Former Foreign Minister Ditmir Bushati has suggested to Edi Rama’s government not to neglect the decision of the Dutch Parliament to propose to the European Council the suspension of visa-free movement for Albanian citizens in the Schengen area.

Bushati was at the helm of the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs for five years before being fired by Rama last December and replaced with his deputy Gent Cakaj.

Bushati’s point of view concerning the Dutch parliament’s decision is quite different from that of Cakaj who said “this is a domestic problem of the politics in the Netherlands”.

The former minister says there is no place for panic, but it would be a fatal mistake “to draw the Netherlands, a founding and contributing member of the European Union, as racist towards Albania or as a country where crime and prostitution are wreaking havoc”.

“It would be also frivolous to ignore the message that comes from this initiative of the Dutch parliament, despite being unjust and lacking the criteria defined by the European Union itself”, Bushati writes, adding that “we should not forget it is us knocking on the increasingly hard doors of the EU and not the opposite”.