Brussels, 09/05/2011 (Agence Europe) - During a visit to Brussels on Friday 6 May, the head of the EU police mission in the Palestinian territories (EUPOL COPPS), Henrik Malmquist, gave his assurance that the mission was unbiased when it came to the recent reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. “Generally, the EU supports the idea of Palestinian reconciliation. In my specific area - security - we still need to know more and understand what this agreement means”, he added. In the eyes of the Palestinian police, however, reconciliation is a “natural” fulfilment of the process and the agreement signed last week between Fatah and Hamas is “in the Palestinians' national interest”, the spokesman for the police, Josef Ozreil, said in Brussels. In an appeal voiced before the European press on Friday, Ozreil call for “more support” to bring the process of Palestinian reconciliation to a satisfactory conclusion. “If we talk about the police, we are talking about the police in Gaza - about 14,000 people that have been out of work for the last four years, so they need a lot of help and they need to be rehabilitated and to be supported”, he said.
“It's going to be one institution, one president, one prime minister”, Ozreil explained to Agence Europe, saying that institutional consolidation between the Gaza Strip under Hamas and the West Bank: “will take one, maybe two months, but at the end that is how it will be”. Ozreil did not conceal the fact that the Palestinians were in favour of having a “democratic, professional and modern” police force able to serve the “future, independent Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem”. With the help of EUPOL COPPS, entrusted with providing advisory services for the establishment of the whole judiciary police, true progress has been made over the past year. Palestinian police action has managed to reduce the number of fatal crimes from 44 last year to 27 this year and to limit drug circulation, Ozreil said. The Palestinian police intervened in this respect on 630 occasions as opposed to 1,000 in 2009, he said, and implemented and executed over 98,000 cases with the judiciary system in Palestine last year. In addition to modernising police infrastructure and training, the Palestinian police also finalised adoption of a strategic plan for the next three years and signed memoranda of agreement with the universities and media in Palestine. (A.By./transl.jl)