Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-18-Speech-3-083"
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"en.20030618.7.3-083"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I believe that when we are talking about security a double language is being used. There are those who say that our real security lies in mediation, cooperation and prevention. Then there are others who say that our security depends on our defence and intervention capacities and associate it more with military aspects.
As far as I am concerned, the basis of our security is the credibility of our politics. Are we credible when in our association agreements with the Maghreb countries, for example, or other countries, we insert an Article 2 that talks about human rights and democracy and then quickly forget this article in our actual relations with these countries? No, no one takes us seriously! We sign association agreements and whenever things get complicated we forget one of the aspects of our security: being surrounded by democracies. The more democracies there are, the less the risk of war. Are we credible? Elmar Brok is right when he asks if we were credible in the Balkans. No. We proclaimed: peace, peace, peace. Men were massacred and we had no power to intervene. We therefore were not credible.
When we are told that our positions must be consistent with those of the Americans, that we must not go against the Americans, I say that we should be neither for or against the Americans. Yet is it credible to say that we are going to war because there are weapons of mass destruction when in fact there are none and it is a lie? We are not credible. Do Europeans have the right to say that a lie is a lie? Are all pro-Americans still annoyed when we say that the Americans lied, that Colin Powell lied in the Security Council? Let us take another example. Are we credible when we invoke international law as an argument? Yet is international law, as it exists today, the Bible? No. Is a Security Council without Brazil, without India, without South Africa a Security Council for today’s world? No. Therefore, fighting for international law is to fight to reform it, to change it. We must stop saying the same thing over and over: international law as it currently stands came from the Cold War and the Cold War is no longer our problem.
I will end with a comment on terrorism. Once again, are we credible in this respect when on the one hand, along with others, we quite rightly say that we had to intervene in Afghanistan to combat the terrorism, yet on the other hand we remain silent on everything that has happened in Guantanamo? Fighting and struggling against terrorism is to fight and struggle for the rule of law, wherever it may be, during war and in the different forms of war. If we do not succeed in resolving these problems together, we are not credible. Therefore, as far as I am concerned, the basis of security is credibility."@en1
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