Budapest, 30/05/2001 (Agence Europe) - Foreign ministers of NATO and the EU met for the first time during a North Atlantic Council-General Affairs Council (NAC-GAC) in Budapest on 30 May without resolving the issue of Turkish blockage of EU access to NATO assets. NATO Secretary General George Robertson, Javier Solana, the EU's High Representative for the European Common Foreign and Security Policy, and Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, representing the EU presidency, downplayed this, instead emphasising the historic nature of the NAC-GAC meeting and the success of NATO-EU cooperation.
Robertson said the Turkish issue was still being worked on and Lindh added that it would be solved soon. NATO officials were already saying before the NAC-GAC meeting that if there was no agreement in Budapest, it would not be the end of the world and that discussions would continue during the NATO defence ministers' meetings in two weeks, on 7 June, and during the 13 June NATO summit meeting. French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine said there was no logical reason for blockage. Reports that Turkey had already agreed to a solution on guaranteed access for the EU to NATO planning and assets were thus denied, although officials did evoke the possibility of an agreement of principle to be developed until the summit with Mr Bush, in two weeks' time.
Lindh said that NATO-EU cooperation was working well in practice. Robertson and Lindh cited as an example of successful cooperation efforts by NATO and the EU to manage the crisis in Macedonia. Lindh referred to the four-party agreement brokered by Solana, on 29 May in Skopje, whose role was praised by ministers during the NAC-GAC meeting. (We shall come back to this in greater detail).
On 30 May in Budapest, NATO and the EU published after the joint meeting of foreign ministers a joint press statement from the EU Presidency and the NATO Secretary General on the Western Balkans.