Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-10-23-Speech-3-150"
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"en.20021023.3.3-150"2
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"Ladies and gentlemen representing the Member States, I do not wish to use a word first employed by Mr Prodi and which is now being bandied about extensively and describe the Council and Commission’s statements that we have just heard as stupid. We must admit however that there is something particularly silly about the problem that currently occupies us, an issue known by the expression the ‘fight against terrorism’. This expression and the very word ‘terrorism’ were in fact pretty poor choices to describe an obvious fact, namely that the policy conducted by what we agree to call ‘the international community’, that is, of course, the United States and its accomplices, the imperial powers, is increasingly fiercely contested throughout the world, so that we end up, as do all empires in fact, giving the label ‘terrorism’ to something that could just as well be called resistance; Mr Krivine illustrated this point very well earlier.
Of course, I am certainly not condoning acts which target innocent people, even though, in a democracy, I am aware, no one is completely innocent. Let us not dwell on that, however. It goes without saying that I utterly condemn the attacks of 11 September, as well as the recent attack in Bali, just as I condemn the recent attack on a French petrol tanker, or less recently, in 1995, the attacks on the Paris underground system, and this leads me, once again, to condemn the fact that the person who committed these crimes is able to find refuge, even today, in one of the Member States of the European Union, a country basically acting as if it were an accomplice to these crimes. This goes to show that nothing is simple.
The fact remains, ladies and gentlemen, and this is fundamental, that we are not a tribunal. We cannot say what is good and what is evil. We must take a candid look at the world today, the state it is in and we will not fool anyone for long by suggesting that what passes as the West has only one enemy, Osama Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda and its presumed ramifications. In fact, those who we call terrorists exist the world over; their numbers are on the increase and they are becoming more radical even as the empire steps up its increasingly violent domination against the populations whose values and secrets it disregards and which it demonises, even though they are obviously in a different category in military terms.
There will never be peace between rich people who are too rich and too arrogant, and poor people who are too poor and too humiliated. It is a fact of life, ladies and gentlemen, that any empire which cannot grow and cope with excessive ambitions and the arrogance of power without having recourse to violence will inevitably bring about rebellions; it is another fact of life that the rebellion of oppressed people is violent, mindless and savage and nothing could be more serious for us, the nations of Europe, who are familiar with history, than to become embroiled in a problem which, under the pretext of combating terrorism, could lead us to feel widespread mistrust towards the developing world which represents, I would point out, three quarters of the peoples of the world."@en1
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