Speeches

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, since 2004, under the presidency of Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia has asked to be part of the European Union as a free, democratic Member State, certainly not as a colony of the European Union. This position has increased pressure to block democratic progress, freedom of the press and gender, reforms, including with the Russian military invasion of August 2008 and the consequent conditioning of Georgian domestic politics. Today Saakashvili was stripped of his Georgian citizenship. He is being held in a harsh prison despite his serious health condition. Successive governments have also questioned and thwarted innovative reforms and anti-corruption actions in recent years. Georgia is now more distant than twenty years ago from Europe and is exposed to the influence of Russia pressing on the Caucasian border with its army and controlling regions such as Abkhazia and South Ossetia, only nominally belonging to the Georgian Republic. The attention of the European Parliament, as the resolution rightly points out, must be very strong after the elections of 26 October, which we hope will take place regularly, and must talk not only with the government but also with Georgian civil society, free to express consent to the European Union, but which is unfortunately conditioned by an apparatus of pro-Russian financial and political interests. Georgia must be supported in a path of autonomy and independence, which in the past had to suffer the empire of the tsars and the Soviet Union and which today suffers the imperialist aims of the current Russian government.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, Mr High Representative, solidarity with the victims and condemnation of the massacre of 7 October require us to denounce the systematic violation by the Government of Israel of international law. Since 1967, the government of Israel has disregarded the rulings of the international community and the United Nations and in the past year has violated the sovereignty of states, such as Syria and today Lebanon, and practiced apartheid and genocide against the Palestinian people. Today Lebanese civilians are victims of the violation of Lebanon's sovereignty, which is now a new Gaza, Mr. High Representative, and hostage to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. The European Union must immediately recognize the State of Palestine and support and strengthen the role of the United Nations and its Secretary-General, irresponsibly considered unwelcome by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is undermining Israel's international credibility, provoking a wave of reaction and hatred towards the Jewish people, to whom all our solidarity goes for the intolerable Nazi-Fascist Shoah of the past and for the current growing episodes of anti-Semitism. The European Union must make its voice heard and strongly call for a ceasefire by all, the release of the hostages, considering the suspension of military support to Israel and the initiation of any sanctions and embargo procedures, as practiced in any other case of violation of international law.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, beyond words and exploitation, we have been witnessing a humanitarian tragedy in Gaza and the West Bank for almost a year. The terrorist action of Hamas on 7 October, which we strongly condemn, however, forces us to recall decades of indifference and mortification for the rights of the Palestinian people – indifference and mortification that have certainly created a climate favourable to the affirmation of Hamas. Today, the conscience and responsibility of the European Union is weighed down like a boulder by the recent decision of the International Court of Justice, which clearly defined and condemned the illegal occupation and violence of the State of Israel against the Palestinians. Dozens of MEPs today denounced war crimes committed by two Israeli government ministers at the top of the Commission. Preliminary to any path of peace is the recognition of the State of Palestine, as reaffirmed by the United Nations for decades, as provided for since the Oslo Accords. Only this recognition makes it possible to invite all Arab countries to recognize the State of Israel and its indisputable existence. However, I cannot recognize as democratic the Netanyahu government, which practices illegal occupation and violent apartheid. Europe today seems plagiarized, not only in the Middle East, by a senseless arms race and the use of war as a pretext for the export of democratic values. More than 40 000 Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza and the West Bank require the European Union to take a position consistent with the founding reasons for its birth, beyond the borders of hatred and war. Enough polemics on the use of the word "genocide", which many of us continue and will continue to use to describe a condition of mortification of rights and extermination of thousands of human beings, for which some have already been recognized as legally responsible and all the others certainly responsible before history.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to underline the sensitivity you have confirmed, Madam President, and the words you have spoken on the occasion of this 32nd anniversary of the Via D'Amelio massacre. We remember Paolo Borsellino, Emanuela Loi, Agostino Catalano, Vincenzo Li Muli, Walter Eddie Cosina and Claudio Traina, killed by a terrible explosion of a car bomb on a very hot Sunday in July in Palermo. Thirty-two years have passed, but in the aftermath of that terrible explosion there was a real civil revolution: women took to the streets, marches and human chains were formed to say enough to a reality in which the mafia had the face of institutions, had the face of those same men who were supposed to fight it. And there arose, strong, not only the need for justice but also the need for truth, the right to truth: This is exactly what I want to remember right now, after four trials that are the biggest judicial misdirection in Italian history. Four processes in which the misdirections of men of the institutions, accomplices of the mafia, have also invented false repentants to prevent the institutional level of complicity of that terrible massacre from being reached. Today we owe it to family members, we owe it to the ‘Paolo e Rita Borsellino’ Study Centre, we owe it to the Red Agendas Movement – we must give a word of encouragement so that the truth can finally be reached, in a condition in which, unfortunately, justice, that of the State, is struggling to arrive.