Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-09-16-Speech-4-011"
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"en.19990916.2.4-011"2
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"(
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, we are talking today about a Reconstruction Agency for South-East Europe whose first operational Agency is to be opened in Pristina, Kosovo. Unlike other institutions in Europe, we have learned a lesson from Bosnia-Herzegovina. We want efficiency right from the start, and this ought not to be compromised from the beginning because the decisions are being taken a long way away. We learned this in Bosnia, and the warning has not been lost on us. Mr Schwaiger, the last rapporteur at OBNOVA, stipulated this for Bosnia at that time.
This report was forwarded to us in July. I have spent my holiday attending to, and then presenting, this report.
The Council has already issued a joint statement of its position which, it told me yesterday, it could no longer change. That of course is just not on. If today we were to take a final vote on this report, then, when it came down to it, we would have a situation in which the Council would be saying “Yes, you have worked well and what you have written is good, but we are not interested.” That is not going to happen today. We shall ask the Commission to take our side in accordance with the five points which were agreed yesterday, and in the weeks to come we shall ensure that the Council accepts most of what we said here, preferably everything, because we have in fact been working really quite efficiently.
I come now to a point which particularly exasperates me. The Reconstruction Agency – the umbrella organisation – is in Thessaloniki. The Stability Pact has its headquarters in Brussels. Can someone explain to me how stability in the western Balkans is to be organised from Brussels? I personally could not, and I am certain that the gentleman whose task this is is much less well placed to explain.
I would therefore urge you to help me convince the Council that the Reconstruction Agency for South-East Europe with its headquarters in Thessaloniki must be very closely connected with the headquarters of the Stability Pact, which must also be in Thessaloniki. I should like to add something on this matter. This Stability Pact intends to organise round-table conferences and is in fact already doing so. Do you know what round-table conferences are? Everyone in South-East Europe is sick to death of these. In the end, nothing of practical value comes out of them. If the Stability Pact were to organise a “working” table conference for democratisation and human rights, all well and good. Except that the Royaumont Initiative is already involved in precisely this field. Or if it were to organise a round-table conference on the subject of economic reconstruction, development and co-operation, again all well and good. But SECI is already doing that. Or it could do something on security issues. However, the South-Eastern European Defence Ministers’ Group is already doing this. So, there are at least four different organisations and groups down there with round tables and square tables, and all to no avail. In the end, nothing emerges from it all.
I am therefore asking the Council to combine the hea4dquarters of the Stability Pact and that of the Reconstruction Agency, to dovetail the two and finally to incorporate effectively the initiatives I have mentioned (I do not want to list them again now; you can read them in the minutes.) We do not need to re-invent the wheel when people have already been working on these matters for years. I would therefore ask you to support me in order to guarantee in practice the efficiency of this Agency.
We therefore attach a lot of importance to having the Agency which is to manage the reconstruction in Kosovo situated in Pristina. I concede, however, that it is a part of the large Reconstruction Agency for the whole of the western Balkans, and for South-East Europe, which will have its headquarters in Thessaloniki. I shall come back to this question of the Agency’s location and everything connected with it, as well as to the question of its efficiency.
What ought this Agency to be doing now in Kosovo? It is to carry out reconstruction on-site, but it is not responsible for only the bricks and mortar. It is also responsible for re-establishing constitutional relationships. It is responsible for rebuilding the infrastructure. It is responsible for establishing businesses, for all this is necessary in order to give the refugees decent homes and the chance to live in Kosovo again.
In Kosovo, it is a question not only of a post-war situation which, from the point of view of damage, is not as bad as we had assumed at the beginning. We also know that the Albanians are in a position to do a very great deal themselves. They are not waiting for the mortar to be supplied to them by others. They are taking the matter in hand themselves. They are also content when they have already rebuilt parts of their houses and can then go on little by little to rebuild more.
No, this Agency also has a quite different task. It must in fact also fill the vacuum that has arisen in the last nine years. There are no authorities there. There is no administrative structure. This is why it is also so incredibly difficult to make any progress at all with the reconstruction and with getting companies established there. Forms of ownership have not been clarified. They cannot tell a firm in Western Europe that they can go and establish themselves there and take over an existing firm. That is just not on at all because no one knows to whom such firms belong. To a large extent, they are in fact state property. The question of who owns the land has not been clarified either. All these matters are the basis for primary tasks to be carried out by the new Agency on-site, and it is only on-site that they can be carried out.
We need people down there to fulfil really important tasks. We need engineers. We also need mine-clearance personnel. We need all types of know-how. That is what this Agency is designed for.
In this case, we have already achieved some things, or else others have conceded things to us – perhaps in anticipation of obedience to Parliament. For example, the director of the Agency must present a quarterly report on its activities to Parliament; the European Parliament must follow the discharge procedure and certify to the director that the budget plan has been implemented correctly; and the Commission must present to Parliament an annual report approved by the Agency’s administrative board.
We also demand that Parliament also, of course, be consulted if the work of this Agency is to be extended into other, similar areas. That cannot happen following a decision by the Council alone. We do not accept any more
where we have not been consulted."@en1
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