Turkey's leading news agency is crucial for promoting coexistence between Greece and Turkey, the top official of a news agency from neighboring Greece said on Sunday.
"Anadolu is a great news agency," Michalis Psilos, the head of Greece's Athens-Macedonia News Agency (ANA-MPA), told Anadolu Agency on the sidelines of a Balkan and southeast European news agencies meeting in Istanbul.
Praising the agency for covering news in 13 languages, Psilos said: "This is very important, it is an international news agency, not only national."
"So cooperation between Anadolu and the Athens-Macedonia News Agency will be crucial and will also be important to promote this coexistence between Greece and Turkey," he said.
"Greece and Turkey have nothing to fear," he said. "Journalists must promote friendship, peace, and joint initiatives for this propose."
"Anadolu and the Athens-Macedonia News Agency will have a lot of things to promote between countries, between our people and our nations," he added.
Psilos decried the "fake-news century" we are living through now: "There's a lot of fake news on the Internet. People don't know what's real or what's rumor or what's false."
He pointed to news agencies' role in giving accurate information and disseminating speedy, reliable news.
Accurate news in a region with a troubled history like the Balkans is very important, he added, saying: "I think the role of news agencies in this direction is very crucial."
Psilos was in Istanbul to attend the 27th Association of the Balkan News Agencies-Southeast Europe (ABNA-SE) General Assembly and Conference on Saturday and Sunday.
He praised ABNA-SE for the importance of Balkan news agencies, calling them a "very important and crucial tool to promote peace and cooperation and friendship between our nations."
"The ABNA-SE, with the participation of … the Anadolu Agency and Athens-Macedonia News Agency, will promote the idea of cooperation and peaceful coexistence in the Balkans and also promote a joint initiative for this respect," he said.
"For us, it is very important to sit together," he said.
On Sunday, Anadolu Agency took its one-year turn at the helm of the ABNA-SE from the Greek news agency at a ceremony in Istanbul.
The ABNA-SE was founded in 1995 with the aim of developing fuller cooperation among news agencies of the region as well as helping to establish a climate of peace, friendship, security and cooperation in the Balkans, according to its website.
Among the members of the ABNA-SE are AGERPRES (Bucharest), ANA-MPA (Athens), ANADOLU (Ankara), ATA (Tirana), BTA (Sofia), CNA (Nicosia), FENA (Sarajevo), HINA (Zagreb), MIA (Skopje), SRNA (Banja Luka), and TANJUG (Belgrade).
Founded in 1920, Anadolu Agency is a well-established global news agency with operations in most major regions around the globe, including the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Asia-Pacific, and serves subscribers in more than 100 countries.
