A NEW PROTOCOL FOR DKMT


The Euroregion Danube - Kris - Mures - Tisza was founded in 1997 and operates on the basis of a Cooperation Protocol signed by nine local authority presidents (eight county councils and an autonomous region) from Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia. As a true historical document, the Protocol proved strong support towards the creation of the first cross border institutions and developed intense relations between local administrations situated on different sides of the borders.
During the last years, the political and administrative initiatives promoted, were joined by a development of cross border cooperation between NGOs.
An assessment of the stage of DKMT cross border cooperation, called Civic Involvement and Responsibility made in 2001 with the support of America's Development Foundation and United States Agency for International Development by a group of experts at the initiative of The Third Europe Foundation, Timisoara shows that within the Euroregion, the participation of the civic sector - as regarding involved resources and invested funds - is already comparable with the political-administrative sector participation.
Despite this, the capacity of the civic organizations to influence upon the decisions taken at the DKMT Euroregion coordination organism level is almost nonexistent. In The President's Forum, the forum which reunites the nine local authority presidents there is no representative of the civic sector. Moreover, the collected resources for developing cross border cooperation, either from local taxes or international programs are orientated exclusively towards the local authority initiatives. According to the same mentioned assessment the border institutions of DKMT Euroregion, especially those of coordination and control are exclusivistic, nontransparent and do not assume responsibilities.

Starting from these problems the Euroregional Centre for Democracy and The Third Europe Foundation developed an advocacy project of medium length called DKMT - A Citizenship Euroregion, with the aim of strengthening the public - private partnership at the cross border institutions level. The main objective of the project refers to adopting a new cross border cooperation Protocol which stipulates the change the cooperation's coordination organism, The President's Forum, in a Coordination Council which will co-opt civic sector representatives too. Another important objective is the creation of an Euroregional fund which can also be accessed by non-governmental initiatives.
The first phase of DKMT - A Citizen's Euroregion project, which took place during January - March 2002 focused upon creating the first coalition of non-governmental organizations from DKMT. During February and March in Timisoara, Novi Sad and Szeged there were three meetings of civic sector representatives from Romanian, Serbian and Hungarian parts of DKMT in which non-governmental organizations considered a common strategy to strengthen the public-private partnership at the level ofcross border institutions. At the end of the three meetings which gathered more than 80 non-governmental organizations, a resolution which requests the modification of the DKMT Cooperation Protocol was adopted. By accessing this site, other organizations from the cross border area could get information about the project development and could subscribe to the resolution.
The DKMT Euroregional meeting of non-governmental organizations will take place on March 23, in Timisoara and will take into discussion the objectives reached so far and the project's second phase development strategies. At the same meeting, the 50 invited organizations will debate the proposed modifications to the Protocol and will adopt a common petition containing the civic sector's requests which will be handed out to the President in Office of the DKMT Euroregion, Mr. Dan Ioan Sipos.

We invite all organizations that would like to support this initiative to subscribe by filling in the form at http://dkmt.regionalnet.org/Mail.htm