Remarks by U.S. Ambassador Marcie B. Ries at Marshall Center Adriatic Charter Conference (19 September 2006)

Mr. Prime Minister, Minister Mediu, Minister Olldashi, Dr. Rose, Major General Schmalfeld, Ambassador Annen, and honored guests:

Thank you very much Major General for the kind introduction, and thank you to the Marshall Center and its collaborators, the Albanian Ministries of Defense and Interior, for the invitation to speak. It is a pleasure to be here and to see so many distinguished alumni of the Marshall Center’s excellent programs with whom we work very closely.

I would like to extend my greetings to our colleagues from the region. If this is your first visit to Tirana, I hope it will be the first of many.

This conference is very timely for the Adriatic Charter countries.

It has been an exciting and promising year in the NATO membership process, filled with high-profile visits and meetings, including Vice President Cheney’s participation in the Dubrovnik gathering last spring.

The topics to be discussed at this conference are closely related to the prospects for NATO membership for a number of reasons.

For one, besides being a military alliance, NATO is a community of values, and one of the most important values its members share is respect for the rule of law and the importance placed on accountable, transparent government institutions.

This underlies NATO’s strength and lends credibility and legitimacy to the work it does, such as peacekeeping, humanitarian work, and fighting terrorism.

Second, and more practically, one cannot envision military and political cooperation on regional and global security issues, such as terrorism, in the absence of secure borders. There is also a need for state agencies equipped to combat organized crime and illicit trafficking that are accountable to government and play a vital role.

This is why creating a culture of accountability, transparency, lawfulness, and indeed, pride, in all state institutions is so important.

It is only with such a culture in place that corruption can be rooted out, and that economic development and the foreign investment that is so critical to it can truly move forward.

U.S. Embassy Tirana, Albania Ambasada e Sh.B.A. në Tiranë, Shqipëri

The existence of corruption allows organized crime and trafficking to flourish, and the existence of these phenomena, in turn, directly affects the prospects for regional security.

Your governments have made great progress in these areas, but work certainly remains. Since crime and trafficking transcend national borders, close collaboration and dialogue among the Adriatic Charter countries and their neighbors is critical. I hope that some of the people you meet here today will be your close collaborators in the future. One of the most important things you will be doing is sharing your best practices. Measures that you have proven to be successful in your countries.

The hard work of dismantling criminal networks and creating a strong culture of respect for the rule of law must be done by you.

We regard and have always regarded the people of the Balkans as sharing our values of freedom, human rights, and democratic governance. As such, we are committed to the goals of security, stability, democracy, prosperity and of course NATO and EU membership for the entire Balkan region, and we will continue to work in this direction with our allies.

With that, I wish you a productive conference and thank you again for the invitation to join you here today.

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