Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-04-13-Speech-4-149"
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"en.20000413.5.4-149"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, here we are debating a tragic issue – a source of shame to all of us – and Mr Ford is not here. Not one of Parliament’s noble spirits is here, and yet the sanctions against Iraq are already ten years old, ten years!
People think the war, the missiles and the gassings are over, but the filthy effects of this war, which was never clean, go on. There is still bombing in the North and in the South. Cornfields are being burned in a country which invented agriculture; date palms are being burned daily. In the Strasbourg newspaper yesterday, there was an interview with a priest who risked his life just to go to the Babylon area, in Ur. For people who go there, taking ambulances and medicines, like me and the National Front, Iraq is a vast concentration camp. 18 million women, children, old people, men, a whole Arab people, are being held captive in their own country by the West, with millions of deaths every day, hundreds of children dying, a systematic, scientific, meticulous, planned, cynical, perverse genocide.
It is not just their bodies which are under attack by being deprived of food, milk, meat and fruit. Their minds are under attack as well. There are no books. Even pencils are banned, on the pretext that their graphite could be used as coolant in the nuclear power stations. There are schools but there is no paper. There are doctors, but there is no medicine. There are hospitals, but there is nothing inside them. It is perverse. They were promised food in exchange for oil. But they are asked to practically give their oil away and then buy food.
Ladies and gentlemen – especially Members who are not here – by what right is this happening? Do not keep silent! Do not be accomplices! UN officials are resigning. We should not have to go there in thirty years time, like the Belgians in Rwanda, and say sorry, or like the Holy Father, who is prostrating himself all over the place.
The honour of Europe depends on our speaking out for these young Arabs, for this great people being consigned to the night. It is all very well being afraid of imaginary dangers in Vienna, but it is in Baghdad that the violation of human rights is taking place. Let Washington’s Nebuchadnezzar let these people go, these slaves in their own country. They must be released from this poverty.
I appeal to your consciences! Europe is denying itself! Just as people kept silent about Spain in 1936, just as people kept silent about the camps, they are keeping silent about Iraq. There is no time to lose; this people could cease to exist. Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to act quickly."@en1
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