Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-02-05-Speech-2-155"
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"en.20020205.8.2-155"2
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". – Mr President, I will try to be brief and to start by thanking you all – those who are here, those who have left – very much for your support for our efforts to bring peace to an area which, as I said at the very beginning, is geographically close to us and also very close to our hearts, minds and values.
I would like to tell you two little anecdotes, one from a very good friend of mine who was in the peace camp in Jerusalem. The other day he told me that he would not dare send his daughter and his son to school in the same bus. That is a dramatic and profound change in the heart and in the mind of somebody who would otherwise be a fighter for peace. On the other side, on the Palestinian side, you go to a hospital, you talk to a paediatrician and he tells you how a little boy has been killed. This is a terrible blow to trust and confidence among people. Therefore we have to work also with societies. We have to engage societies, universities, schools, doctors, etc. to impress upon them that they have to live together and that Europe will be behind that sentiment of reconciliation. That is something we have to do.
I will conclude by recalling a beautiful phrase from Yitzhak Rabin who, without any doubt, was the architect of the Oslo process, together with Shimon Peres. He used to say something that is still valid. We have to fight against terrorism, as if there were no negotiations, and we have to negotiate as if there were no terrorism. That is the approach we have to rally around today. It is necessary to continue the negotiations, to continue talking, to continue moving the political scene – the centre of gravity has to be politics. Until they put politics at the centre of gravity, it will be very difficult to move the process forwards.
We can be proud of what we as Europeans are doing. We do not have the capacity to solve the problem, but we can move in the right direction as soon as possible and aim for peace. This is not a question only of values. It is part of our history, no doubt about that, but it is also part of our future, the future of this European Union, of the countries in an enlarged European Union and of the countries of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, which are part of our family.
I would stress once again that the difficulty of the problem is not the absence of a mechanism to provide a solution to the crisis. We already have the Mitchell report, which contains the steps to be followed, and it has been accepted by both sides. The problem is not that we do not have rails on which the train should be travelling but that we have not been able to get the train out of the station. The train cannot leave the station until the requirement of a seven-day period of complete calm has been fulfilled. But what happens? When you set seven days of complete calm as a precondition, you can always find somebody who is not for the peace process and who, at the last minute, can engineer a catastrophe. Therefore, you are back to square one. That has happened on a couple of occasions. This manner of doing things hands the initiative to the most radical people and takes it away from the moderates. That is the problem we have at this point in time.
Let us hope that the modest beginnings of conversations – I would not call them negotiations between the two sides – held right now, yesterday, tomorrow, maybe the day after tomorrow, maybe at the beginning of the week, will produce at least a change in the way they handle the crisis, by not placing the solution in the hands of those who do not want the process to move forward.
I have not received many questions. Therefore I am not going to respond to the very interesting remarks you have made. At least 90% of your statements have been supportive.
Two questions have been put very clearly and I would like to answer them before I make my final remarks.
On the question by Mr Menéndez del Valle regarding
I do not have the intelligence on which several countries have based their statements. Several countries – some are members of the European Union – state that their intelligence has established a link. Whether it is a state-to-state or state-group-to-state-group link is an open question. But there is no doubt that some kind of link exists between the Iranian people and some Palestinians.
The second question I would like to answer is from Mr Brok, although he is not here. This joint effort is being carried out every day on the ground by representatives of the European Union, of the United States, of the Secretary-General of the UN and of the Russian Federation. They work together every day. I would remind you also that we – that is, I, Mr Powell, Mr Ivanov, Mr Koffi Annan – meet regularly to deal with this issue collectively.
We need to be tenacious and persevering. We also need a change in both societies, and not only in the authorities that lead the countries. Those societies have indeed changed very profoundly in the last few years. Israel has changed. The strong, broad-based peace camp there has not disappeared, but it has been reduced.
The same thing has happened on the other side. Frustration has created a sentiment that the peace camp cannot bring about peace in a reasonable period of time. That lack of trust and of confidence between both sides was not present before. I remember very well the relative friendship in Oslo between Arafat and Peres and between Rabin and Arafat. That has disappeared. We have to do something to reconstruct society vis-à-vis society and we, as Europeans, have a tremendous amount of work to do there, to bring these societies together, because they will have to live together. Whatever we can do through this Parliament, through the institutions, through the NGOs, we must do."@en1
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"High Representative for the common foreign and security policy"1
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