Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-09-15-Speech-3-008"
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"en.20040915.1.3-008"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, as Commissioner Patten said just now, this is a time of grief and not the time for us to read Russia lectures, and on that I very much agree with him. Nobody speaking in this debate can banish these images. I think we can all readily comprehend what it means when, in a particular town, not one single family is not lamenting a victim, and most of those families have lost children. We have to imagine that; there is a place on this earth, in which there is not one family that has not lost a child – grandchildren, nephews, nieces, the children of the family itself. Beslan will have to live with that trauma for a long time, and not just Beslan; we will all have to live with that trauma for a long time. The media world, in which we are at home, is fleeting and happy-go-lucky; today, already, other images are making the news.
So I want to take up something Mr Cohn-Bendit has said, something that I think is very astute. ‘A Rubicon of terrorism has been crossed’, he said. That is a fact; indeed, it has been. For the first time, we have seen in terrorism something characterised by two elements. It is actually an unwritten, but self-evident law of humanity that says that children are not to be targeted by such actions. Until now, as I recall, it was a fact of terrorism, albeit not of war, that children were not attacked. For the first time, something has been introduced, something that says: ‘We don’t care; we’ll take a whole school hostage, and we’re not interested in what happens to the children’. So it is that the end justifies the sacrifice of children; a Rubicon has indeed been crossed, and it is this against which we must defend ourselves. That is why I want, in this debate, to draw attention to something: as we all know how these terrorists think, we also need to make two connections here. There is, quite obviously, a connection between Chechnya and Islamic terrorism, with the idea being to use Chechnya and Ingushetia, regions with predominantly Muslim populations, as a means of taking the conflict to North Ossetia, inhabited by a different faith community, the object being to multiply the conflict two-fold. When, however, children were taken as hostages, the result was an effect that has gone unnoticed by our media. The fact is that, for the first time in a long time, in not one Arab country were there demonstrations in the street in support of this act of terrorism. Throughout the Islamic world, not one newspaper failed to condemn this act. Even the most radical of Islamic leaders anathematised and repudiated this sort of terrorism. It is in this element that there lies, certainly, an opportunity to revive a dialogue that has evaded us. If we can spot a lowest common denominator – and I believe that we can – then it is our shared repudiation of this sort of terrorism, and that smallest common denominator is also an opportunity to begin dialogue, an opportunity that we must make use of. That is why our group has discussed the need to draw the logical conclusions, to actually avoid talking only in terms of cultural confrontation, and instead seize opportunities for inter-cultural dialogue wherever they present themselves, even if it be at a moral nadir such as this one.
To all the perceptive things that have been said here, I want to add that there is a particular question facing the governments of our Union, in this House and particularly here. It is this. The European Parliament was broadly unanimous in supporting those states that rejected pre-emptive warfare as a means of conducting international policy and as a model for conflict resolution. We will shortly be discussing Iraq and the failure of the approach according to which international crises and conflicts can be resolved by pre-emptive strikes. To be consistent, though, we then have to say that such crises are no better dealt with by nullifying the democratic system, by abolishing the rule of law, or by reintroducing authoritarian structures.
While it is not for us to give Russia advice, anyone who reintroduces the death penalty absents themselves from our platform of action, which we in this House, let me add, share with our counterparts in the Council of Europe. That, too, is the honest thing to say, and if we cannot say that to a friend, then I think it is already too late, but, as we have friends in Russia, and as Russia is Europe’s most important partner, that must be said loud and clear. Pre-emptive warfare is no more use than the reintroduction of authoritarian structures."@en1
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