Holiday in Egypt, urges Poland’s foreign minister

Minister Sikorski with Egyptian Prime Minister Esam Szaraf; photo – PAP/Leszek Szymanski

Addressing a press conference in the Egyptian capital, Minister Sikorski said that Egyptian resorts are now safe for holidaymakers and that spending a vacation there is the most effective way to help that country’s economy and assist Egypt in its transition to democracy.

Poles are the fifth largest national group of tourists in Egypt, with some 600, 000 visitors there last year.

Referring to his talks with Egyptian Prime Minister Esam Szaraf and Foreign Minister Nabil el-Arabi earlier, Mr Sikorski said that Poland’s political transformations are seen in Egypt as a “model of success”.

He reiterated Poland’s commitment to assist Egypt in its aim to build a democratic state following the overthrow of the authoritarian regime of President Mubarak.

Today Sikorski is in Tunisia for talks with Prime Minister Bedji Kaid Essebsi and his counterpart Muled Kefi.

In May, Minister Sikorski wrote an article which spelled out how Poland’s experience of democratic transformation in the early 1990s could be of help to the ‘Arab Spring’.

“The former communist world made those choices 20 years ago. But very different choices – for better and for worse – were made in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, in the Baltic states, across the former Soviet Union, in Central Asia, and in East Germany. The results form a crucial database of experience. Today’s Arab reformers thus can draw on our successes – and avoid our mistakes,” he wrote.

Last month Sikorski was in the Libyan rebel held city of Benghazi, as a part of a humanitarian aid mission with the agreement of the EU’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton. Sikorski said that helping spread democracy in North Africa would be very much part of Poland’s EU presidency agenda, which begins on 1 July. (mk/pg)