Brussels, 27/09/2001 (Agence Europe) - The Belgian Foreign Affairs Minister, Louis Michel, who was in Cairo on Thursday after visiting Saudi Arabia where the EU's message received a very favourable welcome, according to a European Commission spokesperson, qualified the statements by the Italian Prime Minster Silvio Berlusconi as "almost barbaric", "stupid and unacceptable". Mr Michel said that if Mr Berlusconi really made this speech, it is serious. It is historically, culturally and politically false and unjustified and, moreover, in complete contradiction with the EU's declaration at the Brussels Summit, adding that to claim that Western civilisation was superior is out-of-date culturally and almost barbaric. Just after meeting the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Mr Michel explained that the remarks were all the more stupid and out of place since we (the European Troika) are here to convince our Arab and Muslim friends that we want to avoid this type of misunderstanding. Commissioner Chris Patten, commenting on Mr Berlusconi's remarks, said that we Europeans had to remember with humility that the Islamic world has never been responsible for a holocaust.
Before leaving Brussels for Washington where he was due to meet President Bush (together with Mr Prodi), the Belgian Prime Minster, Guy Verhofstadt, said that Mr Berlusconi's statements could have dangerous consequences and rather than having a meeting of civilisations, they could give rise to a feeling of humiliation. The President of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, refused to comment, but did take advantage of his address to the Brussels Islamic Centre on Thursday morning to affirm that "We will not fall in any way or under any circumstances into a war of civilisations", stressing that support was required for "the efforts of so many brave men and women to build bridges between civilisations and realities which are different, but whose values are equally profound." A Commission spokesperson refused to comment other than saying that Mr Prodi's speech showed that "we do not share Mr Berlusconi's ideas".
A brief summary of Mr Berlusconi's speech: Western civilisation and Islam cannot be placed on the same level and the West is superior. "We should be confident of the superiority of our civilisation, which consists of a value system that has given people widespread prosperity in those countries that embrace it and guarantees respect for human rights and religion. This respect certainly does not exist in Islamic countries". The West, given the superiority of its values, "is bound to occidentalise and conquer new people". Western civilisation includes values of love of liberty as an end in itself, freedom of peoples and individuals, which are certainly not part of other civilisations, like Islam. This was not the first time that Silvio Berlusconi had made such comments, since he told journalists after the extraordinary Summit last Friday that the West had the duty to advance the Western civilisation and that it was in advance of others that were stuck in the past, or even in the Middle Ages (see our special edition of 22 September, p.3).