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CPLP: Community Debates Cooperation with Community of Central African States

CPLP: Community Debates Cooperation with Community of Central African States

The Economic Community of Central African States and the Community of Portuguese-Language Countries (CPLP) on Wednesday discussed ways of cooperating in the political field, development of the Portuguese language and electoral observation commissions, officials from the organisations said.

After meeting with the executive secretary of the CPLP, Zacarias da Costa, at the CPLP headquarters in Lisbon, the chairman of the commission of the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), Gilberto Veríssimo, told Lusa that at the meeting they had decided to “appoint focal points” to work together to sign a “memorandum of understanding.

Recalling that the ECCAS has 11 member states, three of which are also members of the CPLP (Angola, Sao Tome and Principe and Equatorial Guinea) and a fourth, which is a candidate to be an associate observer of the CPLP, Rwanda, Veríssimo said, “We have four reasons to be together.

“That is why we have decided to appoint focal points from the two organisations, who will put us more in touch, to work on a memorandum of understanding agreement between the two organisations so that we can work together,” he added.

In this context, according to the president of ECCAS, “the political issue interests to both organizations, the stability and political development, at least in the three member states of the CPLP and effective members of ECCAS.

The training in Portuguese language is another aspect in which they may cooperate, said Zacarias da Costa and Gilberto Veríssimo, the latter reminding that “today Portuguese is already a working language of ECCAS, but it is not used”.

“Portuguese is not yet used in ECCAS and we are working with its president and his team, in order to have Portuguese as a working language” in the organisation, said Zacarias da Costa.

Recalling that Portuguese is already a working language in over 30 international organisations, the CPLP’s executive secretary said that the organisation “is working to ensure that this number can grow in the future.

Zacarias da Costa acknowledged that “dreaming of Portuguese as an official language of the United Nations is very difficult,” because “it represents an enormous financial effort,” but argued that it is possible to “increase the number of international organisations where Portuguese is at least a working language.

In ECCAS, Portuguese is already one of the working languages, but it is necessary to “make it concrete and this will only be possible by talking, dialoguing and cooperating, also training people, in order to carry forward this objective”, he pointed out.

“This is also a point on which we have said that we can work together in the training of trainers in Portuguese language”, stressed Gilberto Veríssimo.

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A third aspect in which the two organisations agreed that they should cooperate in the future is “in the field of election observation missions.

“We are working, although not formally for the elections. The ECCAS sent an observation mission to Sao Tome [and Principe] and so did the CPLP. The two observation commissions have worked together, even though there is no formal agreement,” pointed out the leader of the ECCAS as an example, who also expressed the interest of the organisation he presides over in the knowledge that exists in the documentation centre of the executive-secretariat of the CPLP.

The CPLP “has a documentation centre that we are interested in exploring,” he explained.

The member countries of the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) are: Angola, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Sao Tome and Principe.
Angola, Brazil, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe and Timor-Leste are the nine member states of the CPLP.

Lusa

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