Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-03-09-Speech-3-014-000"
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"en.20110309.6.3-014-000"2
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"Mr President, honourable Members, thank you for the opportunity to discuss with this House the circumstances in our Southern Neighbourhood and, of course, with particular reference, as the President has said, to the situation in Libya.
In the coming days and weeks, as we have already been doing, we will be discussing with our international partners how we can coordinate so that we do not overlap and so that we are able to respond more quickly. On 23 February, I held a senior officials’ meeting with officials from the institutions, the World Bank, the Investment Bank, the EBRD, the IMF, but also senior officials from China, Russia, from Australia, from Korea, from the 27 Member States, from the United States and from Arab countries. The purpose of that meeting was not to decide what we would do to these countries but to be ready to be able to offer support quickly.
Honourable Members know that one of the criticisms which can be made about us is that sometimes we take a long time to respond. I want us to be ready and my conversations with, particularly, the Arab League and with the countries concerned have been aimed at making it really clear that my purpose is to make sure we are ready to be able to respond and that that response is coordinated and effective and uses the best that we have available, not only in Europe, but across the world.
After the Foreign Ministers meet tomorrow, and the European Council meets on Friday, the NATO meeting I will attend tomorrow and then the informal Foreign Ministers’ meeting over the weekend in Hungary, I will then fly to Cairo to meet with Amr Moussa, the Arab League and to debrief all of them on what has happened in our discussions and also to meet a new Egyptian Foreign Minister whom I have already spoken to. But, colleagues, I know there is a specific desire to talk about Libya so, having given that backdrop of the work we are doing, let me move on to the issues that concern us all in Libya.
I see two immediate priorities: first of all, to address the humanitarian crisis and assist with the evacuation, and second to make sure the violence stops and that those who perpetrate that violence are held to account.
On the humanitarian aid side, we have moved quickly. The Commission has increased its assistance to EUR 30 million; my colleague, Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva, went to the Tunisian-Libyan border last week to look at what was happening and to make sure that our engagement was working well. We have also, of course, been in touch with the UN on a constant basis to coordinate our activities and Member States have allocated important resources to tackle what is an immense challenge posed by the continuous flow of people, including through FRONTEX.
On the evacuation of EU citizens, the External Action Service has been instrumental in making sure that we have a rapid exchange of information and most effective use of our resources. Together with the Presidency, I activated the EU Civil Protection Mechanism on 23 February to help facilitate the evacuation of EU citizens. Getting information in real time, as honourable Members know, is a challenge, but we needed to make the right choices and so at my request, Agostino Miozzo, the EEAS Managing Director for Crisis Response, travelled to Tripoli on Sunday and Monday to get an assessment of what is happening on the ground.
He met with officials, he met with ambassadors, in a situation which he described to me as calm but extremely tense. Our European ambassadors welcomed the chance to talk in detail and to feed directly into our work their analysis of what is happening on the ground which, combined with contacts that we are making everywhere, helps us to establish a clearer picture of the situation.
Of course, we focused a lot of our efforts initially on the evacuation of European citizens and we have to show solidarity with Tunisia, which is bearing the brunt of the evacuation of so many people, especially Egyptians who are ending up on the Tunisian border and need to be brought to Egypt. Honourable Members know that there are about one million Egyptians in Libya, and about one and a half to two million people from the African countries that surround Libya who are currently there, and we know from what we heard is happening in Tripoli that there are about two to three thousand African people at the airport who are waiting to see how they are going to leave.
We have to be ready though to step up our support for the Libyan people. As I have said, this is a very fluid situation and we have to read it very carefully. I have asked my services, therefore, on a prudent planning basis, to look at a possible CSDP engagement; that engagement would be to support current evacuation and humanitarian efforts. As always with any CSDP options, this needs to be very carefully analysed and we will need proper answers on questions of mandate, resources and objectives. That work, I can tell you, is ongoing this week.
Dealing effectively with the humanitarian crisis is fundamental, ending the violence is a prerequisite to everything else. That is why I am pleased that the international community as a whole, through the UN Security Council, has made its position clear: that the violence is unacceptable; it must stop and people should be held to account.
Let me begin by stating the obvious which is that the Southern Neighbourhood is changing fast and across the region, people are standing up for that core human aspiration: to be able to shape their own lives, economically and politically. They call for political participation with dignity, accountability, they call for justice and they call for jobs. I believe we have to respond to those calls. I believe they are just and I believe that we need to make sure that we act quickly.
I am glad that agreement was found in New York on the European demand to include a referral to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. This was a European initiative and they have already started preliminary investigations into alleged war crimes.
Not surprisingly, we are working very closely with our partners: with the UN, with NATO, with the USA, with Turkey, with the Arab League and with many, many other countries with whom we are in daily contact. We talk with them about all of the issues in the Southern Neighbourhood but, especially, to make sure that we are collaborating effectively on the approach that we take in our Southern Neighbourhood and, as I have said, that includes all our partners. We have, as you would expect me to say, our own responsibility.
We immediately suspended the negotiations of the EU-Libya framework agreement, together with all cooperation of a technical nature.
We started preparatory work on restrictive measures ahead of the UN Security Council. In addition to the UN sanctions, we adopted on 28 February further restrictive measures: we have an embargo on equipment which could be used for internal repression and autonomous designations under the travel restrictions and assets freeze. We are now in the process of adding several entities controlled by Gaddafi and his closest associates to that list.
Honourable Members, we will remain at the forefront of the international efforts to restore peace and stability in Libya. Once we get an end to the violence, we have to work to support the emergence of a new Libya with democratically chosen leaders and where people’s rights are respected. In line with what I have said from the very beginning, we will not be dictating outcomes but supporting pluralism, accountability, deep democracy and shared prosperity.
By their nature, crises are a test of our policies, our resources and our abilities to respond in real time and the events in the Southern Neighbourhood represent an enormous challenge for the European Union. I believe, as Vice-President of the Commission, that how we respond will define this Commission for years to come.
So I look to the European Parliament and I need your support, because it is only our collective effort that is going to help to bring the European Union together, to confirm a strong position. We cannot afford to think small; we cannot afford to let inflexibility get in our way. We can and we have to respond in a strategic and united way. But I believe that if we do, we can make a real difference, supporting the people in the region who are asking for our support, but supporting them as they shape their own future.
A crucial aspect of what is going on is that the demand is coming from within. In my visits to Tunisia and Egypt, I heard many, many times: this is our country; this is our revolution. We want to do things our way but we want to engage with you and we need help.
Those principles, I believe, should guide the actions that we take: these democratic transitions must belong to the people; they must be home-grown. They will determine what happens next. But we have to be ready to offer the support, ready with creativity and determination and to do so on a scale that matches the historic nature of the changes we are seeing.
In a fluid situation like this, we have to have our actions rooted in our core values and our core interests. We have every reason to back the changes under way. Tunisians, Egyptians, Libyans and others are demanding respect for those values that actually are at the heart of the European ideal. The emergence of the democratic societies will help to sustain security and provide shared prosperity in our neighbourhood and that is why we have moved between us, the Commission and myself, to produce a joint paper for the European Council that meets on Friday which includes measures that we hope will contribute to that: more European Union financial support available from within the institutions, but also by mobilising the European Investment Bank – and I pay tribute to Parliament for moving so swiftly to recognise the need to assist the Investment Bank with its mandate to be able to put that support at the disposal of people – and that has been extremely successful.
We need your help to do more for the EIB and also for the EBRD, both of whom have been talking with me about the capacity that they have to alter their mandates and be able to put new support at the disposal of this neighbourhood – not, I hasten to add, at the expense of the work that they currently do, but in addition. With the European Investment Bank, we know that we can mobilise a further EUR 1 billion. Just so you can appreciate the amount that that will give, the current work of the Investment Bank in Egypt is EUR 488 million. This would be able to allow them to double the investment at least and that would enable some of the big infrastructure projects which are clearly needed and wanted by the people to be set in place.
We also want to see, through the paper, support with the training and exchange of students. These are young populations. One of the common factors across the Southern Neighbourhood is that it is a young society; those young people, some of them highly educated, some of them wanting further opportunities in education and training – we should respond to them as well, and we will be inviting Member States to consider that and I invite the Parliament to do so as well.
The emergence of a vibrant civil society: meeting with civil society in Tunisia, I met with people who had never been in the same room before because it had not been allowed. Their willingness and desire to establish themselves more fully as NGOs, as organisations able to work on issues of concern in their society and to hold their government to account, that is an extremely important part, as you know so well, of the development of this society. From that stems more inclusive governance: the ability of people to feel that they have a stake and a say in the governance of their society.
Of course, too, food security, a huge and growing issue in the region; further trade openings; the ability to get greater market access and mobility partnerships – all of these are included in the overall package that will be put to the European Council. I stress again, as I have done before, we want to see this as an incentive-based approach enabling people to move quickly, but also to differentiate. These countries are all different and they are at pains to say, ‘Please do not put us all together and see us as the same. We are different countries; we wish our societies to develop as differently as yours have. Yes, there are similarities but our distinctive difference is something we wish to ensure that you respect and you work with’. We want to take an approach which says that we give more for more; that those partners, those countries who want to go further and faster with reforms, should be able to count on greater support from the European Union."@en1
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