President Iohannis and the Romanian Diaspora
Romanian President Klaus Iohannis met with members of the Romanian community in Philadelphia
Leyla Cheamil, 22.09.2017, 13:48
The Romanian community is important for Romania’s relationship with the United States, President Klaus Iohannis, who attended the 72nd session of the United Nations General Assembly, has said. The President met on Thursday with members of the Romanian community in Philadelphia.
Klaus Iohannis: “I have been paying special attention to the Diaspora from the very beginning, out of conviction. You are important to us. You are vital for nurturing a continuing relationship with your birth country and I count very much on you and on the other Romanians in the US when it comes to the Strategic Partnership between America and Romania.”
Klaus Iohannis has also said that when the details of his visit to the US were set and after a thorough selection of the Romanian communities in that country, he chose to meet with the Romanians in Philadelphia. Iohannis also talked about his meeting with the US President Donald Trump in the first half of the year. “After that meeting our relationship became very strong and we managed to give a new dimension to the Strategic Partnership between the two countries,” Iohannis also said. Iohannis went on to say that President Trump showed at that moment that he highly appreciates the Romanian community in the US. Also during his visit to the US, Klaus Iohannis has announced he cancelled the visit he was supposed to pay to the neighboring Ukraine next month.
He took this decision following the adoption, by the Kiev Parliament, of a new education law that limits the rights of the Romanian ethnics to study in their native language: “When I found out about this law I cancelled my visit to Ukraine and also the meeting with the Ukrainian Parliament Speaker that was due to take place at the presidential palace in September, thus conveying very strong diplomatic signals. It so happened that I met the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on the hallway of the UN headquarters, we greeted each other, of course, and I told him my concerns.”
In response to the education law adopted in Kiev, Romania’s Parliament adopted a declaration saying that the new piece of legislation “drastically limits the right to education in their mother tongue of the Romanian ethnics in Ukraine, something that raised serious concerns in Romania.” As many as 400 thousand Romanian ethnics are currently living in Ukraine, most of them in the Romanian territories annexed by the USSR in 1940 and taken over by Ukraine in 1991 as successor state.
