Kosovo Defence Minister visits Tirana, Peleshi: Mutual investments in the field of Defence

Published: Thursday, 26 August 2021 21:11

 

Albania and Kosovo will significantly strengthen the cooperation in the field of Defense and Security. The news was given by the ministers of the two countries during the official visit in Tirana of the Defence Minister of Kosovo Armend Mehaj, where was received with honor by his counterpart Niko Peleshi.

First, Minister Peleshi thanked Minister Mehaj for the assistance given by the troops of the Kosovo Security Force in extinguishing fires this month in Kukes region and later on he made public the ambitions of the two countries to significantly increase the cooperation among their forces.

“Following the talks and discussions in the official visit happening in May of this year, today we talked about more intensive and greater integration in the field of education. We have a project and an ambition to re-dimension our Armed Forces Academy, to bring it to another level. In order to approach the best models, we are mainly oriented by the West Point model in the USA. The keyword of today's meeting was complementarity or smart defense. Both in the field of education and in the field of our capacity’s maintenance, in the field of intelligence, and certainly in many other fields, there is a lot of space moving to a new approach, to complementarity. Particularly, joining the forces, and economizing them in order to avoid doing the same thing, the same investment not necessary to be developed in our two countries. "Even beyond, not only between Albania and Kosovo but also among other countries in the region,", -said Minister Peleshi.

While the Defence Minister of the Republic of Kosovo, Armend Mehaj provided further details regarding the cooperation in the field of military education and confirmed collaboration in mutual investments.

"We have also agreed with the Defence Minister to increase our cooperation concerning education. Kosovo should have the education of high military school while Albania that of the military university. Synchronization of education should be within our countries. We also talked about more mutual cooperation concerning military equipment so that in the future there will be no investments on both sides or in the whole region, once in Kosovo, once in Albania, and once in Macedonia or Montenegro, in order to be more synchronized and to collaborate helping each other when necessary or if maintenance is required.” , - stressed Minister Mehaj.

The two ministers also pledged to make reciprocal visits much more frequently.