Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-05-15-Speech-3-311"
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"en.20020515.11.3-311"2
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". – Mr President, it is an honour to present this report on Iraq to Parliament this evening. I commend it for the vote tomorrow and I hope and believe that as many colleagues as possible will support it.
Iraq is a country that is riven by tragedy: it is fraught with trauma, and the pain of its people stretches across the world. It is ruled by a tyrant, a predator, whose hunger for territory has led his army across into the Islamic Republic of Iran; he initiated the Iran-Iraq war – a million people died. Later, he moved into Kuwait, with the results that we all know so well and into the north of Iraq, where he chemically bombed the northern Iraqis. And in the south of Iraq, he has drained the historic Iraqi marshlands. The actions of one man and his regime have destroyed 5000 years of unbroken human civilisation, causing the worst humanitarian tragedy since the Second World War, according to the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights of Iraq. He is a man of deep cruelty, he runs a reign of terror and, as a recent émigré who fled from Iraq said, he has made a modern concentration camp out of Iraq.
With such a situation, what can the European Parliament offer? We need to think how different Iraq could be. Iraq has the capacity to be the wealthiest nation in the globe per capita with her oil and other resources. She has the example, in the three governates of northern Iraq, of democracy and the Rule of Law. Iraqi people are highly talented, most able and, until Saddam Hussein took over, they had a high standard of education and health and some democracy.
So what does the report recommend that is different, that adds value to this very long-running debate? We make a number of proposals that I commend to this House. First, we recommend the establishment of an ad hoc international criminal tribunal. That has been called for before – I called for it myself in 1988. What is different? We are recommending that it is set up to try not just Saddam Hussein but all of his officials who have carried out gross violations of human rights, both inside and outside of Iraq's territory. Since that is difficult to set up, we recommend strongly and powerfully that the European Union takes the initiative and sets up an office for inquiry into the huge violations of human rights. We should be able to collect and prepare the necessary evidence and to produce an official register of the numerous violations perpetrated by the Iraqi regime. We want this to be set up without delay. We call upon the Commission and the Council of Ministers to facilitate this and to make it happen. This would make a tremendous difference to the future of the Iraqi people.
Secondly, we call for the nomination of the Iraqi marshlands – drained down to the last 10% now – as a world heritage site. We believe that this could be done; it could be restored. We call upon the Islamic Republic of Iran to take charge of the small patch of the marshlands still undrained that remains within its country.
Again we ask the international community and the European Union to take special note of the 3.5 million refugees who fled from Iraq in the last 11 years. Those refugees are being given insufficient support. None of the oil-for-food programme goes to help them and they get very little else. We call upon the European Union, and the Commission in particular, to look at and review their programme and to provide good support for those refugees so that they can be retrained and can bring democracy back into the future Iraq.
So we are recommending a rehabilitation agenda. I have ignored the comments, the amendments that talk about war. This House has no competence over war or troops, so we are recommending that we should provide training and civilian support. We should call upon everyone to put every possible pressure upon the regime of Iraq to let in the weapons inspectors and give them untrammelled access throughout the country. We see the future for Iraq, and I call upon this House to support the report."@en1
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