Your Excellency, dear Mr. Ambassador,
Dear Colleagues,
Today we accept, from the hands of the plenipotentiary representative of the State of Israel to CICA, a voluntary contribution, which this distinguished Member State has decided to make to CICA.
We highly appreciate and welcome Israel’s decision. I am sure that this contribution will facilitate further progress of CICA in the upcoming 2023, along with other contributions from the Member States, and will serve to achieve the goals and objectives of our organization, including the tasks that were set before us by the recent Sixth CICA Summit in Astana.
The contribution of your state, dear Ambassador, testifies to the importance that your government attaches to interaction within CICA. Moreover, the contributions of Israel and other Member States are explicit evidence that they see a great future for CICA, strong prospects in solving urgent problems and overcoming the challenges of the vast Asian continent. And I have no doubt that by joint efforts we will be able to make significant progress along this path.
In the coming year, CICA is expected to come up with ambitious plans. The Kazakh Chairmanship was mandated by the Member States to develop a road map for transformation into a full-fledged international organization, which, we hope, the CICA Members will be able to finalize and agree on by the end of the next year. The draft CICA Plan of Implementation of Confidence Building Measures and Provisional Calendar for 2023, which the Member States will consider next week, contains about 40 different events, including the traditional Informal Ministerial Meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. Therefore, voluntary contributions are more than welcome.
Dear Ambassador, let me once again express our appreciation for this voluntary contribution and kindly ask you to convey our sincere gratitude to the Government of Israel for this decision.
I would like to propose a toast to the strengthening and development of confidence building measures and to the successful interaction of the Asian states in CICA!
