7-11 Apr. 2008
On the occasion of a visit by Robert Simmons, the NATO Secretary General’s Special Representative for Central Asia, a second NATO-Kazakhstan Partnership Week will be held in Astana and Almaty, Kazakhstan from 7-11 April 2008
Special Representative Simmons will hold meetings with high level Kazakh officials, and will head a large NATO delegation to review NATO-Kazakhstan co-operation under the Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP) and the Planning and Review Process (PARP). He will also meet Ambassadors of NATO countries accredited in Kazakhstan.
In this framework, a series of high visibility public events with the participation of senior NATO representatives will be organised jointly by NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division, the Embassy of The Netherlands to Kazakhstan and the Government of Kazakhstan.
The NATO-Kazakhstan Partnership Week will include several public diplomacy events such as the Inauguration of a Computer Centre at the Defence Institute for Foreign Languages with equipment granted by NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division through the Science for Peace and Security Programme.
Other activities include a visit to the Information Centre on NATO at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Almaty.
The centre, inaugurated in 2006, has been fully functioning since 2007. Its main mission is informing students and academic staff on NATO and Euro-Atlantic Partnership issues and activities, and an interactive discussion with academics and students on international security issues after the Bucharest Summit at conferences set up at the Al-Farabi University in Almaty and the Eurasian State University in Astana.
The opening of a NATO Depository Library at the Kazakh National Academic Library in Astana, where NATO will send multimedia material and publications which will be accessible for students, academics and researchers is also foreseen during the week.
The idea behind the visit is to highlight the continual cooperation between NATO and Kazakhstan.
The “NATO-Kazakhstan Partnership Week” will make an important contribution to raising general public awareness of NATO and Partnership policies among Kazakh civil society, and will strengthen co-operation between NATO and Kazakhstan.
The first NATO Week in Kazakhstan was organized in June 2006.
