Remarks made by the Secretary-General of the ABU, Dr Javad Mottaghi

Javad Mottaghi: Thank you very much, Your Excellency, Mr. Aurescu, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Miculescu, President and Director General of Radio Romania, distinguished guests, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Media 2020, welcome to Bucharest. I am grateful to His Excellency the minister for taking time out of his busy schedule to be with us this morning and address this gathering. I am grateful to Mr. Miculescu for inviting us to Bucharest and for initiating this important event. I am grateful to everybody in the house who have come from Europe, North America, and also from the far distant Asia-Pacific region. I am delighted to have you with us and thank you for your partnership and contribution. We are here to partner, we are here to enhance our partnership between East and West.

We are here to promote dialogue, we are here to listen to each other, to learn from each other and to exchange experiences that we have in our countries and in our regions. We are here to face the challenges that we might face within our countries and regions, and try to see how best we can change the challenges to opportunity. And we are here to promote new initiatives, new co-productions, new partnerships that could bridge the gap between West and East. And we are here to look into the future, and that is why Mr. Miculescu, ABU and Radio Romania initiated Media 2020, and that’s what Media 2020 is all about. At the same time, we are here to start a dialogue, in a way to institutionalise a possibly permanent and constant constructive dialog between broadcasters in the East and West.

We are here to think locally and act globally while we broadcasters are committed to our audience, and we are obliged to listen to our audience in each country and to learn from them and to fulfil the wishes of our audiences. We are here also to look at others, how they are doing, and how they are responding to the challenges. And this is what we do in Asia, think globally and act locally. And we are here to also focus on commonalities, and at the same time analyse the differences, the differences that exist on two continents, across the globe, and also the differences that we see in our region. We do the same in the Asia-Pacific region. Asia-Pacific is a diverse region.

Diversity in economy, diversity in politics, in population, culture, size, everything. But we believe diversity is not a threat, and we celebrate diversity. That’s the way ABU, as the biggest broadcasting union in the world, is working. We respect diversity and we celebrate diversity. We focus on commonalities. At the same time we analyse the differences with a view to reduce the gap, to reduce the differences and see, at the end of the day, how best to serve our members and our audience, as large as four billion audiences, in the huge network of the Asia-Pacific, with 278 members in 68 countries. And I am grateful to Ovidiu for bringing us to Bucharest, to your beautiful city. Some two years ago, when Romania joined the ABU as a member, hardly a broadcaster in the Asia-Pacific region knew about Radio Romania and its activities.

Now all broadcasters in the ABU region know Radio Romania and its activities, because Radio Romania has been actively involved in ABU. Radio Romania participated in many activities that we have done, and you possibly have heard about last September. The symphony orchestra of Radio Romania held a beautiful performance that we have seen last evening. They had two performances in Malaysia for the World Summit on Media for Children, and one of the performances went live, on the air, for millions of audience. And what I can see, Your Excellency and colleagues, is that Radio Romania has turned to be a window, a window not only to promote itself and its activities, but also to promote Romanian culture. And that is important, we all have to look at that.

As broadcasters, at the end of the day we are promoting dialogue, we are establishing links between East and West, and Radio Romania has successfully introduced your culture to our region, and will continue to do that. I am grateful once again to everybody for being with us, and I am grateful to speakers, interpreters and moderators, and our host. On that note, I wish you a successful conference. Thank you very much.