Soeharto scheduled to visit war-torn Sarajevo this week
Soeharto scheduled to visit war-torn Sarajevo this week
JAKARTA (JP): President Soeharto will visit Sarajevo on an overseas this week that will also take him to Copenhagen and Zagreb, Minister/State Secretary Moerdiono announced yesterday.
Soeharto is scheduled to spend three hours in the besieged capital of Bosnia Herzegovina on March 13, Moerdiono told reporters after meeting with the head of state at his Jl. Cendana residence.
The United Nations peacekeeping force in Bosnia has guaranteed the safety of the President and his entourage, he said, adding that Soeharto would be flown aboard a UN plane from Zagreb to Sarajevo for the visit.
In Sarajevo, Soeharto, who is the chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), will meet with Bosnian leaders "to obtain first- hand information" about the situation in the country that has been ravaged by civil war for the last four years.
In Zagreb, Soeharto will meet with Croatian government leaders, largely to discuss the prospect of economic cooperation between the two countries, Moerdiono said. A group of Indonesian business executives will join the entourage there.
Soeharto played host to Bosnian President Elija Izetbegovic in January 1994, Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Siladjzic in March 1994 and Croatia's Prime Minister Nikica Valentic last January.
It was during Soeharto's chairmanship of the 111-nation NAM that Serb-dominated Yugoslavia was expelled from the movement in 1992. The old Yugoslavia, then including Bosnia and Croatia, was one of the founding members of NAM in 1962.
Soeharto and his entourage will leave Jakarta tomorrow for Copenhagen where he will attend the World Conference on Social Development, which got underway in the Danish capital yesterday.
He will be one of 130 national leaders attending the summit, the fourth in a series of five summits sponsored by the United Nations.
Soeharto attended the first of them, the Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992 but missed the next three: the human rights summit in Vienna in 1993, the summit on natural disaster reduction n Yokohama, Japan, and the summit on population in Cairo, both in 1994. The fifth summit will be on women, slated to be held in Beijing in September.
Soeharto's entourage to Copenhagen will include First Lady Mrs. Tien Soeharto, Minister of Foreign Affairs Ali Alatas, Moerdiono and Nana Sutresna, the chief executive assistant to NAM chairman. Already departing in advance were Coordinating Minister of People's Welfare Azwar Anas and Minister of Social Services Inten Suweno, who are heading the Indonesian delegation to the ministerial-level meeting.
Soeharto's entourage to Croatia and Bosnia will be reduced slightly but will still include Alatas and Moerdiono.
Moerdiono said the Copenhagen summit will focus on eradicating poverty and improving productivity and social integration, all of which echo Indonesia's own development program.
"I think the topics of the summit complement with the underlying thoughts in Indonesia and the programs that we have been carrying out for the past 25 years," he said.
Soeharto has also lined up a series of bilateral meetings with other leaders who are attending the summit in Copenhagen.
They include the presidents of Argentina, Algeria, Turkey, Poland and Ukraine, the prime ministers of China and Bangladesh, and the foreign minister of Iran, who is representing his president.
There will also be a luncheon by the host nation that will present a chance for Asian leaders attending the summit to meet, Moerdiono said.
Soeharto will take part in a meeting with nine of the world's most populous countries to follow up on their meeting in New Delhi last year that proposed education for all their citizens. This upcoming meeting is at the initiative of the United Nations Education and Scientific Organization (Unesco).
From Copenhagen, Soeharto will make his way to Zagreb and then a brief stopover in Sarajevo. He is scheduled to return to Jakarta on March 14. (emb)