Brussels, 17/09/2001 (Agence Europe) - European Parliament President Nicole Fontaine said she was concerned at the attack that cost the life of Commander Massoud, "the most emblematic figure of the resistance of the Afghan people". This attack, she says in a press release, "confirms, if confirmation there need be, the collusion of the Taliban regime with international terrorist networks", and is in line with the "same strategy as those committed in New York and Washington on Tuesday". Ms. Fontaine recalls that she had invited Commander Massoud to Strasbourg last spring, who had "agreed to come to Europe for the first time, not to ask for help in waging war but to make peace" (see EUROPE of 6 April, p.3). His requests "should have deserved at that time and further back even the backing on the part of Western Governments", says Ms. Fontaine, "deeply" regretting "that we were unable to help this courageous man who, moreover, had warned the international community of the imminent dangers it was facing". Having received Commander Massoud and three women having clandestinely left their country, "I had called on EU governments to place pressure on countries that back the Taliban", Ms. Fontaine also recalled, regretting that it had taken the attacks on the United States for the "international community to think about acting", while stressing that it was not the Afghan people who "deserve further collective punishment", but the authors of "these odious acts" and those who ordered them. The Taliban regime "tarnishes (…) the image of an open and tolerant Islam", and must "be outlawed by the international community, as was the case for the Khmers Rouges, but after too much wait-and-see and two million deaths", Nicole Fontaine concludes.
(Questioned on the French television station LCI on Monday, Ms. Fontaine said that the retaliation of the United States should not be "gesticulation" consisting in "bombing the population and leaving the Taliban regime intact", as, that way, "we would be playing the game of the terrorists that wanted to destabilise us".