Brussels, 19/07/2006 (Agence Europe) - Francis Wurtz, President of the GUE/NGL Group at the European Parliament, welcomes President Borrell's initiative to convene an extraordinary session of the Conference of Presidents of EU political groups on 20 July to provide the various political families to express their views on the crisis in Lebanon. This is all the more necessary as the declaration adopted by the EU Council (EUROPE 9234) “could go down in the annals as a model of feebleness”, Mr Wurtz says in a press release. He explains it is naturally not a problem for him if the Council calls for Hezbollah attacks against the civilian population of Israel to stop. But there are now hundreds of innocent victims of Israeli bombings also, he said, saying that the incalculable consequences of destabilisation threatens this damaged country and beyond and the “Twenty-Five have not found a single word to condemn the deluge of fire from the Israeli army”. Noting that the Finnish Presidency would have been under constraint to review work under combined British and German intervention, Mr Wurtz asks: How have we arrived at such a position when several Member States and the High Representative, Javier Solana, have expressed solidarity with Lebanon? (See EUROPE 9235).
The president of the Socialist Group, Martin Schulz (who announced that, during the Conference of Presidents, he would call for more EU humanitarian aid for victims of the conflict) sounded a note of warning, saying: “The time has come for EU government leaders to speak with a single voice on the Middle East. They must avoid the divisions they showed on the Iraq war. (…) All parties in the region must be ready for sincere negotiations about the future architecture of the region. (…) Europe must take an initiative for the UN Security Council to examine proposals for an international monitoring presence in the region”. Mr Schulz, who condemns the attacks against civilians in Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, also calls for an initiative on the subject of Syria.