Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-11-28-Speech-3-183"
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"en.20011128.10.3-183"2
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". – Mr President, I guess it would be a slight exaggeration to say that the Chamber was packed with knowledgeable friends of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, but those who are here are eminently qualified to address this subject because I think that the honourable Members who certainly know most about Macedonia and who are, in some respects, most knowledgeable about Southeast Europe as a whole are in this Chamber. I am extremely grateful for the contribution which honourable Members have made to what has been a pretty successful development of Europe's strategy in the Balkans and I am particularly grateful to the rapporteur, Mr Lagendijk, for his report.
As far as we are concerned, the next event on the horizon will be the donors conference, which we will try to organise with the World Bank. There are a number of conditions, as honourable Members will know. We were first of all insisting on the implementation of the framework agreement on the passage of amendments to the Constitution through the Parliament in Skopje. We also wanted a law on local government passed, because frankly if it is not, the United States is unlikely to come to a donors conference. It is absolutely crucial, as my colleague Commissioner Solbes would assure you, if we are to provide macro-financial assistance at a donors conference, that there must be an agreement with the International Monetary Fund. Macro-financial assistance is never given unless there is such an agreement.
President Trikovsky assured me this week that an agreement with the IMF is now on the cards and I think the relevant meeting in Washington is at the beginning of December. I hope therefore that on the back of the passage of the legislation, which I have referred to, the constitutional amendments and the recommendation of an agreement to the board of the IMF, we can hold a successful donors conference. If it is agreeable to all the parties, and to FYROM, we will do it before Christmas, but at the moment when it looks as though it is likely to be most successful. What I do not want to do is to set a date for a second time and have to postpone it, because that would be calamitous.
I am very grateful to honourable Members for the fast delivery of their opinion on what we are proposing. I am sorry that I cannot express my gratitude by accepting all the amendments which have been put down. Characteristically, I am not able to do that. Some of the amendments, for example the references to the provisional nature of what we are doing, are of no real legal value. Others, I am advised, are not really suitable for inclusion in a legal decision.
I want however to respond slightly differently to two of the arguments which have been put and which you will understand. First of all, I want to assure the Parliament that it would of course be consulted if there were any question of extending the Agency to other countries. If we were to propose that, we would of course consult the Parliament.
Secondly, honourable Members, and this is a point that Mr Swoboda has made very eloquently, are concerned about the integrity of the management of what we are doing in Southeast Europe. They are concerned about the coherence of what we are doing in Southeast Europe and understandably press us to set out our strategy for the management of community assistance for the Balkans.
I am happy to do that. I just beg Parliament not to press me to do it by 31 January. I will tell the Parliament why. We have a good team of people working on the Balkans in the Commission. They spend three-quarters of their time in meetings in the Council, in consultative task forces and in drafting reports; we are in the middle of drafting a report for the Council, which of course the Parliament will see, on the overall progress of the stabilisation and association process. I do not want to make unreasonable demands on them, but I can assure Parliament that, as early next year as I can manage it, I will come to Parliament to try to set out the sort of strategy which I think honourable Members are entitled to ask for and which we should be pleased to give. It is very important that Parliament should make sure from time to time that we actually know what we are doing.
I have been in this job for just over two years and what I am going to say does not suggest that all that has happened is because there has been a new Commission – I am not suggesting that at all. But we have seen, first of all, a transformation in the region with the latest admirable events, as the honourable gentleman said: the elections in Kosovo and the developments in FYROM. We know that every time we take a couple of steps forward, something will happen which pushes us back again, but I think that from Croatia to Serbia, to Macedonia and Albania, we are heading in the right direction.
We have a coherent strategy and we have made a remarkable amount of progress. We have made that progress because we have worked together in a way which has extended stability to the region and underpinned those who are prepared bravely to argue and work for economic and political reform.
At the end of the stabilising and association process is the prospect of potential membership of the European Union. That has been the most formidable element in bringing greater peace and stability to Southeast Europe. We must make sure that the huge amount of political and financial investment that we have made in the last couple of years continues to pay off in steady progress and development. That will of course be more likely if we are able to continue to work with Members of the Parliament.
Perhaps I can just re-establish the context in which we are having this debate. Honourable Members know that Macedonia was the first country with which we negotiated a stabilisation and association agreement. While we were negotiating that agreement, during each of my visits to FYROM – and I have visited Skopje probably more than any other capital city in the world in the last couple of years – we were regularly on the receiving end of grumbles about the lack of speed of our delivery of development assistance.
When the crisis came this year, we worked very hard and I pay a particular vote of gratitude to the work of my colleague, Javier Solana. We worked extremely hard to try to get FYROM back on the rails. We were delighted by the Lake Ohrid Agreement and said straightaway that we would do everything we could to help the implementation of the framework agreement in Lake Ohrid.
My concern, as I have explained to honourable Members, was that unless we made a special effort, we would not deliver that assistance quickly enough. I would have very much liked to have gone through the process of deconcentration rather more rapidly to FYROM and delivered our assistance in a conventional way, but that was to run a risk. The most certain way in which we could deliver the assistance was by extending the work of the Reconstruction Agency and that is why we are all here this evening.
I know that some honourable Members were understandably a little confused about our management strategy. With the benefit of hindsight, with which we are all much wiser, it would perhaps have been sensible if I had consulted honourable Members earlier. But I hope that we have managed to convince honourable Members that there was no intention on our part to downgrade our relationship with the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
I saw President Trikovsky earlier this week. He was en route to a prayer breakfast – I am afraid I was not – and I think that we have managed to convince him and the authorities in Skopje now that we are just trying to deliver assistance as rapidly as possible and we have already been delivering assistance in the sectors electricity and housing, etc.
It is understandable that honourable Members should think that there is some confusion in our management strategy for the whole region, But I do not feel that I am being inconsistent in arguing, on the one hand, that we have to work through Europe Aid, through deconcentration, which has now begun and which we must now push as rapidly as possible, while on the other hand, saying there may be odd occasions, particularly crises, which require different sort of arrangements.
We are considering for example, at the moment how to deal with the situation in Afghanistan – whether we should put a task force into Afghanistan in order to get quick-acting projects going as soon as possible. So I do not think that it is inconsistent to press ahead with the reform of Europe Aid, while at the same time thinking that from time to time other arrangements are necessary.
Perhaps I can just remind honourable Members that we pledged EUR 30 million to the implementation of the framework agreement and that we have also been disbursing EUR 12.5 million under the rapid reaction mechanism. We have committed about EUR 5 million through ECHO to humanitarian relief and we have got a regular CARDS programme of EUR 42 million for this year for FYROM. All that work, except the ECHO dimension, will be put through the Agency over the next couple of months."@en1
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