RIYADH, 25 January — A senior diplomat has called on the European Commission to set up a coordinating office in Saudi Arabia in the model of the EU offices in Norway and Australia to boost GCC-EU cooperation. The move will be a big step in consolidating EU's relations with the Gulf region.
Austrian Ambassador Dr. Harald Wiesner said a EU representative office here would help coordinate efforts of the EU countries in providing a 'road map' to the GCC-EU relations. Though all EU countries except Luxembourg have their missions in Riyadh, they fail to unify their efforts in the absence of a coordinating office.
The move will also give a fillip to the economic relations. The Gulf Cooperation Council is the fifth largest trading partner of EU with the two-way trade amounting to $35 billion in 1999. The EU states purchase 47 percent of its total oil needs from the GCC. Wiesner said the opening of an office would also ensure more EU involvement in the Middle East peace process.
The diplomat said Austrian President Dr. Thomas Klestil would visit the Kingdom later this year following an invitation from Crown Prince Abdullah, deputy premier and commander of the National Guard. The two sides are working to find out a mutually convenient date for this high-profile visit, he said.
Referring to commercial relations between Riyadh and Vienna, Wiesner said the draft of the investment protection treaty, approved recently by the Saudi Council of Ministers, was ready to be signed by the two countries. The endorsement of this investment protection agreement will encourage businessmen in the two countries to invest in joint projects.
He, however, called on the two countries to hold regular political and commercial consultations. He said Austria had strongly supported Saudi Arabia's bid to join the World Trade Organization.
On cultural cooperation, the diplomat said that over 250 volumes of Arabic manuscripts had been recently discovered in Austria, which would shed new light on the historical ties between the two sides as they dated back to between 14th and 16th centuries.
He said the Austrian government was seriously considering a project to study these manuscripts with the help of Arab scholars as part of its program to build an intellectual bridge between the Arab World and Austria. He said he was currently holding talks with the Deputy Ministry of Antiquities and Museums on the project. The rare Arabic collections are preserved at the Vienna-based Austrian National Library.
