Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-02-15-Speech-4-153"
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"en.20010215.6.4-153"2
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".
Mr President, may I begin by replying to Mr Haarder that the absence of our fellow Members of Parliament is an utter disgrace, to put it bluntly. We cannot compress five days’ work into a Wednesday just because some people want to work for one day and have six days off every week. Perhaps there are employees in other walks of life who would welcome a similar arrangement. In my opinion, what goes on here brings shame on this Parliament, and I find it scandalous, Mr Haarder, that you should encourage this by trying to eliminate Thursday sittings too, now that the Friday sittings have gone.
But now to the topic itself. I wish to say very clearly that we, as Europeans, bear a great responsibility for Kosovo – and this topical and urgent debate, incidentally, was originally devoted to Kosovo, not southern Serbia; it is listed in the agenda as the ‘situation in Kosovo’. In this respect I am not entirely happy with the resolution, and I should also like to point out that my name appears erroneously on the resolution, which I did not sign. May I ask that this be corrected, because I believe – as the last few speeches, and particularly Mrs Pack’s eloquent intervention, have graphically illustrated – that it is a matter of stabilising the situation in Kosovo, for as long as the situation in Kosovo is unstable, there can be no stability in the neighbouring regions either, including southern Serbia and, indeed, the whole of Serbia.
This is why it is absolutely imperative, as Mr Lagendijk quite rightly said, to take the decisive step by arranging for elections to be held in Kosovo. Until we have democratically legitimised authorities for Kosovo to act as negotiating partners of the democratically legitimised Serbs, there will be no peace settlement in the region, and we shall incur a heavy burden of guilt if we keep postponing these elections for every conceivable reason, because by so doing we undermine Mr Rugova’s position, and extremist forces – whose background, by the way, is obscure, to say the least – are able to exploit the situation and make internal political capital out of the Albanians’ frustration. As I have said, our inactivity weakens the position of Mr Rugova, who embodies people’s hopes for a peaceful solution. Instead of just pointing the finger at others and saying that this one or that one is undemocratic, we should recognise the fact that we ourselves are neglecting our primary responsibility.
Let me close with a remark aimed at the Serbian President: if he does not accept EU mediation to resolve this thorny issue, I wonder why he accepts money from the European Union."@en1
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