Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-04-24-Speech-3-041"
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"en.20020424.3.3-041"2
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"Mr President, I too have just come back from Jenin and, when Commissioner Patten says that ‘Israeli soldiers have sometimes shown a disregard’ for human life, I have to say that I am very surprised to hear him use that terminology. There is no doubt that what we saw in Jenin was a complete lack of respect for human life. Bulldozers were sent in to raze houses to the ground and, to make certain that under no circumstances could anything living be found or a single body dug out, tanks were subsequently sent in so that there was little more than a broad road where the houses had been. If that is not a lack of respect for human life, I do not know what is. It is completely unknown how many dead there are under the rubble in Jenin. The fact that there are dead bodies there can be smelt, however. There is a disgusting smell when one walks around the area, and a start can therefore be made on digging where the smell is worst. If it is not known how many bodies there are down there, it is because men and women were separated from each other. The men have still not been handed back to Jenin, so it is not known how many are still prisoners of the Israelis and how many are lying dead beneath the rubble.
If we are to condemn the suicide bombers, as of course we must, we must condemn what has happened in Jenin just as vigorously. We must not just demand that Israel withdraw its troops. We must condemn its action and we must demand that the guilty be held responsible, with Israel itself holding the soldiers who have committed these inhuman acts to account. There is no doubt at all as to how many civilians have been killed. We have the exact figures from human rights organisations. More than 2 000 civilians have been killed. We know how they have been killed: whether they have been killed in bombardments or whether they have been shot and, if so, where they have been shot. We know how many of them are children. We know how many of them are men and how many are women. We also know that a systematic destruction of the whole infrastructure is taking place in the Palestinian areas. We know that there is now no registration of births or deaths. Marriages are not being registered. There is no registration of criminals, yet at the same time it is said that President Arafat should imprison the criminals. However, there are no longer any registers, for everything has been systematically destroyed.
I would ask Commissioner Patten to withdraw his statement about guarantees that this must not happen again. Following such completely systematic and very deliberate destruction, how in the world are we to expect to receive guarantees from Israel to the effect that nothing like this will happen again? If we do not receive guarantees from Israel, are we really to delay putting the whole of this structure in place, or not to put it in place at all? There is no doubt as to what is desired by Israel or, rather, Ariel Sharon. I decline now to distinguish between the two, for it is of course Ariel Sharon that we are talking about. Last week, he imprisoned a leader, Marwan Barghouti, who has been one of the main people behind the demand for peace. He is now being held in detention. In eight days, he has only spent one hour with his lawyer. He is being interrogated 21 hours at a time and is only allowed to sleep for three hours. He is my colleague. He is under the same immunity as myself. At the moment, however, he is being tortured in an Israeli jail. It is a phase in the complete destruction of Palestinian society, its infrastructure and leaders. Let us tell it like it is. Let us not make any assumptions. There is evidence enough."@en1
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