Madam President, Commissioner, as I take the floor in this debate, I would be failing in my duty if I did not pay homage, as you have done Madam President, to the memory of Commander Ahmed Shah Masood. A number of our Members had the opportunity to meet him here just six months ago, at your invitation, and we discovered that not only was he a man of war famous for his tactics and his exceptional charisma, but he could also be a statesman, and a man of peace and reconciliation, the peace and reconciliation for which his country has been waiting for more than thirty years. My hope today is that this man, my friend, who said that he was prepared to give his life for the sake of the people of Afghanistan, will not have died for nothing. Obviously I regret the fact that he was not listened to sooner when he asked for international aid to rid his country of the iron rule of the Taliban, and when he condemned the development of that totalitarian movement of Islamic fundamentalism flaunting its desire for world domination. What Mr Patten has just told us about the political situation in Afghanistan confirms my analysis that Commander Masood’s plan for solving the crisis in Afghanistan could be well underway. Now that Pakistan has been obliged to stop giving political and military support to the Taliban regime, that regime should collapse under the pressure of the whole of the Afghan people, as Commander Masood predicted. I think that proof of this has been provided by the agreement that has just been signed in Rome between the opposition forces and the former King Mohammed Zahir Shah, whose prestige is still as great as ever in his home country. I also see proof of this in the statements made by Mullah Omar himself, when he announced yesterday that he might possibly be overthrown, and finally in the news that has just reached us about the defection, with seven hundred of his militia men, of the Taliban governor of the Javan region on the border with Turkmenistan, which has brought the province of Badghis under opposition control. Carried away by the idea of realpolitik, the international community, and with it, I am sorry to say, the European Union, had adopted an attitude towards the Taliban that was at the very least conciliatory, working on the principle that they exercised the real power and that they could not do so without the support of the whole of the Afghan people. At the time I compared this attitude with the attitude that the Western governments thought they ought to adopt towards the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge before their abominable barbarism became apparent. Thanks to that same blind tolerance, we have allowed this hornets’ nest of Islamic terror to develop on Afghan territory. Its evil deeds were denounced by Commander Masood, and it must now be destroyed, something which I hope will happen very soon. However, for the sake of destroying a hornets’ next it should not be necessary to burn down the whole house. On the contrary, it is essential that the Afghan people should be spared, and given all the assistance, of whatever kind, that they need in order to establish a stable regime based on national reconciliation. I have the feeling – and Mr Patten has just reinforced it – that this is the direction in which the Union’s efforts are heading, and I welcome this, but I do not forget the disastrous humanitarian situation that prevails in the region as a whole. I am thinking of the hundreds of thousands of refugees waiting at the border with Pakistan, and also of the people who for months now have been completely without supplies in the northern provinces. I know that the Russians have set up an airlift for emergency humanitarian aid, operating from the airport at Dushanbe in Tajikistan. I would not like to see the European Union conspicuous by its absence in this undertaking, in which its assistance is also desirable. What these people want is, of course, food, but in addition they want medicines, blankets and shelters, and above all they want us to demonstrate our solidarity. In Bosnia, at the height of the crisis, Europe, acting within the Atlantic Alliance, was able to set up a scheme for parachuting supplies into the most isolated enclaves, those that were at greatest risk. This is what the people of Panshir are now expecting. Have we, and have you, Commissioner Nielson, the will and the means to provide it?

Political group: PPE-DE