NATO investing in Balkan countries

NATO investing in Balkan countries

The Alliance is restoring bridges and improving the infrastructure to assist regional countries.

EUFOR troops in Bosnia and Herzegovina demine a strip of land to enable infrastructure development. [Bedrana Kaletovic/SETimes]

NATO is beginning co-operation with regional governments on projects to restore and reinforce the transportation infrastructure in the Balkans, officials said.

In Macedonia, NATO is funding a project to reconstruct bridges based on a memorandum of understanding the Alliance signed with the Macedonian transport and communications ministry.

Officials said NATO reconstructed 51 bridges in the first two of the project's three phases. The beginning of the third phase was set for last November on the Veles-Katlanovo route of the European Transportation Corridor 10.

This year, NATO will finish reconstructing 13 bridges in projects that cost about 9 million euros, said Mile Janakieski, Macedonia transport and communications minister.

"The entire reconstruction of the bridges should be finished by September 2015," Janakieski said.

NATO reached an agreement with Macedonia in 2005 to reconstruct all bridges it has used on the road from the Macedonian-Greek border to Kosovo during and after the 1999 Kosovo conflict.

"The bridges were damaged due to the frequency of the NATO vehicles. Their repair is an act of goodwill toward a country that should have become a part of NATO even in 2008," Vlado Buckovski, former prime minister of Macedonia who signed the agreement with NATO, told SETimes.

In Kosovo, NATO's KFOR troops are building bridges, paving roads and making tunnels.

KFOR built a new temporary military bridge in Rakovina last...