Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-09-03-Speech-3-151"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20030903.6.3-151"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spoken text |
". Mr President, first of all in the presence of the Commissioner who is presently responsible for humanitarian assistance, and also in the presence of the Commissioner who was responsible for humanitarian assistance before that, I would like to say how pleased I was that so much support was declared in this debate for the work of ECHO in Iraq over the last few months and indeed years.
Secondly, we have to agree on the circumstances in which we can best and most effectively contribute to meeting those needs.
There are three things that I want to mention again. The first is that for the international community, it is imperative to have a multilateral umbrella for our contributions. It is imperative to have an international trust fund which operates transparently and separately from the Iraqi Development Fund and the Coalition, though properly co-ordinated with what they are doing.
I repeat that unless I can give those guarantees to the budgetary authority it would be very difficult to persuade people to make the budgetary switches which will be required in order to achieve a reasonable level of generosity within the bounds laid down in the financial perspective.
Secondly, we need reasonable security in Iraq. It is not a very sophisticated point to make. It is impossible to develop a society if there are bombs going off. It is very difficult to reconstruct and to build democracy and pluralism if there is violence and instability. We need to ensure that the security situation improves. We must not be deterred from making commitments, but we must recognise that the amount of instability will affect the amount of progress in reconstruction.
Thirdly, the sooner we can transfer real authority to Iraqis in government to manage their own affairs the better. I hope that is going to follow from the appointment of the Iraqi cabinet the other day: they need not only titles, but also bureaucracies that they can run, policies that they can frame and services that they can deliver.
We are at the beginning of a long road. It is going to be a rocky road, but the sooner we get started the better for everyone.
There have been a number of very good and relevant speeches. We listened with interest to the contribution from the honourable Member Mr Hume, whose own personal record in the area of conflict prevention speaks volumes. He rightly pointed out that in modern warfare most of the victims are civilians.
I agree with much of what he said about conflict prevention, but perhaps I part company with him on one point. If one wants to see an international rule of law, one must, from time to time, accept that it needs the sanction of force if it is to be effective and if it is to be applied.
I am sure the whole House has noted the tribute paid by my honourable friend Mr Evans to his constituent, and we all know the enormously important and difficult job undertaken, as part of nation-building, by those who seek to establish judicial authorities and policing authorities where there has previously been chaos. Building an Iraqi police service is going to take a great deal of professionalism and a great deal of the sort of bravery shown by the honourable Member's constituent. I join him in offering my condolences to his family and friends.
I agreed with much of what was said during this debate. I agreed with what the honourable Member Mr Cohn-Bendit said about the regional dimension of the problems in the Near East, the Middle East and Central Asia. I agreed with what the honourable Member Mr Collins said about the importance of the UN role. This is a point underlined by the International Crisis Group report, to which I referred earlier. I am only sorry that those two honourable Members are not able to be with us to hear me paying those glittering tributes to them.
I also very much agreed with what the honourable Member Mr Sakellariou had to say about involving the people of Iraq as much as possible in shaping their own destiny.
We have to face the fact that you cannot drop a fully-fledged democratic system from the air into a country. You have to build democracy from the bottom up. You have to build democracy through local elections and regional elections, municipal elections, elections for professional bodies, trade union elections, elections in all those functional organisations. That is the way we will embed pluralism in due course in Iraq and, I hope, in other countries in the region.
Of course, the honourable Member Mrs Bonino was entirely correct – she has a way of pointing out from time to time that the emperor is decidedly lacking in clothes. She was right to say that we need a policy framework for what we do. It is not simply going to be enough to sign cheques.
I would like to say one other thing about the Madrid conference. We want to be clear about what we need to achieve at Madrid. I do not think the contents of the collection box is the principal issue. The principal issues are these: we have to have a proper assessment of the needs of Iraq over the next 14 or 15 months. We have to know what is going to be required."@en1
|
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples