Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-30-Speech-2-178"
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"en.20040330.5.2-178"2
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"Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner Patten, the European Union has, then, rediscovered its ‘sacred union’ by condemning the killing of Sheikh Yassin, and some have even presented him as a venerable old man and an almost saintly person.
Today, in this Parliament, we have heard the party chairman Mr Barón Crespo authoritatively, and others I believe somewhat less authoritatively, remind us of the possibility of calling for Article 2 to be applied, that is to say the suspension of the Association Agreement with Israel because of the death of Sheikh Yassin. His death is certainly a violation of international legality; there is no doubt about it.
The European Council dedicated five paragraphs to condemning Israel for this, but I do not recall having read anything in the text about employing handicapped children for just a few euros to turn them into human bombs with 10 kg of explosives. We Radical Members have called for the suspension of the Association Agreements – as Commissioner Patten knows only too well – under Article 2, which unfortunately we have never, or almost never, put into practice, for scores of countries, many of them also in the region.
I believe that it is important not to lose sight of this fact. If we consider it right to condemn Israel, a democratic country – having awarded it, so to speak, the title of democratic country – which means we can expect it to respect international law, assuming, on the other hand, that it is pointless to ask for respect, for example, from the other Arab countries, we are making a huge mistake and we are continuing to rant on without having an effective role in the region.
As regards the issue of the Greater Middle East, for example, it is true that the Americans have been over-ingenuous, putting forward this proposal without allowing it to be scrutinised and assessed perhaps more attentively and being put first and foremost to the governments of the Middle East. The idea in itself is a good one – not the idea of exporting democracy, which just makes the concept appear ridiculous and trivial, rather like the one that we too tried to develop, to some extent artificially, long before the US proposal, with the infamous Sana’a Conference on Democracy and Human Rights in the Middle East. Either we lay the foundations for political democracy or, as Europe, we go along with the American idea, independently, of course, but put forward a strong proposal in the months to come, in consultation with Arab countries, taking an approach that seeks to involve them – not just at a governmental level but also at a civil society level – in a solid and strong proposal to promote the kind of societies and democracy called for by these countries in order to achieve development, as the UNDP told us.
This is, therefore, the way to resolve – or to include – the Israel-Palestine issue too in a more overall solution. To conclude, I applaud the fact that the major leaders of the European left finally recognise, as we have been saying for 30 years, that the accession of Israel and Palestine to the European Union is another important path towards reaching a lasting solution to the Middle East issue."@en1
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