Mr President, after listening to this debate this morning, it seems to me that there is one thing that can be said that we all more or less agree on in this House, and it is this: the system of sanctions in its current form is not working; it is leaking like a sieve – the Americans themselves have said it is as full of holes as a Swiss cheese – and so it needs changing because it has not achieved the objectives for which it was set up. Changing, but certainly not abolishing; there are also reasons for abolishing it, according to Mr Salafranca, but abolishing the sanctions against Saddam Hussein today would mean declaring him the winner in his own country and throughout the Arab world and holding him up as the victor in this psychological war, just at this sensitive time in the war between Israel and the Palestinians, and this would make his dictatorship even more permanent and even more brutal. So we ask ourselves: what of the children, the people who are suffering in Iraq; what is happening to them? They, Mr President, are victims of Saddam Hussein and not of the sanctions, as Commissioner Patten said rather more diplomatically, and I fully agree with his analysis. They are the victims of a despot who – and I refer to Kofi Annan’s denunciation – deliberately withholds millions of dollars earned from oil and does not spend it on food and medicines, in order to starve his people and, as is happening here today, to arouse our sympathies and our solidarity and to transform every child that dies into a propaganda weapon; a despot who exports food from his own hunger-stricken country to neighbouring states to increase his prestige, who finances the Palestinians, who go to demonstrations with his portrait, who gives ten thousand dollars to every family that has had victims in the Intifada, who builds himself huge palaces – I saw them with my own eyes when I was in Iraq a month ago – right on the ruins of Babylon. Iraq is the victim of Saddam, not of the sanctions. But the sanctions must be changed; agreement on them is weakening and Saddam Hussein is taking advantage of the divergences of opinion in the West on this point; he is taking advantage in order to split the West even more. The economic sanctions must be eased but those on arms and technology must be tightened, at least until Iraq allows the UN inspectors free access. Iraq is in fact rearming with chemical, biological and probably even nuclear weapons, and the danger it poses is becoming greater all the time. This latest air raid on Baghdad should, in fact, have been better prepared, with an attempt to gain consent from neighbouring countries and perhaps also consultation of the Western allies. However, it was a useful signal, I think, to make Saddam Hussein understand that, even with the new American administration, the vigilance will be maintained and, we hope, even increased, and I would even go so far as to say that we can already see the first fruits of this action. In connection with this, I should like to direct a question to the President-in-Office of the Council: do you know whether, during the current mission in the Middle East, Colin Powell obtained Syria’s agreement to United Nations control on the use of the oil pipeline linking Iraq to Syria?

Political group: PPE-DE