Brussels 28/02/2011 (Agence Europe) - The initiator of the Union for the Mediterranean, UfM, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, called on Sunday 27 February for a re-design of the UfM, set up in July 2008 but unable to get properly underway due in part to the problems in the Middle East and in part to low visibility and vagueness of UfM institutions, objectives and strategy, not to mention lack of resources.
Sarkozy said the time had come to re-design the UfM in the light of the great events currently underway and France would make suggestions to its partners with this in mind. He sees the crisis in the Arab world as providing greater justification for the UfM although it has not been backed by great political will in Europe and there has been a total absence of initiatives from non-EU countries. Sarkozy said the Arab revolutions opened a new epoch in EuroMed relations, countries which have a very close history and geography. He said Europe must not be afraid of these historical changes because they involve huge hope, being carried out on behalf of the values closest to the EU and there must be a single aim - to support and help people who have opted for freedom. He said people would not accept European interference and it would be morally and strategically wrong to ignore what is going on, and the EU has to ensure that the hope that has been raised is not allowed to die because the fate of the current uprisings is not yet certain. If people of good will fail to unite to ensure they succeed, they may sink into violence and end up in worse dictatorships than the previous ones. If the movements fail, he said, there would be tragedies among the floods of immigrants leaving these countries and there would also be terrorism, which would be aiming at the whole of Europe.
Sarkozy said that the worst economic and financial crisis since the Second World War seems to be easing and no sooner has Europe got over the euro crisis when, across the Mediterranean, an immense uprising is taking place. Some Arab communities are taking their fate in their own hands, overthrowing regimes that initially gave them freedom from colonisation, but the tools of freedom turned into tools of oppression. He said Europe had the duty to act ambitiously in line with the scale of the historic events and this is why France has called on the European Council to meet so that Europe can decide on a common strategy to deal with the Libyan crisis which might have a huge negative impact on stability across the regions. Likewise, he said, Europe must immediately give itself new mechanisms to promote education and training of young people in North Africa and come up with an economic and trade policy to encourage the growth of the young democracies that want to be born. (F.B./transl.fl)