Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-01-16-Speech-2-025"
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"en.20010116.3.2-025"2
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"Mr President, may I say that Mr Staes has done an excellent job in his report. May I also point out to everyone that the Balkans are a separate area of Europe, both geographically and from the point of view of their customs and their way of thinking. So we need to study every incident from every possible angle if we are to be efficient both in our criticism and in the measures which we take. What it comes down to, as Mr Staes has said and done, is going and seeing for yourself. From where we stand, we cannot see what is happening in these particular regions, which are pretty much a law unto themselves. We cannot monitor what is going on from behind a desk. We cannot understand the Balkan way of thinking from letters, faxes and e-mails. What we need to do is to get close to them, and we need to get close to them not just by expressing an interest which, it goes without saying, is manifest on all sides; we need to get close to them in practice, both physically and geographically, but mainly by learning about their history and what makes them tick.
Everything that has happened, the comments made by the auditors and the Commission, demonstrate that something that is good can always be replaced by something that is better and that something that is better can always be made better still. That is the direction we are all pulling in. I am certain that the interest evinced by us and the critical spirit which exists cannot but lead in the right direction and, if you like, we can take the results of the practices applied to this sort of cofinancing and adapt them in other directions. The European Agency for Reconstruction is now up and running in Thessaloniki and Pristina. It has attracted a great deal of criticism, but we cannot presume that Sarajevo is the same thing as Pristina and we need to make that clear, which is precisely why I referred to different ways of thinking, customs and situations which need to be borne in mind.
Many honourable Members – and to some extent they are right – said that the agency in Thessaloniki should be decentralised and should move to Pristina. Many of us categorically opposed this as out of the question. We have been proven right in keeping the agency in Thessaloniki because if we had moved the Thessaloniki agency to Pristina, Yugoslavia would now be unable to obtain funding from the European Agency for Reconstruction because it would have been impossible for a Serb to go to Pristina and claim so much as a single euro. Which is why I repeat that criticism is a good thing, but everything we do must be adapted to the circumstances, the needs and the peculiarities of each region."@en1
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