The summit of the GUAM Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova will be held in Tbilisi at the end of June/beginning of July 2008. "During this summit the chairmanship of the organization will be passed onto Georgia for a one-year term," Velariy Chechelashvili, the GUAM Secretary-General told KAVKAZ-PRESS.
A plan on Georgia's chairmanship at the organization, the parameters and components of which are the subject of active consultations at GUAM, will be confirmed in Tbilisi, he said.
Chechelashvili announced that within the framework of the summit there are plans to arrange some field meetings, gatherings of the Council of National Coordinators and the Council of Foreign Ministers. "We are expecting a large number of guests - these are our traditional partners, including the United States, Japan, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, etc," the GUAM Secretary General said.
Before the Tbilisi summit there are plans to hold meetings on the field working groups, to hold a conference on transport and conflict resolution due in Baku, conference of business circles in Odessa as well as a meeting of the National Coordinators and Council of Foreign Ministers.
In May there are plans to hold the inauguration of a new building of the GUAM Secretariat with the participation of Foreign Ministers. It is a modern technological secretariat in the center of Kiev with serious organizational and technical opportunities to provide a comprehensive cooperation system of GUAM.
Four post-Soviet republics; Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova, established the GUAM format in 1997 during a summit of presidents of European Union countries in Strasburg. In 1999, Uzbekistan joined the organization but left four years later. In 2006, at the first summit of the organization in Kiev a decision was made to announce GUAM as an international organization with a new name; Organization for Democracy and Economic Development - GUAM.