Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-04-06-Speech-4-164"
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"en.20060406.26.4-164"2
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".
Mr President, I have to say at the very start that I think it a scandal that Mr Pflüger had nothing whatever to say about the plight of Christians in Iraq, although that is perhaps understandable if one is aware that his party still lives off the money of another state in which Christians were subject to great persecution, that state being the GDR.
I have to tell him, though, that there are many points on which I agree with him. I was – and still am – a forthright critic of the intervention in Iraq, and I do believe that we have to very objectively assess what has resulted from it. The main justification for this intervention adduced by those who sought to justify it was the need to improve the state of human rights under Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime. There have indeed been some improvements, but we must, unfortunately, note that a number of things have also got worse.
First among these – and a major one – is the fact that the intervention caused the very complex ethnic balance in what was an artificial state created by the colonial powers after the First World War to be upset, and that nobody has any idea how to create a proper state in Iraq.
The hardest hit by all this are the less numerous peoples and particularly the small minorities such as the Assyrians and other small ethnic groupings. I am very struck by the way in which so many in this House find it so difficult to stand up for the rights of Christians and to speak up in their defence. Here is a minority that is being persecuted for its Christian faith. Who shall plead their cause if not this Europe of ours, the inhabitants of which are 85% Christian?
We in this House must stand in solidarity with all those who are persecuted, with everyone whose human rights are violated, but there should be some sort of natural bond between the mainly Christian Europe and the ancient Christian minorities in this region, who have a very troubled history to look back on and who suffer in a particular way from the unstable conditions that prevail today. They are persecuted for being Christian, and their persecutors are extremist elements that – as Lady Nicholson put it so very well – misuse Islam for political reasons in order to subjugate and enslave the minorities they do not like. It is a politicised Islam that persecutes these minorities.
We have every right to be critical of the state of affairs in the prisons. What must be plain to us is that, while we have overthrown a dictatorship, and are engaged in building up democracy and the rule of law – an objective I endorse and that needs masses of support from the EU – we must then be willing to be judged by appropriate standards. The conditions under which prisoners are kept and the justice system are the first steps on the road to a functioning state under the rule of law, and this is particularly true of those prisons that are run by others rather than by the Iraqis themselves.
All things considered, one has to say that human rights are indivisible, and turning a blind eye is not an effective way for anybody to stand up for human rights."@en1
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