RYCO Publication: A Better Region Starts with YOUth (2020)

A
youth
better region starts with
Partnerships
Interviews are usually one-on-one conversations but not this one. Since RYCO’s work is characterised
by multiple partnerships we could not avoid talking to more than one person. In this group interview,
we asked our partners and donors how they see RYCO and its work as well as its future.
RYCO: Why do you consider RYCO a strategic partner?
Genoveva Ruiz Calavera, Director for the Western Balkans at the
European Commission Directorate General for European Neighbourhood
Policy and Enlargement Negotiations: Reconciliation and
cooperation are the essence of the European project and
indispensable for the Western Balkans’ European path. RYCO plays
a strategic role by building trust, dialogue and cooperation
between young people of the Western Balkans. I am confident that
with RYCO’s help, the youth of the Western Balkans will lead the way
to overcoming divisions that result from a difficult past and will help
the region look towards the future.
RYCO: In your experience and through your partnership with
RYCO, what are its most evident results thus far?
Susanne Schütz, Director for South-East Europe, Turkey and the EFTA
States, German Federal Foreign Office, and former German
Ambassador to Albania: RYCO is one of the great and very concrete
achievements of the Western Balkan countries from the Berlin Process.
Thanks to RYCO, already thousands of youth in the region have met
their peers in their neighbouring countries, got to know each other
better and built friendships. RYCO thus makes an important contribution
to good neighbourly relations and the region and to reconciliation in the
region. This is an invaluable investment in the future, as our experience
with the Franco-German Youth Office has shown.
RYCO: What attracts you to the mission and values of RYCO?
Christina Vasak, Former French Ambassador to Albania: From day
one in Paris, the raison d'être of RYCO, with the help of the Franco-
German Youth Office, has been to foster regional cooperation
throughout the Balkans thanks to the youth. RYCO is a hyphen
between young people who are more or less ignorant of one
another, in spite or because of a tragic past and its susceptibility to
prejudice and fake news. Devising and implementing common
projects in various fields is a simple, albeit ambitious, way to
overcome barriers from Tirana or other capitals and places, to build
bridges and contribute little by little to the essence of the European
Union, i.e. integration, in other words ‘e pluribus unum’.
95