August 2, 2015

A look at some of the main stories in Romania today

România Internațional, 02.08.2015, 12:00

Romania, together with Germany
and Bulgaria, proposed a revised Black Sea strategy that may constitute a first
step towards creating a European Union Black Sea strategy, said Romania’s foreign
minister Bogdan Aurescu. In an interview to Realitatea TV channel on Saturday,
he said Romania also proposed the creation of a new strategy to approach NATO’s
eastern and southern partners in the run up to the NATO summit in Warsaw in
2016. Aurescu also said that Romania is not a target for Russia because the
former is a member of NATO and an attack on Romania is tantamount to an attack
against NATO.

The situation of the Tartar population in the Crimean Peninsula, which
was annexed by Russia last year, was the main topic of the World Congress of
Tartars held in Ankara, Turkey. Around 500 delegations of Tartar organisations
from across the world, including Romania, attended the congress. They called on
the international community to step in and put an end to Russia’s undemocratic
actions against the ethnic Tartars in Crimea. The representatives of the
Democratic Union of Muslim Tartars in Romania reiterated their support for
finding a solution to the problems faced by the Tartars in Crimea. Most of
Romania’s 25,000 Tartars live in Dobruja, in the south-east, a province that
was under Ottoman rule for hundreds of years.

The European Commission supports
the resolution of the European Parliament on the recognition of the genocide
against the Roma during World War Two and the establishment of a Roma Holocaust
Memorial Day in Europe on the 2nd of August. In a message posted on
Saturday, Romania’s prime minister Victor Ponta said his government welcomes
the initiative of the Roma civil society in Romania to commemorate together
this tragic event in world history and urged all Romanian citizens to observe a
minute’s silence for the victims. On the 2nd of August 1944, almost
3,000 Roma men, women and children from the concentration camp in Auschwitz
were sent to the gas chambers by the Nazis. The Roma are the biggest ethnic
minority in Europe.

The Romanian
tennis player Patricia Maria Tig, no. 154 in the world, today lost the final of
the tennis tournament in Baku, Azerbaijan, worth 226,000 dollars. She was
defeated by Russia’s Margarita Gasparian, world no. 112, in three sets, 6-3,
5-7, 6-0. The qualification for the final in Baku is the Romanian player’s best
result yet. Tig and Gasparian faced each other only once before in a match won
by Gasparian in 2015 in France.

In Romania, the
drought has affected large surface areas covered by farming land and damaged at
least a quarter of this year’s crops, the president of the League of
Agricultural Producers Associations, Laurentiu Baciu, told Radio Romania. He said
corn crops have suffered the most, followed by sunflower and soybean crops.
Navigation on the Danube is slow, as the river’s level is very low. Its flow on
entry into Romania is half its normal level. 60 vessels have been blocked for
several days in Zimnicea, in the south.