Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-29-Speech-3-136"
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"en.20000329.8.3-136"2
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"Mr President, each of the countries referred to in this report is different and each of the plans varies accordingly. I will speak only about Sri Lanka, a country I have visited, and a country many of whose citizens have sought refuge in London and other parts of the European Union.
It is a country, President, in which a civil war has raged for the past eighteen years – eighteen years which have seen the proportion of defence spending by the Sri Lankan government rise steadily. This money is spent fighting a war that the Sri Lankan government cannot win and it is a war that the Tamils cannot win either. The only solution must be a brokered peace. It could be that the European Union, with its historical links, could act as that intermediary.
My colleague, Anna Terrón, has said that this report is naïve. I feel that the report skirts around the real issue and is a diversion from the debate that we ought to be having on Sri Lanka and the other countries. The report says that there is no end to the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. It speaks of human rights abuses, cases of aid not reaching the most desperate areas and of economic deprivation. That is the effect of the war and it says that we should work more closely with the Sri Lankan government.
Yet it is they who are controlling what we know and it is they who control what coverage we get and we must be circumspect. We all know about the well-publicised cases of Tamil action against government forces. We have heard less about the hospitals and schools being destroyed and of torture by Sri Lankan government troops.
So when the report says, Mr President, that we should look for ways to find a political solution to this conflict, I agree. Nothing else matters. Nothing else will solve the problems or lessen the human rights abuses. Nothing short of a cessation of the conflict will end the misery of the Tamils in Sri Lanka and nothing else will end the number of people seeking refuge in the European Union. Nothing else will stop people from fleeing the country. A high-level action plan, Mr President, that does not recognise these fundamental reports is – I would argue – not worth the paper it is written on."@en1
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