DUSHANBE, March 12, Asia-Plus  -- Tajikistan and Algeria have signed four bilateral cooperation documents during an official visit of Tajik President Emomali Rahmon to the North African country. 

On Tuesday March 11, President Rahmon held in Algiers one-to-one talks with his Algerian counterpart, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.  Their talks were followed by enlarged negotiations between the government delegations of the two countries.  

According to Tajik presidential press service, President Rahmon stressed that peacekeeping experience of Algeria had been actively used in Tajikistan.  

The sides exchanged views on prospects of further expansion of bilateral cooperation between the two countries in the fields such as hydropower, industry, infrastructure development, regional and international trade.  Both sides vowed to boost bilateral trade, which currently did not correspondent to its real potential.  

The Algerian side supported President Rahmon’s proposal to hold a business forum with participation of entrepreneurs of the two countries in Dushanbe to determine priorities and volumes of concrete economic relations.  

The sides also considered regional and international issues being of mutual interest and spoke for political settlement of all conflicts as well as expressed confidence that the upcoming meeting of heads of member states of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) in Dakar would make an appropriate decision on this subject, the presidential press service said.   

President Rahmon invited his Algerian counterpart to pay an official visit to Tajikistan.

The negotiations resulted in signing of four bilateral cooperation documents.   The agreements aimed to increase bilateral trade beyond the current annual level of 183,676 US dollars and to boost cooperation in the fields of energy and culture. 

The same day, President Rahmon held talks with a number of high-ranking Algerian state officials, including Prime Minister Abdelaziz Belkhadem, Algerian National Council Abdelqader Bansaleh and Algerian National Majlis Abdelaziz Zirai. 

 In the meantime, Algeria Press Service reported that Tajik President Emomali Rahmon underlined Tuesday in Algiers the level of the relations between Algeria and his country, calling for enhancing bilateral cooperation in the economic field.  "My visit to Algeria tends to reinforce the good relations existing between Algeria and Tajikistan," Rahmon said during the banquet offered at his honor by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, according to the Algeria Press Service.  He asserted his readiness to contribute, aside President Bouteflika in the development and the reinforcement of both countries’ relations, recalling the historical friendship relations that tie Algerian and Tajik peoples.   

President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, for his part, asserted Tuesday that all conditions are fulfilled to enhance cooperation between Algeria and Tajikistan, on the basis of friendship between the two peoples and the complementary potentialities of both countries’ economies. The Algerian head of state pointed out, in a toast delivered on the occasion of a lunch offered in the honor of President Emomali Rahmon, that "all conditions are set to enhance our cooperation, relying on friendship between our two peoples and on complementary potentialities of our economies," mentioning in this respect agricultural, hydraulics, mining and justice sectors.    

Algeria and Tajikistan agreed to push their bilateral relations to a "quality" level, declared Tuesday in Algiers Tajik President Emomali Rahmon, following his talks with President of the Republic Abdelaziz Bouteflika. "We agreed, President Bouteflika and I, to shift to a new quality step in our bilateral relations", Emomali Rahmon, on a three-day official visit to Algeria told the press. My discussions with President Bouteflika were related to the prospects of bilateral relations, mainly as for the economic and trade cooperation, he added. "We consider that there are major potentialities likely to give shape to this cooperation," he said, calling the Algerian economic operators to invest in Tajikistan, "where big and many projects are underway." "It will have a positive impact on the reinforcement of friendship relations between the two countries," he added. Algeria Press Service