Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-09-06-Speech-3-149"
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"en.20060906.21.3-149"2
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"Mr President, this summer’s conflict has claimed the lives of over 1000 people, the vast majority of whom were innocent civilians. It has reduced much of Lebanon to rubble. If the situation teaches us nothing else, it must teach us to look forward, rather than back.
The danger is this: the European public at large believe that Europe has responded to the crisis. If things go wrong and we have large numbers of young men coming back home in body bags, people will want to know who in Europe is responsible. Somebody will have to take the political responsibility.
Please, President-in-Office of the Council, get Europe’s common foreign and security policy together so that we are not faced with that kind of situation.
In conclusion, we should give two cheers for Europe: one for Louis Michel’s rapid action and one for Romano Prodi’s courage in coordinating our efforts to deal with this problem. We should thank the Commission, the Finnish Presidency and Cyprus – a new Member State – for the tremendous help it has given. We should also thank Turkey for having the courage to help us in committing troops.
However, we still run the risk of insistence on national sovereignty resulting in global anarchy.
We should waste no time in deploying the 7000 troops that the Union has pledged to UNIFIL to stabilise the situation in southern Lebanon, to cut off the flow of arms and to support the humanitarian effort. We must, however, clarify UNIFIL’s mandate to turn the UN resolutions into reality on the ground.
And of course we must go further. We must speak with one voice. We must, in the short term, demand the immediate lifting of Israel’s air and sea blockade of Lebanon. We must demand the lifting of the blockade of Gaza and we must help to establish an effective Palestinian Government.
In the medium term, while condemning terrorist acts we must bring Hizbollah and Hamas in from the cold and engage them in a dialogue for the establishment of a democratic framework. We must set up an independent inquiry into the civilian deaths caused by all sides in the recent conflict and, as Kofi Annan has pointed out, it will not be through the barrel of a gun, but thanks to dialogue and compromise that Hizbollah will put down their weapons and negotiate a long-term solution.
We have long-term tasks too. If we are to raise a new generation that is not steeped in fear and intolerance, we must build institutions that will ensure peace in the long term. When he was President of the European Commission, Romano Prodi talked about setting up a Euro-Arab development bank, jointly financed and managed by both sides. We must look, too, at a security organisation along the lines of Mr Fogh Rasmussen’s proposed conference on security and cooperation in the Mediterranean, which Mr Schulz has quoted. We must look at how we can tie in, with a proper immigration policy, all of the countries of the Mediterranean basin. And we must oversee all of this through the Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly in which you, Mr President, have invested so much political – and no little financial – capital. Let us learn from Einstein when he told us that peace cannot be kept by force, only achieved through understanding.
Mr Tuomioja, you spoke about the European Union’s remarkable achievement and its major success. I commend the work you have done, but let us not exaggerate. It is a crisis that has driven the European Union to the position it is in, though something Michel Barnier has called the
. The Union does not have the European constitution that it needs and which would have equipped it far better to deal with this situation. We are deploying European forces but this is not an EU force, even if – thank heavens – it is a coalition of the coherent.
In terms of democratic decision-making we are running on a wing and a prayer. After your meeting in Lappeenranta on 25 August, Mr Solana said that this was the most important decision taken by the EU for many years. If that is so, then why is Mr Solana not here, telling us about it and telling us about the conditions surrounding this conflict? He has a mandate, but of what kind?
When we asked we were told that the rules of engagement for the forces were: ‘a matter strictly between the United Nations and the troop contributors’. We were told, therefore, that this was not a European matter. It is absurd that Mr Solana is not here to talk to us about the rules of engagement for this conflict!"@en1
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"reflexe Européen"1
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