Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-11-16-Speech-2-128"
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"en.20041116.12.2-128"2
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Mr President, few Members will have worked as hard to preserve our capacity for dialogue with the authorities of the regime and the Cuban people as I have during my period as chairman of this Parliament's committee responsible for relations with that country. But the dialogue that we advocate, that we believe in and which we put into practice, Mr President, has not been wrecked by any government of the European Union, nor by Osvaldo Payá, nor by Elisardo Sánchez, nor by Marta Beatriz Roque, but by the policy of executions, the arrest of independent journalists - such as Raúl Rivero, who is currently rotting in Cuban prisons, and others - and the policy of arresting peaceful dissidents and human rights campaigners.
Faced with these events, our Parliament cannot remain deaf, dumb and blind. The Council's common position, which some people wish pointlessly to alter – and we have the results of today’s comparison, which have been a spectacular disaster for the approach of changing it - requesting a new report from the Ambassadors in Havana, has served, as expressed by Mario Vargas Llosa in an article published recently in the
newspaper, to send a clear message to the millions of Cubans who cannot protest, vote or escape, that they are not alone, that they have not been abandoned and that the western democracies are with them.
What is proposed to us by certain political groups in this Parliament in their resolution, where there is not even any mention of calling for the release of political prisoners? To cooperate and talk with the villains and mock the victims? To be complacent towards those who oppress them? To seek a policy of appeasement and friendship with tyranny?
Mr President, Andrei Sakharov, who left us a legacy of moral integrity and a significant lesson in peaceful co-existence between peoples, said that the voices that count are often those which cannot be heard. Mr President, the forced absence from the Sakharov Prize award ceremony last year of one of its most honourable recipients, Osvaldo Payá, is the best possible argument for speaking out on behalf of those people inside and outside of Cuba who are fighting for their freedom and dignity, and for this Parliament, Mr President, to be very forceful in its demand for freedom, as it has always been."@en1
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