Bulgaria and Romania call for UN support in the Black Sea region

Senior officials from Romania and Bulgaria have called on the United Nations to play an enhanced role in promoting democracy, regional peace and stability across the Black Sea area, saying that the recent conflict in Georgia epitomized some of the challenges facing the region.

According to the UN press service, Bulgarian Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev said that the UN's experience in peacemaking and conflict prevention could be put to good use in the Black Sea region.

PM Stanishev said that the fighting in South Ossetia, which has broken away from Georgia, provided "ample evidence" of the need to deal with unresolved conflicts sooner rather than later.

"Should the plans for a regional center for UN mediation in the Western Balkans/Black Sea area meet approval by member states, Bulgaria stands ready to host it in Sofia, and to facilitate in every possible way its activities in Southeast Europe, in the South Caucasus and other neighboring areas," Stanishev said.

Romanian Foreign Minister Lazar Comanescu, meanwhile, told the UN General Assembly that the benefits that would flow from a more stable region would be enormous.

"If we take a closer look we see a region with a large population, an important hub for energy and transport flows, a great economic potential," Comanescu said.

Comanescu added that the conflict in August in Georgia's breakaway South Ossetia region, "with its reverberations in Abkhazia and the entire state of Georgia and beyond, should focus the attention of the international community on all protracted conflicts in the area, including Transnistria and Nagorno-Karabakh."

Clive Leviev-Sawyer

This is an edited version of an article originally published in The Sofia Echo