Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-15-Speech-3-014"
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"en.20000315.1.3-014"2
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"Mr President, I would like to start by apologising for the absence of Lord Bethell, our first speaker. He must be held up somewhere for he is usually very conscientious. As he was not here this morning, I will, in effect, be taking over his task of first speaker.
Mr President, I would like to thank you for the declaration by the Portuguese presidency and also for the Commission’s declaration. I would also like to congratulate the Portuguese presidency because once again, it appears that it attended virtually all important debates this week. Not all presidencies do this but the Portuguese do, and I think, therefore, that they deserve a compliment for this.
Mr President, the Geneva Convention is more topical than ever, especially in light of the events of the past couple of years. In Kosovo, hundreds of thousands of people have been forced out of their homes because they belonged to the wrong ethnic group. The same has happened in the rest of former Yugoslavia since the early nineties. Serbs have been driven out of Croatia, Croats out of Serbia, Serbs and Croats out of parts of Bosnia and in Bosnia, the Muslim population was forced to flee, all of this with the help of military units of the respective Member States. This image has been etched in the minds of each one of us because this took place in Europe, and not least because it reminds us of the abject conditions of the 30s and the dreadful war which followed. Never again. This is what politicians decided in post-war Europe. And this is how European cooperation and the Geneva Convention came about. For a long time, we thought that Europe would remain spared of this kind of adversity and that we had sufficient instruments in place to prevent this kind of brutal disaster. This appeared not to be the case. Yugoslavia proved that Europe will remain vulnerable as long as the Union limits itself in scope to Western Europe. The task of the European Union is therefore to extend the system we have created to the whole of Europe, above all with a view to keeping the peace.
It is just as important to look at the world around us. Take Chechnya, where the population is the victim of a battle between the Russian army and terrorists. Or Asia, Burma, in particular, where entire groups of the population are being driven out of their traditional areas with military force. Indonesia, Timor, but also the Moluccas, where hundreds of thousands of people are forced out of their homes with the active backing of the army – yet again. Sudan, where the southern population has been on the run from the northern rulers for years and where martial law is ignored. The Great Lake areas in Africa where the fight between the Hutus and the Tutsis, an ethnic battle if ever I saw one, has forced millions of people to flee. They are increasingly beleaguered rather than being protected by the national army units. Then there are the border areas in Ethiopia and Eritrea, a kind of forgotten war, where governments are fighting over a specific border and where, meanwhile, nearly one hundred thousand Ethiopians have been driven out of Eritrea and vice versa. Nobody seems to be taking any notice of this problem.
This is only an outline of the problems, both within Europe and elsewhere, which occasioned the drafting of the Geneva Convention. The fiftieth anniversary of the Geneva Convention has actually been written in blood if we consider these fateful events. At the same time, the Geneva Convention is also a beacon because we now have a tool by means of which we can expose inhumanities and because we can also report on positive developments. One of these positive developments is the European Union itself where – to quote President Mitterrand, who spoke here – after 400 years of war, we have enjoyed more than 40 years’ peace. Prominent politicians, some of whom, in fact most of whom, come from within our circles, have helped to bring this about. So there
a solution to all these humanitarian issues which are referred to the Geneva Convention, and this solution is co-determined by us on a daily basis within our European Parliament, where 15 nationalities cooperate in a peaceful manner. We should not turn a blind eye to the suffering around us but we should also be grateful for being able to live in peace and prosperity here in Western Europe, hoping that this peace and prosperity, as well as an end to all violence, will reach all corners of the globe: in Eastern Europe, South-Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and anywhere else in desperate need of this."@en1
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