Iran’s Minister of Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts has said that an upcoming meeting of the tourism ministers of the Asian Cooperation Dialogue (ACD) in Yazd, central Iran, will mark a beginning to the fight against Iranophobia.
Addressing a meeting of the government officials and private sector representatives of Yazd on Sunday, Reza Salehi Amiri said that “we have to open the lock of Iranophobia”.
He argued that Iran is safe and if the tourists do not come to Iran, it is due to the Iranophobia atmosphere created in the Western media.
In the final declaration of ACD foreign ministerial meeting in Tehran on June 25, 2024, Yazd was designated as ACD Tourism Capital for the year.
Private sector entrepreneurs, senior experts and tourism ministers of 35 ACD member countries are scheduled to convene in Yazd Chamber of Commerce for a meeting in late October.
The Asia Cooperation Dialogue (ACD) was inaugurated in June 2002 in Cha-Am, Thailand, where 18 Asian Foreign Ministers met together for the first time. The ACD is a continent-wide forum, the first of its kind in Asia, which aims to promote Asian cooperation at a continental level and to ensure coordination among different regional organizations such as the ASEAN, the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council, the Eurasian Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the SAARC.
According to its website, the ACD aims to constitute the missing link in Asia by incorporating every Asian country and building an Asian Community without duplicating other organizations or creating a bloc against others.
The first ACD ministerial meeting on tourism was also held in Iran’s northwestern city of Tabriz on August 29-30, 2016.
Iran’s local Isfahan Chamber of Commerce hosted the 2nd conference of chambers of commerce of ACD member states earlier this year in late April.