Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-12-17-Speech-3-454"
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"en.20081217.26.3-454"2
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".
Mr President, what does the agency Frontex have to do with development? It has an awful lot to do with it, as former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, clearly explained in the periodical
in March this year. He wrote, ‘That brings us to Frontex and the hypocrisy of the Commissioners in Brussels who, with one hand, engineer famine in Africa while, with the other, criminalise the victims of their policies, the famine refugees.’
A specific example is that the EU carries out agricultural dumping, thereby destroying the local African cultivation of foodstuffs, thus making it increasingly the case that people have to flee their home countries. Another specific example is EU factory ships depleting fishing grounds within the exclusion zones of African states. There is also a rapid destruction of traditional fishing villages, in the Sahel Belt for instance, but Mali and Guinea-Bissau are also examples of this.
What this means is that, in Frontex, we have an institution that physically seals off Europe and organises deportations, and does so regardless of the UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. In the meantime, mass deportations – like the one that took place from Vienna from 11 EU Member States on 14 November – are being organised. There is much talk of ‘solidarity’ in the report. However, the solidarity referred to here is not solidarity with fellow human beings, who are fleeing their countries, but rather solidarity between Member States. What is needed is absolutely clear, and that is solidarity with people fleeing from insufferable living conditions. All Frontex achieves is to lengthen the routes by which people flee. It categorically does not provide any solution. For that reason, the only sensible thing to call for is the disbandment of Frontex.
In this context, I would advise you all to take a look at opinions from Africa once in a while, for instance, those of Mali’s former Minister for Culture and Tourism, Aminata Traore, who put it very clearly, as follows, ‘The human, financial and technological resources that Europe employs against waves of migration from Africa are, in reality, the instruments of a war between this global power and young Africans from both town and country, whose right to education, economic participation, work and food is completely ignored in their countries of origin under the tyranny of structural conformity.’ I think these words are clear."@en1
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