Great initiatives of the prospective Eurasia

 On October 29, 2011 the VIII session of the Eurasia Section Council took place. One of the major results of the session has become the extension of the Eurasian Section. Nizhny Novgorod, Comrat (Moldova), Jalal-Abad (Kyrgyzstan)  and the Public noncommercial organisation “Far Eastern Tatar Congress” have become the new members of the organisation.  UCLG Co-president, the President of the UCLG Eurasian Section, the Mayor of Kazan Ilsur Metshin, presented the new members with the UCLG Eurasia Membership Certificates.

The Mayor of Comrat, Nikolay Dudoglo expressed gratitude to the new members for joining the Organization’s Section. He emphasized the importance of the participation and membership in the international organizations as the means inducing the city’s recognition. Nikolay Dudoglo expressed high hopes for the future of the organisation and emphasized the importance of the city’s unification in reaching the common goals.

The Vice-Mayor of Jalal-Abad warmly remarked “We are very glad to join the family of the Eurasian cities and we believe that the participation in ULCG projects and programmes will enable getting precious experience and become recognizable in the world”.

The regional sections of the World Organisation “The United cities and local governments” actively cooperate between each other and exchange their experience. The support of the Mid Eastern Section is a good testimony of such.

Secretary General of UCLG-MEWA Mehmet Duman attended the UCLG Eurasian Section meeting and addressed the participants with the greeting speech on behalf of UCLG President, the Mayor of Istanbul, Kadir Topbas.

“In the modern globalised world, only the unified voice of the international community can be heard. This is why the activity of our organisation has become even more important than ever before. Our activity has to be conductive to the development of the local democracy, the equality of human right and cooperation between the state, regions and local governments at the world stage”

 «I would like to take the opportunity to express our striving at realizing the programmes and projects that will be developed in cooperation with the Eurasian and MEWA sections as two kindred organizations. I hope and strongly believe we can make miracles together and can make a significant difference”.

The importance of these goals was also emphasized by the Mayor of Grozny, Muslim Huchiev who told the participants how the membership in UCLG helped the city to gain the international recognition.

 «Our city is not perceived as a trouble spot any more. The tourist inflow has increased. More over, we received the UN-Habitat Scroll of Honour Award. And for this we are thankful to the UCLG Eurasian Section and personally to Ilsur Metshin who takes active part in the work of our organisation”.

The Mayor also emphasized the importance of the work in collaboration with mass media in the issues of cities’ activities advocacy.

For the realization of this project the Mayor of Kazan made a suggestion for Kazan to host the Eurasian cities press-services meeting in Kazan in 2012. This meeting will be conductive to Eurasian cities cooperation, as well as to the information exchange

Furthermore, at today's meeting of UCLG Eurasian   section the report on the organization’s activities in 2010-2011 was listened to, and the changes to the Statute were made. Thus, the name of the Section was changed from formerly being Euro-Asian. Due to the constant expansion of the geography of UCLG participants, and the Section in particular, it was decided to rename it to the Eurasian. The relevance of this decision emphasizes the recent initiative of the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation V. Putin to create the Eurasian Union. This means the organization keeps pace with the modern world processes.

The particular attention was paid to the role of the Internet resources of the Eurasian cities. The results of the Eurasian cities website analyses were provided showing that Kazakhstan and Russia have the best internet resources. The local governments in such countries as Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Armenia use Internet resources exceptionally seldom. There are no websites of the small towns as the survey has shown. This analysis has revealed a lot of other drawbacks, the main of which are:  the outdates information, the lack of the contact and budget information, empty columns and the absence of the English version of the sites. The UCLG co-president Ilsur Metshin called the cities attention towards creation of high-quality informational-full municipal cities and remarked that the absence of the English website version significantly hinders the inflow of investments and tourists.

Among other issues, the participants discussed the question of the next venue for the General Assembly and the Council of Eurasian Section. The decision was on Kazan hosting the next meeting in summer 2012.

15.11.2011

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