Plenary session of participants of non-European countries of the Mediterranean basin

•	Ziad Abdul-Samad, Lebanon
Ziad's speech was not recorded, though he was kind enough to send us his notes which we report below in order to give the main points concerning the Euromed partnership.

The main factors underpinning the partnership project:
1.	The geopolitical factor, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In other words the need for preventive action against conflicts in Eastern Europe.
2.	Globalisation and the creation of regional and sub-regional blocks.
3.	Safety and more specifically unequal distribution of revenues between the northern and southern shores may lead to conflicts.

Officially declared targets:
1.	Creation of an area of peace and security, based on democratic principles and respect for human rights.
2.	Creation of a prosperous free trade area between the European Union and its southern partners until 2010.
3.	Contribution to development and the formation of an active civil society.

The genuine reasons:
1.	Profit from the projects launched in the Middle East intended to set up a Middle Eastern and Arab World Common Market, especially following the Madrid peace process.
2.	The structural adjustment programmes imposed by international financial institutions (World Bank and IMF) on the southern Mediterranean countries that have paved the way for the "Euromed" project.
3.	The tendency of Europe to protect its interests against increasing US domination, made even stronger after the Gulf War.
4.	The position taken by Europe to solve the "immigration problem" by economic development designed to create jobs and improve living conditions.
5.	The very cautious approach taken in Arab countries to implement democracy.

It should be noted that the agreements are a very important and efficient tool for applying pressure to implement policies in both Southern and Eastern countries. Aid and financial contributions are ideal forms of intervening in the domestic affairs of these countries.

The three main sections of the partnership:
1.	The Political Peace and Security section: this implies setting up a Common Area of Peace and Security.
2.	The Social, Cultural and Humanitarian section: this implies developing human resources and cultural exchange, including the free circulation of persons, migration and labour.
3.	The Economic and Financial section: this implies setting up a free trade and prosperity area, through sustainable economic and social development and the combat against poverty.

Evaluation and critical analysis of the Euromed Partnership:
The main obstacle to partnership is the worrying lack of democracy in the region, making political and social democratisation necessary to increase the participation of civil society and thus the people. This not only prevents genuine development but undermines the legitimacy of the regimes and by repercussion the role of the state on both sides of the Mediterranean.

The obstacles to developing the partnership:
1.	There is no clear and well-defined project for the partnership; it lacks overall vision and economic, political, social and cultural relations. It also lacks a well-defined objective. Likewise, there is a lack of clarity regarding the mechanisms and instruments to make it function.
2.	The bureaucratic and sometimes corrupt method of operation of European institutions in charge of partnership projects impedes and slows down closer relations between the two shores and the partnership in general.
3.	The way the EU treats the circulation of persons and its visa restrictions, giving priority to security rather to humanity, reflects the intentions behind this partnership. This subject is one of the threats to the creation of a democratic Europe and a partnership respectful of human rights. 
4.	The Arab-Israeli conflict: the Israeli occupation of territories belonging to neighbouring Arab countries and especially of Palestine is a major obstacle. Furthermore, the USA does not fulfil an efficient role in building just, comprehensive and lasting peace, leaving this task to the UAE. This weakens the EU's legitimacy, having negative effects on the partnership. The EU calls for abidance with international resolutions and charters but does nothing in practice to apply the UN resolutions on Palestine (especially resolutions 194, 242 and 332). 
5.	Lastly, respect for human rights is an essential pillar of European construction and the Euromed partnership. However, the EU does nothing to oblige Israel to respect human rights; quite the contrary, Israel belongs to the partnership and profits from all aids and contributions in spite of its active racism against the Palestinian people in the occupied territories.

European construction lacks clarity and has no clearly determined objectives: is it the creation of a European super state or a structure of economic political, social and cultural coordination, or else a free trade area?

Furthermore, the executive authorities of the European institutions suffer from excess bureaucracy which makes them inefficient at best and counter-productive (even corrupt) at worst.

Globalisation and regional economic groups constitute threats. These difficulties, to put it lightly, will only disappear if all the economic agreements that have been signed undergo thorough critical examination and modification. This especially concerns the liberalisation of markets, opening borders, pulling down tariff and non-tariff barriers and eliminating subsidies to developing countries, whereas the developed countries still maintain their barriers on the free circulation of goods, services and people. This also applies to agricultural subsidies and non-conformity with quotas for textiles, leather and clothes.

The European proposal to start a new round of trade negotiations in the WTO to deregulate additional sectors such as investment, government procurement, the environment and working conditions privileges multinationals to the detriment of the peoples of developing countries and their conditions of development. 

This is why the objective must be to set up a partnership capable of meeting the challenges of  neo-liberal globalisation. 
This is how we see Europe and the project for partnership. We are willing to collaborate with all those who share this approach to build a pilot partnership together and efficient regional groups on both sides of the Mediterranean, for the peace, prosperity and development of all. 

•	Fathi Chamkhi, Tunisia
The beginning of her speech was barely audible.

…We participated in another summit held at Marseilles last November. This summit was the first step in mobilising the resistances and convergences in the combats of Mediterranean peoples against liberal globalisation and its disastrous effects in the region, especially for the countries of the south. This liberal globalisation of the Mediterranean has a name: the Euromed partnership, as formulated by the European Commission and launched at Barcelona in 1995. This partnership does not correspond to the hopes and desires of the regions' peoples. However, regional impetus must be generated to satisfy the great and urgent needs of the people, especially those of the South. Setting up co-operation projects intended for social development is urgent in the Mediterranean. Far from giving perspectives for development, this liberal partnership destabilises and destructures already fragile social and economic system that have to bear the burden of foreign debt, falling raw material prices, structural adjustment plans, etc. The miracle solution offered to developing countries so they eventually attain prosperity is already being applied in Europe through the uncontrolled liberalisation of its members' economies and generalised free trade. Far from promoting independent development that respects both the environment and human beings, the thinking behind these agreements can only widen the gulf between the industrialised countries, which have flourishing and competitive industries, and the developing countries, victims of decades of pillage and one-sided relations. Restructuring developing countries as a function of liberal tenets implies even greater austerity. Reduced salaries and higher taxes, growing unemployment, insecure jobs and worsening working conditions create barriers to general education, the combat against illiteracy, investment in research, expanding health services and rehabilitating unsafe and unhealthy dwellings. This partnership places European wage earners in competition with the workers of developing countries, further strengthening the power of transnational corporations. The social disparities between Europe and the countries of the South are used to gnaw away the social rights of the workers of both sides of the Mediterranean. The aim is to floor social rights and then all the attributes of citizenship. This policy hits women and children first. We are repeatedly told that the Euro-Mediterranean region will be the home of human rights and democracy, but how can we believe European governments that still support the most authoritarian and repressive regimes in the region six years after having signed the Barcelona declaration? What credence can be given to their will to defend the rights of the individual when one of these basic rights, that of free circulation, is constantly ignored by the ramparts of the Schengen Agreement? The freedom of circulation is only fit for goods and capital, but not for men and women. Peace in the region and proclaiming the right of peoples to live freely are impossible while Israel continues its colonisation and denies the Palestinian people its right to found an independent state, while it massacres Palestinian children in total impunity and forces part of this people into endless exile. In the place of this Mediterranean based on inequality, injustice and without rights, we propose a civic, democratic, social and united Mediterranean that respects the environment. The Mediterranean project must be based on genuine development that benefits all the region's peoples. This entails narrowing the divide between the two shores, if need be by implementing measures biased in favour of the peoples of the south. This would raise the working and living conditions of everyone in the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean that we want will be built to satisfy the social, political, educational and cultural needs of the people and not the falsely inevitable constraints of the market. 	Both the north and south have advantages that could be used to avoid misery, mass unemployment, illiteracy, violence, conflict, fundamentalism, competition, delocalisation, exclusion, racism and inequality. Citizens, NGOs, associations and the unions of all countries, whether alone or in networks, are committed to resistance, which they have already shown at the Marseilles Summit and at others, giving life to alternative solidarity and cultures, and giving substance to other local projects. These requirements demand genuine finance from society, on the scale of the Mediterranean. Considerable resources can be granted by Europe, especially if it were to tax financial transactions and write off the debt of the developing countries of the south and east Mediterranean. Mediterranean countries should henceforth put their commitments into practice and devote 0.7% of GNP to public development aid. Peoples should be free to decide for themselves and choose their own future; they must be able to decide democratically the type of relations they want to develop with other peoples of the Mediterranean. Human rights issues such as abolishing the death penalty, democracy and popular sovereignty are not subsidiary issues, rather they are the part of the foundations of the partnership we seek. Likewise, these mechanisms must be democratic and be controlled by civil society from their formulation to their implementation. Lastly, building peace in the Mediterranean demands that the entire region be made nuclear free, with the dismantlement of all the American and NATO bases in the region and the immediate raising of embargos against populations, especially that against the Iraqi people. The UN cannot fulfil its original role as long as it remains under the thumb of American hegemony. Carrying out these measures, and defining and implementing a vaster alternative, demands action from a social movement respectful of cultural pluralism and the environment, that takes its strength from democratic and popular roots. 
I am totally convinced that your assembly is a decisive step towards this goal.
Thank you.

•	Mustafa Ateek, Palestine

I am a Palestinian, born in a Palestinian refugee camp. We came from a Palestinian village of four thousand inhabitants that was razed to the ground in 1948. They are all refugees now. All that remains of this village and its church are ruins that can be visited when passing through. What brings me to speak about the history of this conflict? Because as a European citizen, I have noticed that people often speak of its consequences without looking back at its origins.
Everything started in 1947, when the UN decided to separate Palestine into two states: the state of Israel and the Arab state of Palestine. For the record, the Jewish community in Palestine (because it was not yet the state of Israel) possessed 6% of Palestinian territory, whereas the partition gave this community more than half of Palestine. Things speeded up in 1948 with the creation of the State of Israel, immediately resulting in the expulsion of 900,000 Palestinians in one year, including all my family, to, refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, where they have lived for 52 years. A small number of Palestinians succeeded in remaining in what became Israel, becoming foreigners in their own country overnight, second rate citizens or what are called Israeli Arabs.
Israel is the only state in the world to have been founded by decision of the UN and the international community; since which this state has never applied a single decision issued by the UN. A paradoxical situation since Israel, a state born from a historically generous decision, refuses to apply the resolutions of the international community concerning the conflict, whether they concern the right to return or the right to found a Palestinian state, treating them like so much trash. 
It was in 1948 that the Naqba or disaster occurred for us Palestinians; on the contrary, it was the birth of the Israeli State on 80% of Palestinian land thus over more territory than the partition had already provided. During the following 19 years, from 1948 to 1967, the State of Israel succeeded in forming a Blitzkrieg style army capable of occupying the whole of Palestine, then the Golan Heights in Syria and then the Sinai and all its Arab neighbours in only five days. This is when UN decision 242 was made which demanded the immediate and unconditional retreat of the Israeli army from all the territories occupied in 1967. These have since been called the Occupied Territories.
Since June 1967: The UN Security Council passed the resolution to demand the total and unconditional retreat of Israeli forces from this territory, including from East Jerusalem which was part of the territories conquered in 1967. Even the United States, which systematically uses its veto to protect Israel, could not use it this time. 
I shall go faster, and just mention the event in 1982 that everyone knows about, the massacres at Sabra and Chatila ordered by Mr Ariel Sharon, the current Prime Minister of Israel. This brings us to the Oslo Agreements that Europe tried to set up and sponsored with the United States and Russia. This agreement was made between the sovereign state of Israel and an occupied people. It was obviously very difficult to oblige Israel to apply even the Oslo agreements which amounted to a ceasefire while waiting to get down to discuss the real problem which is the return of the refugees and retreat from the territories. Unfortunately, Israel even failed to respect the Oslo agreements, which were nowhere near what the Palestinians had hoped for. This was all done in total impunity. Interventions in conflicts have occurred for far less, and here we are confronted by a state that has defied the entire world since 1948 with impunity.
The Palestinians despaired after non-compliance by Israel with the Oslo agreements, leading to the second Intifada that has lasted since 28 September of last year.
Thanks to the media, you have all seen the bloody repression used to quell this popular revolt. I dislike political speeches, preferring civic ones and because I am in an assembly of citizens. I will simply quote a short text by an Israeli writer and journalist that appeared in the newspaper of a Russian community in Israel: "Our Jewish army murders civilians, demolishes houses, starves people and besieges Palestinian villages. Our crimes surpass those committed by the Russians in Chechnya and Afghanistan, those of the Americans in Vietnam and those of the Serbs in Bosnia."
Today the situation is worse than explosive. European construction needs lasting peace and thus peace in the Middle East. There is no peace without justice and justice requires the application of the resolutions voted by the entire international community. We ask for the application of the international resolutions concerning this conflict; we only ask to live in peace in an independent Palestinian State alongside the State of Israel. I ask this quite simply as a citizen of the world, as a Palestinian refugee, a human being whose family, like four million other people, lives in refugee camps in miserable conditions. I can demand rights for all, human rights are valid for all. We are also humans and have the right to life, peace and education, and we have the right to our own land. I call on every Palestinian and Israeli citizen, all the citizens of the world, and since we are in Europe, I call on European citizens to bring pressure to bear on the organisations and public opinion so that Israel’s impunity ceases; that this State that has defied humanity for 51 years ceases, so that we can build, so that I can return to other Alliance assemblies and speak of the Palestinian economy, development, etc. and not only tell you the figures of the last Intifada: more than 500 dead, 9,000 injured including a thousand permanently handicapped, and so forth. I don’t want to tell you these figures. However, I want to return in a few years to say that we are in the sovereign State of Palestine, that our capital is Jerusalem, that the refugees that have been waiting fifty years to return home have finally done so, and speak to you of problems other than that which I have just spoken of.
Thank you.

•	Amina Rachid, Egypt

I shall not speak here of the recent events that we may have seen shown on  television in all their atrocity. Neither shall I speak of the encircling of the West Bank, and the economic, geographic, cultural and human war waged against it, nor the closing of its borders. We have spoken a lot about opening borders but in my mind and heart I saw all these borders closed. I shall say little about an injustice done over fifty years ago, supposedly giving a land without people to a people without land. I shall simply deal with one point of the conflict, that of the right to return. No peace is possible or conceivable without the right of return for these refugees scattered around the world. This right of return means the restitution of the most basic and legitimate rights to a dispossessed people.
Just before the event of 1948, 1,200,000 Arabs were living in Palestine with 635,000 Jews. 900,000 Arabs were expelled either immediately or else frightened into fleeing. Under Ben Gourion's government,  450 Palestinian villages were razed to the ground. Only a few buildings abandoned by Palestinians remained and Israeli settlements developed around them. Everyone knows the story of the key that Palestinians carry in their pockets after 53 years with the hope of returning one day. 
What of resolution 194, adopted by the UN General Assembly on November 11, 1948, related to the refugees' right of return and their right to compensation if they did not want to return. Israel refused and this refusal will continue. Then came the war of 1967, with the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians by force or intimidation. According to the latest UN statistics, there are now 3,700,000 Palestinian refugees.
Like everyone else, the Palestinians are entitled to the right of citizenship, but many Palestinians currently have no identity cards, thus prohibiting them from any movement. They all have travel documents issued by the UN, and some documents exist thanks to new laws, but they are humiliated and persecuted every time they cross borders. As we have seen, the most recent violation struck our comrade, scheduled to come from the West Bank, though prevented from leaving his country. The countries that voted for partition in 1947 at the UN do nothing for the refugees. However, an Israeli management takes care of the property and land abandoned by the Palestinian refugees. It is untrue that Israel cannot absorb those Palestinians who want to return; it has taken in a million immigrants from the former Soviet Union, so it is economically capable of taking in the refugees as well. Year after year, this country takes in 50,000 new Jewish immigrants. I shall conclude with a proposal made to the consciences of all those who struggle for a fairer and happier world, for a united and responsible Europe, one which is happier for itself and its neighbours, and to take a more positive attitude towards the European Union. It is to demand that the Union considers and examines the claims made by the Palestinians, that is to say the liberation of all the occupied territories, the dismantling of the colonies, the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine and above all the right of return of all these refugees around the world.
Thank you.

•	Radovane Mohamed Zizi, Algeria

I am Algerian, a country also in need of peace. But before speaking about peace, I would like to speak about the media. Although the media are rightly presumed to make public opinion, they can also mislead it. This is why I would like to say that the claims made at present by the Berber or Amazir region, that is to say Kabuli, are national rather than regional claims. The recent adoption of a new penal code that stifles freedom of expression concerns every sector of society and not only the independent press, and all those who belong to the Amazigh people. These claims, which are mostly fuelled by repression in different forms, combined with connivance with terrorism, are part of a strategy used by the government to foster differences between regions. They show false reports of Arabs demonstrating in Algiers, whereas these demonstrations occur in Kabuli with all those that accompany them. Thus recently over the past months they have succeeded several times in transforming peaceful actions into confrontations. The Algerian Presidency turns a deaf ear to this turmoil, which is to say it is attempting to isolate the problems or, in more technical terms, contain them and eliminate all forms of democratic expression by political parties, the press, unions and civil society in general. Then, as if nothing has happened, it launched new reforms and celebrated its alliance with armed and political fundamentalism. Until when? The answer surely depends on the social movement and its progression, and on civil society which resists, in spite of repressive acts amounting to crimes against humanity. I think it resists better than it did fifteen years ago. It is very difficult for me to speak to you, since an Algerian President was overthrown by the army in 1965 and it could happen again today. This is the force that controls decision-making in Algeria now. 
So the debate remains open, though I am cut off from information, like you, and I don't have the means to inform you of what is happening. However, yesterday, there were still more dead in Algeria, but the social movement continues and I hope it will reach its goals.
Thank you.