Macedonia and Montenegro Want to Join Rail Alliance with Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia
BalkanTravellers.com
Macedonia wants to join the alliance, created by the three former Yugoslav states 20 years after the dissolution of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, to which they all belonged, according to General Manager of Macedonian Railways Oliver Derkovski.
The idea is for “a new legal body, whose headquarters will be in Slovenia,” he explained to regional media.
Montenegro would also like to be a part of the joint project of the countries from the Corridor N10, which runs between Salzburg in Austria and Thessaloniki in Greece and passes through Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia and Greece, Andrija Lompar, the country’s Minister of Sea and Transportation, announced.
According to media reports, Lompar met with Serbian infrastructure Milutin Mrkonjić in the Montenegrin town of Kotor.
The desire of Macedonia and Montenegro to join the alliance will be discussed in a founding meeting which will take place in Belgrade on September 8.
The rail connections between the former Yugoslav countries, which were severely interrupted and entirely halted during the 1990s wars, continue to be in need of improvement. Some routes are only being reinstated now, nearly two decades after they were stopped, as was the case with the train between Belgrade and Sarajevo.
Meanwhile, another publication argued that this and other projects involving cooperation between the Western Balkan states were not driven by sentimental Yugo-nostalgia or conspiracy attempts, as many claim, but rather by pure financial interest.
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