Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-01-29-Speech-3-067"
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"en.20030129.2.3-067"2
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".
Mr President, I would first of all like to thank the many honourable Members who have accompanied me during this sitting for their tenacity and perseverance. Thank you.
As the honourable Members may imagine, I am in constant contact with many people, with many important countries in the Security Council, and with non-European countries and non-members of the Security Council. The honourable Members will remember, because you follow this issue as closely as I do, that a few days ago in Ankara there was an important meeting of the most significant Arab countries. I would urge you to read the declaration which emerged from that meeting. That declaration is not so different from the European Union’s declaration on Monday, quite the contrary, although it is perhaps less forceful.
We are therefore working in the right direction. Will we achieve a good outcome? We will see, but we have a political dynamic which nobody would have expected a few months ago. We must therefore continue working, continue cooperating in this way with the other members of the Security Council, we must continue working with the other countries and amongst ourselves so that, at the end of this journey, we may have, as I said at the beginning, a solution to this extremely serious conflict. Because there is absolutely no doubt that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is going to be the great issue which we Europeans are going to have to deal with in the coming years and we will have to genuinely take on board the importance of this issue. And I believe that we are sometimes not sufficiently awake to the possible consequences of this, but I hope that in this case it is resolved and that the solution is a good one.
In any event, for my part, I will always be prepared to appear before this Parliament, however many Members are in attendance, in order to try to move forward and overcome the difficulties facing all of us at this historic moment for good or for bad. Let us hope that it is for good.
I would like to speak briefly, without exceeding the time allotted to me, to explain various issues. Firstly, there can be no doubt that this is a difficult debate. It is a debate which goes to the heart of the European Union’s foreign policy and beyond. We have a new world situation which may undoubtedly have consequences for the future which are hard to predict today. But I would like to say that we must not indulge in a sort of pessimism about the European Union’s inability to reach common positions. We are talking about such serious issues as war and peace. We are talking about something extremely grave; life or death. And it is therefore natural that so many Members of Parliament have spoken in very different ways and that the governments have also at times said so many differing things. Hence the first consequence; it will be very difficult to take a decision on war and peace, on life and death, by means of a vote on one particular day.
Peace and war, life and death, belong to the States and one State will never be prepared to allow another State to impose on it the obligation to go to war or, conversely, to impose that obligation to go to war on another. I say this within the context of the European Union.
On the second issue, I believe that if we cast our minds back to the end of August and the beginning of September of last year, I believe that the majority of Members of this honourable Parliament thought, with fear or horror, that we were at the beginning of a unilateral action against Iraq. There was pressure, very significant pressure from many countries, the majority of countries of the European Union. And we should also recognise the courage of the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, at that time. Amongst all of us we managed to ensure that that operation, which appeared to be under way, was brought within the context of the United Nations. And in September of that year the Iraq dossier, which was kept outside the United Nations Security Council, outside the framework of the United Nations, was brought to the United Nations. And for seven long weeks Resolution 1441 was debated. All of this action was unquestionably led by European countries in order to achieve a unanimously approved Resolution.
It has been a long time since a resolution of such importance has been approved unanimously, and countries such as Syria, for example, and a few days later, as I said at the beginning, the Arab League, the Arab countries, unanimously supported the content of Resolution 1441.
I do not believe that the Europeans are the only people responsible for Resolution 1441, but it would be pessimistic for us not to say that we have been very instrumental in the existence of Resolution 1441. So let us reassess our feelings of pessimism or optimism: our actions have been significant and they continue to be so. Resolution 1441 obliged the inspectors, Dr Blix and Mr ElBaradei, to produce a report. They were kind enough to speak with the President of the European Parliament yesterday by videoconference. The Members of this Parliament are well informed about what Mr Blix thinks. You have an in-depth knowledge of what he thinks, not only from what he has said in public, but also from what he said in that videoconference. And all the honourable Members of this House know that Dr Blix, a great European by the way – as he said himself yesterday −and a man who believes in the values of Europe, spoke to you yesterday with a degree of pessimism in his heart. This pessimism was not the result of ignorance, since he is a wise man, who has worked on the inspection of weapons of mass destruction for many years. He was somewhat pessimistic because he recognised that there had not been the cooperation he had hoped for. He had hoped, with his skill, his experience and generosity, for greater cooperation.
So, the first consequence we have in our hands, the first report, is a report which does not satisfy us in terms of the cooperation between Saddam Hussein and his regime and the inspectors. But despite all of this, we must continue and we have therefore asked the countries of the European Union to give all possible assistance to the inspectors. And I insist: what kind of assistance can we give? There are three types: assistance in terms of time, giving them more time; material assistance, giving them more resources if they need them; and assistance in terms of information and intelligence.
Another achievement yesterday was that the evidence in existence which was not being distributed beyond a certain number of people, some of them amongst Dr Blix’s colleagues, will now be discussed on 5 February within the United Nations Security Council. The United Nations Security Council is still, therefore, the centre of gravity of the debate, and I believe that the countries of Europe have had a hand in this, not in every respect, but to a very considerable extent.
There is therefore a dynamic of pressure which must be maintained – and the inspectors are asking us to maintain it − and at the same time a political dynamic in the debate taking place in the Security Council, which will take time. There will be other sittings and no doubt this Parliament will analyse within a few days the reports which will be produced in the United Nations Security Council. On the 14 February there will be a second report from the inspectors and we will see how the situation is developing."@en1
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