Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-07-04-Speech-3-578-000"
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"en.20120704.32.3-578-000"2
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"Mr President, of course we support the EU policy led in particular by Baroness Ashton. However, I now wonder what we can do with the limited means we have at our disposal. As has been said, all this is ‘high politics’, you talk about it in the highest circles, but what about us, what more can we do?
Three weeks ago, I met Mr al Labwani, a longstanding Syrian opposition leader who was imprisoned five years ago. On leaving the confines of Parliament at the time, he returned to Damascus and was immediately imprisoned. What is more, this was not for the first time. Together in my office, five years ago, we discussed conditions inside Bashar al-Assad’s prisons and we talked about the temptation of suicide. He said to me, ‘It is terrible!’ When asked if he was frightened, he replied, ‘No, I will not kill myself!’ What really touched me when I met him again was when he said to me, ‘See, Ms De Keyser, I did not kill myself and I am now the happiest I have been in my life. I could never have imagined this. Despite the massacres we are now seeing, I had never in my life imagined that I would see this day in Syria’.
In other words, beyond the massacres, beyond the horrors that are occurring – and I will talk about that – there is now hope among the civilian population in Syria, and therefore we cannot let them down. This message went straight to my heart and I said, ‘What can we do?’
I have here the reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. I have all the preliminary statistics on crimes against humanity, on torture in Syria today and I do not even dare, Mr President, to read out any of these stories because they are beyond comprehension.
What I would like to say to you is that we need to prepare for what comes after Bashar al-Assad. We must now set out the arguments and gather the evidence. What is more, I am asking you, and the European Union, because …"@en1
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