Strasbourg, 12/05/2005 (Agence Europe) - After Wednesday's memorable debate (see yesterday's EUROPE, pages 4 and 5 and the following pages), the European Parliament adopted a joint resolution on the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, in Strasbourg on Thursday evening, by an overwhelming majority (463 votes in favour, 49 against and 33 abstentions). In this text, which was approved with no amendments, the EP commemorates “all victims of Nazi tyranny, especially all victims of the holocaust” and, more generally, “all victims of the war, on all sides” of what was a “common European tragedy”, and to all the allied soldiers who gave their lives, and to the nations, “especially the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the other Allied states”. The EP also points out that “for some nations, the end of World War II implied a renewal of the tyranny inflicted by the Stalinist Soviet Union”. In this context, the EP welcomes the fact that “the central and eastern European States and people can now also enjoy freedom and the right to decide about their destiny after so many decades under Soviet domination or occupation or other communist dictatorships”. The MEPs also stress the need to uphold the memory of the past, “because there cannot be reconciliation without truth and remembrance” and state that “only strong Europe can offer a solution to overcome the atrocities of the past”.
An emotional debate, with MEPs denouncing Nazi crimes and Polish, Hungarian, Czech and Latvian members recalling Soviet crimes - Oral arguments in support of ratification of the Constitution
During the debate, all German MEPs voiced their horror of crimes committed by their country before the end of the war, while MEPs from the new Member States (especially Poland) were keen to recall the Soviet crimes committed during the post-war period. There can be no doubt about what caused the war, it was “lunacy” on the part of the National-Socialist regime, the president of the EPP/ED Group, Hans-Gert Pöttering, said on Wednesday afternoon during the debate. He asserted that, “there were not many victors in 1945. Rather there were lucky and not so lucky survivors”. Mr Pöttering pays tribute to those who allowed a return to dignity and democracy and who had the vision of a future united Europe: Winston Churchill, Robert Schuman (without the “greatness” of France which stretched out the hand of friendship to Germany, Europe would have remained an “empty idea”, the CDU member said). These hopes, however, were disappointed in Eastern Europe, which was nonetheless gradually able to rise to join a Europe which is not just a political construction, Mr Pöttering stresses, but also a “moral habitat”, which is opposed to totalitarianism and to nationalism and which is open to dialogue among people, religions and cultures. No German representative can think of 8 May 1945 without being aware of the fact that he is German, the president of the Socialist Group, Martin Schulz, said, adding that, alongside him, there is Poul Nyrup Rasmussen from Denmark, a country where his father was among the forces of occupation, and that, in his group, next to him, there are representatives from countries that still carry the scars of war, as well as Jews and Muslims. Mr Schulz hammered home the fact that we all say “never again” - it should never again be possible for a State to want to exterminate another people, and it is the “singular nature” of the Third Reich to have taken on such an identity. He received resounding applause. Mr Schulz went on to conclude that one should remember Anne Frank and Sophie Scholl, the German schoolgirl who was executed. At this point he was mainly addressing the young who were present and who would have a better future than their parents or their grandparents. As President Borrell had done when opening the debate, Graham Watson, President of the ALDE Group, said we should not forget our past but look towards the future. As a student in Leipzig in 1976, he saw with his own eyes that, while we were free in the West, tyranny in the East had been replaced by other kinds of tyranny, the British Liberal Democrat said, calling on Europeans to continue to reject all totalitarianism. Building the future, that means ratifying the European Constitution, Mr Watson urged, exclaiming: freedom, equality and fraternity - that is now part of our European democratic fabric. An emotional defence in favour of the European Constitution was also launched by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Co-President of the Greens/EFA Group, who feels the Constitution is a battlement against totalitarians. The German Green member also stressed the need to confront authoritarian regimes. Yes, we must speak with the Russians, he said, but we must speak to them of Chechnya. Yes, we must speak with the Chinese, but we must speak to them of repression. Mr Cohn-Bendit also adopted a personal tone recalling that he was born one month before August 1945. His father, a lawyer working for the Red Cross, left Germany seventy-two years ago. Cohn-Bendit was born “exactly nine months after the US landed in Normandy. I am a child of liberty”. “Dear friends”, Daniel Cohn-Bendit said going from French to German, Germany is a symbol of what has happened in Europe, because it has known two totalitarianisms, Nazism and Communism. Francis Wurtz, President of the European United Left/Nordic Greens Left, does not like this parallel. In his view, “when an institution like ours evokes this founding event (…), the victory by all the Allies - Americans, British and Soviets - of the anti-Hitlerian coalition, each word counts”. Announcing the rejection of the Brok resolution by his group, the French Communist protested: “At the time when the European Union consults its citizens on a draft Constitution, how will they interpret a conception of the enlarged Europe which begins by questioning the cornerstone of the vision of Europe and the world born on 8 May 1945, namely that Nazism was not a dictatorship or a tyranny or anything else but the total rupture with our civilisation?” Mr Wurtz stressed: “We are ready in a debate without taboo on the crimes of Stalinism, as on the German-Soviet pact remembered so sinisterly, or the history of the Baltic States, but nothing - absolutely nothing, must allow Nazism to become banal”, as the declared aim of Nazism was to exterminate all the “inferior beings” and enlarge the “vital space” left for the “superior race” through “total war”. In his view, “a word on the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the tens of thousands of deaths in a country already vanquished would not have gone amiss”.
Among the MEPs from the new Member States who spoke in the debate, several complained of the lack of understanding of their colleagues from Western Europe for the years of Soviet oppression they had suffered. Jozef Szajer (EPP-ED, Hungary) paraphrased a declaration by Franco Frattini in a letter to Hungarian MEPs (your history is our history, wrote the Commissioner), affirmed: “our history is also your history…but new often get the feeling that it is not understood by everyone…Western Europe was able to pick itself up after the warn we were excluded and not because of our own fault”. Mr Szajer denounced, in this context, the attempts by some (including some at the European Parliament) to pain a “threatening picture” of “poor” citizens from the new Member States. He added that many people did not understand that “the red star is a system of hatred and tyranny as much as the swastika”. He said that despite this, those inheriting this defunct system have now become in Russia “soave” business men, “responsible” politicians and “speak of Soviet occupation as liberation”. There cannot be two weights and measures, he said: Auschwitz and Katyn, the redefinition of borders, deportation of whole nations, torture, unacceptable crimes, whoever the authors, concluded the Hungarian deputy. Several Polish MEPs described in detail the tragic events that marked decades of their countries' history. Some, like Jan Jerzy Kulakowski (ADLE) or Jozef Pinior (PES), highlighted pro-European ideas. Pinior said that he believed that Europe would be a privileged zone of hope” for all Europeans, although he referred to the fate of the Eastern and Central European countries under the Soviet oppression. Kulakowski reeled off a number of dates in his country's painful history, the arrival of the Nazis in 1939-44, and the Red army which “observed the repression” and had done nothing until 1945, sealing the “separation” of Poland from democratic Europe. He arrived at the creation of Solidarnosc and the “beginning of Poland's liberation”. He noted that “solidarity has to exist in the future”. Wojcieh Roszkowski (UEN) spoke of the past with indignation. Poland had been the first to oppose Hitler and had been “thrown into Stalin's arms”. The member of the Union of Europe of Nations described the debate as “the most important discussion on European identity that we have ever had” and sharply attacked President Putin, who he said, “had a Soviet interpretation of the second world war”. In Western Europe, one continues to speak of “Polish” concentration camps or even Polish “crematoriums”, although the camps were German on Polish territory, Maciej Giertych (Independence and Democracy) protested. Girt Waldis Kristovskis (UEN, Latvia) was also highly critical of the regime that “succeeded the USSR, and that refuses to recognise past crimes”. The attitude of the Russians “does not encourage reconciliation”, he said. On the other hand (see EUROPE 8945), his compatriot, Tatiana Zdanoka of the Greens/EFA Group, criticised the draft resolution because, in her view, it would be detrimental to the protection of Russian minorities in Latvia and Estonia. Jana Bobosikova (NA, Czech Republic) preferred to confirm her opposition to the European Constitution which, she said “is heading straight into the wall”. Citizens do not understand anything about Europe and it would be better to have a system in which national States have more to say, she concluded, urging in passing for a reduction in taxation.