Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-09-16-Speech-4-126"
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"en.19990916.9.4-126"2
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"Mr President, it appears that Enceladus is furious with Greece and Turkey and, being his inept self when it comes to dialogue and bargaining, he flew into a fit of catastrophic rage, scattering death, sorrow, pain, desperation and havoc around the two countries. The catastrophic bible-like scenes in Turkey stretch over some 60,000 square kilometres, almost the size of Belgium and Denmark put together – an expanse which has affected the lives of 15 million people.
More than 15,000 people lost their lives in the earthquake. Every building within 80 to 90 kilometres of the epicentre of the earthquake is in ruins. According to statistics, this region once produced 30% to 35% of Turkey’s GNP and provided employment for thousands of workers. The purely economic repercussions of the earthquakes are great and it would seem difficult, if not impossible, to expect Turkey to overcome all that without any generous help from outside, without our active support.
In Greece, the destruction is not so wide-spread but the cost in human lives is grave with 138 dead, 3 seriously injured, and approximately 100,000 left homeless. The material cost is huge and the earthquakes cost both Greece and Turkey dearly. One particular part of this cost, and perhaps the most tragic, concerns the number of human beings who lost their lives, the number of families who were destroyed and the psychological shock suffered by the whole of the regions’ population, who are now filled with dread at the possibility of another earthquake. The people in those regions have had to summon spiritual strength to overcome the individual, family and financial disaster and to start building again from scratch.
Nevertheless, every cloud has a silver lining. The earthquakes seem to have destroyed houses on the one hand and built bridges between Greece and Turkey on the other. The earthquakes laid the unique foundations for co-operation between the two countries. The pain and the disaster have taught us that we can only cope with national disasters through co-operation and peaceful co-existence. George Papandreou and Mr Cem, the Foreign Ministers for Greece and Turkey respectively, finally decided to include the issue of Greek-Turkish co-operation in dealing with natural disasters on the agenda for dialogue between Athens and Ankara. It appears, as the speaker said previously, that every tragedy has a cathartic effect. However, in closing, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to return once again to a suggestion which was also put forward by other speakers, that is the need to create a European research centre for the systematic study, research and implementation of new preventative methods for earthquakes."@en1
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