'Asia Cooperation Dialogue, Turkiye’s Asia Anew initiative share goal of bringing nations together'

ANTALYA, Turkiye

Turkiye’s Asia Anew initiative supplements and complements the Asia Cooperation Dialogue (ACD), according to the group’s top official.

The aim of the Turkish initiative is to bring nations together, which is in line with the ACD’s own objectives, Pornchai Danvivathan, secretary-general of the ACD, told Anadolu Agency.

The Asia Anew initiative and the ACD are “in my view, supplementary and complementary to each other,” he said in an interview on the sidelines of the Antalya Diplomacy Forum recently held in Turkiye.

“The main concept of trying to consider all members together, as one, is something we can work on together,” he said.

When Ankara launched the Asia Anew initiative in 2019, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Turkiye was pushing to “further enhance its relations with Asia, which is becoming the world’s economic center, in multiple dimensions.”

The initiative is seen by experts as a step toward reshaping the future diplomacy of Turkiye, a country that straddles the two continents and, as Cavusoglu stressed at the time, “is a bridge between the East and the West.”

Pornchai also hailed Turkiye’s efforts during its tenure as ACD chair from 2019-2021, saying they helped pave the way for future cooperation.

“The Ankara Declaration on future cooperation perspectives was the main contribution of the Turkish chairmanship,” he said.

“Other than that, Turkiye also managed to host the first virtual conference of chambers of commerce and industry,” he added, referring to the 1st ACD Member Countries Chambers of Commerce and Industry Conference organized by the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkiye (TOBB) in January 2021.

This, he said, will “become a permanent mechanism for ACD to work closely with the private sector.”

During Ankara’s chairmanship, Nevsehir – the gateway to Turkiye’s picturesque Cappadocia region – was also declared the ACD’s tourism capital for 2022, he added.

Since its inception in 2002, the ACD, an intergovernmental forum with the objective of improving Asia’s global competitiveness, has opened its doors to 35 countries, the highest figure for any such group on the continent.

Pornchai stressed that the “quality” of the group’s members was one of its real successes.

“The value that we have is what we call the spirit of ACD, which works on the basis of consensus, where decision-making is done through consensus,” he said.

Other distinguishing features of the ACD are its “voluntariness … inclusiveness and also informality,” he added.