Romania, Pakistan have uninterrupted ties for 56 years

Islamabad:Ambassador of Romania to Pakistan Nicolae Goia has said Romania and Pakistan established diplomatic relations in 1964, we have had uninterrupted diplomatic ties for 56 years, during which Romania has contributed to the development of Pakistani economy by building cement factories in Labelled and Kohat, refineries in Karachi, tractor assembly factory near Islamabad and many other projects in various fields.

The Romanian ambassador expressed these views in an exclusive interview with DNA.He further said, ‘we have tradition, we have many success stories, and we have all the necessary ingredients to reset our economic cooperation to a much higher level that it is right now’.

He further said as the ambassador of Romania he will put high on his agenda laying down the foundation for increasing the people to people contact, work system so that our expertise in the fields like construction, infrastructure, insurance, banking and finance, MSE etc. will be transferred to our Pakistani partners. We are going to encourage Romanian businessmen to invest in Pakistan, we will support the process of training young Pakistani in Romania.

Talking about bilateral political relations between Romania and Pakistan he said they are from cordial to excellent. An important number of high level visits on both sides have given impetus to these relations.

“We aim to expand our bilateral political dialogue and keep in mind that the consultations between Ministries of Foreign Affairs are becoming instrumental in promoting and supporting the mutually beneficial items on our common agenda, as well as in preparing high level contacts”.

The economic and trade relations between both countries have been growing for the last decades and Romania is an important trading partner of Pakistan. Both countries have been enjoying historical friendship and traditional cooperation in many fields for the past many years but there is a need to enhance trade volume between booth countries. Our main priority is to increase and diversify the commercial exchanges between Romania and Pakistan, in a balanced manner for exports and imports, Ambassador Goia added.

Talking about COVID situation in his country the ambassador said, in 2020 COVID-19 affected almost all countries and more than 50 million people around the world. It has governments operating in a context of radical uncertainty, and faced with difficult trade-offs given the health, economic and social challenges it raises.

By spring 2020, more than half of the world’s population had experienced a lockdown with strong containment measures. Beyond the health and human tragedy of the coronavirus, it is now widely recognized that the pandemic triggered the most serious economic crisis since World War II.

‘Our countries are facing unprecedented challenges from COVID-19 the strain on our governments is extreme, and the impact on people all over the world continues to grow’.He said, nowadays, there is a strong need to strengthen the international economic cooperation and, simultaneously, to reconstruct the traditional relationship with the old friends, Pakistan among them.

Besides the bilateral cooperation through mutual investments, we are also interested to find options of working together on the third markets where, Romania and Pakistan might conjugate their resources and energies in the most constructive way. This is, unfortunately, a domain which had been somehow neglected lately because of focusing on the internal reconstruction of economy.

Romania and Pakistan do have common areas of interest both geographically (Near East, Northern Africa etc.) and thematically (the common interest of developing sectors as IT and communications, civil constructions and infrastructure, agriculture etc.).

Our priorities, bilaterally, but also at EU level, are to support the democratic evolution of Pakistan, to intensify commercial trade and investments, and to consolidate regional stability, with special focus on the situation in Afghanistan.