ITALY, E.EUROPE VOW TO FIGHT ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

Views on BG | November 23, 2001, Friday // 00:00

Reuters

By Jane Barrett

Italy and its central and eastern European partners vowed on Thursday to crack down on illegal immigration and work together to fight terrorism and organized crime.

Italian Foreign Minister Renato Ruggiero, part of a government team hosting the Central European Initiative (CEI) summit, said he and his counterparts had discussed bringing down international barriers, but also controlling them.

``Cracking down on illegal immigration is one of our goals. Strengthening our efforts against human trafficking is essential in the fight for fundamental human rights,'' Ruggiero told a press conference during the summit.

Illegal immigration is a topic of heated discussion in Italy. Notoriously anti-immigrant Reform Minister Umberto Bossi has even suggested building a wall along Italy's border with Slovenia to keep out unwanted immigrants.
In recent weeks, the problem of thousands of people flooding through Italy's porous borders each year has been linked by some to the threat of terrorism and suspicion that Italy harbors so-called ``terrorist sleeper cells.''

``The fight against terrorism needs great collaboration between all our countries,'' Ruggiero said. ``We must create financial and judicial structures to exchange the information necessary to give the war against terror a pan-European dimension.''

Ruggiero said the 17-country CEI would also work to create an international network from Sicily to Ukraine to battle organized crime and drug trafficking.

The CEI is made up of EU members Italy and Austria along with Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania -- all in talks to join the bloc.

The other members, Albania, Belarus, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Moldova, Ukraine and Yugoslavia, must not be left out in the non-EU cold, Ruggiero said.

``We must overcome barriers, pushing political, economic and cultural relations out to the east, to the extreme limits of what can be called Europe,'' he said.

Ruggiero said he hoped the Kosovo election of moderate ethnic Albanian Ibrahim Rugova would ``bear positive fruit and develop in a satisfying way for the Balkan region as a whole.''

``Let's hope this will contribute to the region's stability,'' he said.

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