Jozefina Topalli, who stressed that the goal of the country’s parliament is to develop closer ties with the Hellenic Parliament and, in that framework, asked Kassimis to convey an invitation to Greek Parliament president Dimitris Sioufas to visit Albania.
Kassimis expressed the belief that the contribution of the Greek minority and PBDNJ to Albania’s progress is very important to the development and future of the country, and he did not hide his satisfaction at the significant steps that have been taken to protect the rights of the Greek minority.