Members of the European Parliament have condemned Turkey’s actions in the Exclusive Economic Zone of Greece and Cyprus and have expressed full solidarity with the two member states of the European Union.
They have also expressed concern about the ongoing dispute and the risk of military escalation between the EU member states and the EU candidate state.
This comes before the September 24-25 special session of the European Council devoted the dangerous escalation and Turkey’s role in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The EU has declared that it clearly and resolutely protects its interests and that the Members of the European Parliament call on Turkey to immediately end any future unlawful intelligence and drilling activities in the Mediterranean, refrain from violating the airspace of Greece and the territorial waters of Greece and Cyprus and stop the nationalist and belligerent rhetoric.
European Parliament from EU, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
European Parliament blasts Turkey in resolution calling for immediate end of illegal actions against Greece
With 601 votes in favor, 57 against and 36 abstentions, the Plenary Session of the European Parliament adopted a resolution condemning Turkey’s illegal actions in the exclusive economic zone of Greece and Cyprus, while reiterating its full solidarity with the two Member States.
The EP also expressed its concern about the ongoing conflict and the risk of further military escalation between the EU Member States and a candidate country and calls on the Council to consider additional sanctions in the event of Ankara’s non-compliance.
Ahead of the European Council meeting on 24/25 September which will examine the dangerous escalation and Turkey’s role in the Eastern Mediterranean, MEPs expressed their full solidarity with Greece and Cyprus and stated that the EU is clear and determined to defend its interests.
MEPs urged Turkey to immediately end illegal exploration and drilling activities in the Eastern Mediterranean, not to violate Greek airspace and Greek and Cypriot territorial waters, and to stop “nationalist rhetoric”.
Finally, the European Parliament emphasised the need for dialogue and co-operation to avoid sanctions on Turkey and called on the Council to prepare further measures in the event of no progress with Ankara.
Secretary-General António Guterresinformed a High-level Ministerial meeting, that there were more than 2,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Yemen, and with war having “decimated the country’s health facilities”, the need for a negotiated political settlement to end the conflict is more urgent than ever.
He recalled his personal attachment to the country, which dates back to his time as High Commissioner for Refugees. “I will never forget the generosity of the Yemeni people in hosting refugees”, he said. “Since assuming the position of Secretary-General, I have constantly sought to do whatever I can to help find a peaceful resolution to the conflict”.
He noted that the war has not only brought State institutions to the verge of collapse but also “reversed development by decades”.
And despite initial expressions of support by the warring parties for a global ceasefire and Yemeni-specific truce, “the conflict continues unabated”, he said.
Perishing at home
In recent weeks, the conflict that has persisted for more than five years between the Saudi-backed coalition supporting the internationally recognized Government, and the Houthi rebels formally known as Ansar Allah, has escalated.
“Airstrikes and ground clashes result in many civilian casualties, and Houthi drone and missile attacks on the Kingdom of SaudiArabia persist”, flagged the UN chief.
Moreover, more civilians were killed in August than any other month this year, with one-in-four slain and injured in their own homes.
Mr. Guterres echoed his call for all parties to cooperate without preconditions, in efforts to reach an agreement on the Joint Declaration, which is comprised of a nationwide ceasefire, economic and humanitarian confidence-building measures, and a resumption of peace talks.
Build on milestones
The Secretary-General said that the military escalation between Houthi fighters and the army in Ma’rib – where more than one million civilians have sought shelter since 2015 – only serves to derail peace efforts.
He emphasized that the need to build on the UN-brokered Stockholm Agreement of December 2018, and the Saudi-facilitated Riyadh Agreement, which lays the groundwork for sustainable peace.
Mr. Guterres urged all parties to cease hostilities and reiterated the UN’s continued support in implementing the agreements.
Oil tanker dangers
Turning to the SAFER oil tanker wreck, moored off the western coast of Yemen, the UN chief expressed his deep concern that having had almost no maintenance for five years, “an oil spill, explosion or fire would have catastrophic humanitarian and environmental consequences for Yemen and the entire region”.
He said it would close the crucial Hudaydah port for months – cutting off food supplies for millions of Yemenis, reliant on imports.
“I call for rapid and unconditional access for the technical team to the tanker to assess its condition, conduct any possible repairs and avert a disaster”, asserted the Secretary-General.
Essential funding
Regarding international funding and aid, the UN chief urged donors to disburse the money promised at the end of a high-level pledging conference last June.
He expressed concern the only half as much was pledged compared to last year, “so it is very worrying that meaningful sums still remain unpaid”.
To date, only 30 per cent of the UN response plan is funded – the lowest level ever, this late in the year.
Mr. Guterres said that critical UN programmes are closing down and the funding is “vital to prevent a devastating famine”.
“Now is the time to step up for the people of Yemen”, he told ministers.
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The European Commission on Thursday September 17th presented its new climate plan for 2030, including a tougher target to cut emissions to 55% of their 1990 levels, informs LETA/DPA.
Frans Timmermans, European Commissioner for the European Green Deal, said the future of the next generations was at stake if the EU failed to take action now.
“Only two months ago I held my first grandson … I also worried what sort of world would he live in when he reaches 20 years of age,” he said. “His entire future depends on whether we get it right – now.”
As part of the plan, the commission published suggested amendments to a previously proposed European Climate Law, including the new legally binding emissions cut target of 55%, up from 40%.
Timmermans said the commission would present a detailed plan of how to achieve that target by June 2021.
The European Parliament and EU leaders still need to approve the proposals, which are likely to face resistance from countries economically relying on carbon-heavy industries, such as coal.
Timmermans said some existing schemes would have to be extended to achieve a greener Europe. The EU’s emissions trading system, under which producers pay for the carbon-dioxide they produce, could for example be extended to include the shipping industry.
Free allowances would also have to be reduced, he added.
So far, net emissions have only been reduced by 22% compared to 1990, a commission impact assessment found. This includes net absorption and emissions of the EU’s land-use and forests.
“It’s absolutely intolerable,” EU lawmaker Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar told DW. “It’s unacceptable that there are almost 13,000 people completely homeless, with no sanitation facilities, with no roof, with no access to medicines.”
Elena Kountoura, a Greek MEP, called for other EU countries to take a bigger role in supporting refugees saying, “asylum seekers are not something that should just be of concern to Italy and Greece, this is a responsibility that needs to be taken on by the European Union.”
“The solution is not another Moria, we need a genuine solidarity-based European solution,” she added. That solidarity was not an “adhoc option,” Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar told DW, when it comes to “transferring 400 unaccompanied minors from the hell in Lesbos in Moria to the mainland.”
Tom Vandendriessche, Belgian Member of the European Parliament for the Flemish right-wing nationalist party Vlaams Belang, called for the EU to rethink its asylum policy.
“I do think Europe can do a lot more and we need to help the Greek government by giving them extra funds to build a new camp, then these immigrants, these refugees, need to be brought to a new camp. But most of all, we must determine another policy. We cannot host everybody in the world who is looking for a better future,” Vandendriessche told DW.
“We need to agree inside Europe on a common policy. I believe that this common policy needs to agree on that the asylum system, as we have it right now, is just not applicable anymore,” added Vandendriessche.
According to a poll published by public broadcaster ZDF, 43% of Germans believe that the country should take in a large share of the refugees, while a further 46% thought that they should only be taken in on condition that other European countries do the same. Around 1 in ten were completely against taking in any of the displaced people.
At the same time, 62% of those surveyed agreed that taking in these refugees would lead to increasing numbers of migrants making their way to Europe.
When al-Qaeda destroyed the Twin Towers almost exactly 19 years ago, the aims of the terrorists were not fully understood by many in the western media. Osama bin Laden intended not just to wage war against the non-Muslim world but to present himself — and his jihadi narrative — as the new voice of Islam. He was fighting a war of ideas, as well as one of terror. One of the best ways to understand and combat the ideological side of the jihadi movement is to read the works of the philosopher Bassam Tibi, who has been fighting fundamentalist ideas for the past four decades.
His work — speeches, essays and more than 40 books — tracks the methods by which Islamists operate. With forensic precision, he details the ways in which they are inimical to most of Islam’s history. ‘To protect themselves against criticism,’ he once wrote, ‘Islamists invented the formula of “Islamophobia” to defame their critics.’ The word ‘serves as a weapon against all who do not embrace Islamist propaganda, including liberal Muslims’.
I’ve been an admirer of his work for years and flew to Frankfurt to meet him and to hear his story first-hand. He grew up in Damascus and became hafiz (someone who has memorised the Quran) at the age of six. There was a clash of civilisations in his head. ‘My family was against colonialism, against imperialism, against the hegemony of the West — but we were still admirers of the West,’ he says. ‘We would go to the Quranic school, then after Friday prayers go to a party with kids and dance rock ’n’ roll. The culture we looked up to was American.’ He had his eye on Harvard but his father — a property magnate whose company had built half of the new buildings in Beirut — was keen on Germany because it had sided with the Arabs in the first world war. So Tibi went to Hamburg in 1962 and never came back.
‘I came to Germany as an anti-Semite,’ he admits. ‘We were educated that way. I used to fight with my brother who was two years younger. My mother — who was not an anti-Semite but this is just the language we used then — said to me in Arabic: “Leave him. You can do this to a Jew but not to your brother.” Then I met two Jews and they changed my life.’
They were the philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the founders of the Frankfurt School of critical thinking. They had fled Nazi Germany for America and only returned after the second world war. They wanted to find out why, after the Enlightenment, with all of its logic and beauty, humanity in the 20th century had started ‘sinking into a new kind of barbarism’.
Tibi had similar questions about Islam and Islamism. Ernst Bloch (a third Jew) anchored Tibi’s thinking in Islamic rationalism. Bloch wrote about Ibn Sina — born in the Samanid Empire in around 980, the golden age of Muslim civilisation — who had plenty to say about human equality and the intertwining of Arabic and western thought.
‘Bloch says the Enlightenment started in medieval Islam,’ Tibi tells me. Tibi makes an important distinction between mufti Islam, the world of the fatwa-givers (a type of Islam that’s on the rise in Britain too), and the world of Enlightenment Islam, highlighted by Bloch. The mufti world of Islam is ‘leading Muslims backwards’, Tibi says. He seeks to explain, revive and promote the Islam of early Enlightenment — the ‘Islam of Light’.
I ask him when he first noticed that something was going wrong in the Muslim world. ‘It started with the Six Day War,’ he says. Israel’s victory was a massive humiliation for the secular Arab regimes in the eyes of their citizens, especially when Israel gained the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. At the time, Tibi hoped that the response to this would be a new Arab Enlightenment. Instead, religious extremists rose to positions of power. His first physical confrontation with them came in 1979 when he presented an academic paper in Cairo and was denounced as a heretic.
He has long thought it interesting that Arabs constitute only a fifth of the world’s Muslims, yet seem to direct most modern Muslim thought. ‘If you want to know where Islam is going,’ he says, ‘you don’t go to Turkey. You go to Egypt.’ His early work on Cairo’s political institutions drew him to the attention of the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, who went on to acquire worldwide fame with his 1993 essay ‘The Clash of Civilizations’, in which he argued that faith (especially Islam) would be the world’s next battle line.
It’s an argument that Tibi had tried to talk him out of long before. ‘I was trying to correct his knowledge about Islam. It’s a conflict, I said, not a clash. Dealing with Huntington was like dealing with an Islamist: it’s all about language. If you “clash”, it’s over. But in a conflict, there is a conflict resolution. We can negotiate, we can talk. We say: “There is a western Islamic conflict, and there are ways to deal with it.” But a “clash”? The word is essentialised. It’s saying that we Muslims are backward people.’
Tibi is also an expert in sharia law, which is often deployed by fundamentalist states in the name of being true to Islam. But Tibi argues that it is not fundamental to the religion. ‘If God believed what the Islamists believe, the term “sharia” would occur every second or third page in the Quran. But it is mentioned only once. And not in the meaning of law, but in the meaning of morality or guidance. The Quran was revealed in the 7th century. The sharia schools in Sunni Islam were created in the 8th century, 100 years later.’ The use of sharia in the modern political and confrontational sense, he says, started with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 20th century.
Tibi argues that the Islamist agenda is far more modern than the fundamentalists want to admit, and springs from the political totalitarianism invented in the last century. Taking Hannah Arendt’s definition of the term, he categorises all aspects of this ‘political religion’ as authoritarian. He draws out the modern, totalitarian nature of Islamism in his research: for example in his analysis of the works of Hassan al-Banna, who founded Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. It was this movement, Tibi says, that came up with the idea of modern-day jihadism and enforced the notion of Islam being incompatible with western values.
‘When I sit with civilised Europeans, they look at me. I am a Muslim, I am a democrat: what do they think is wrong with me? What do they dislike about me being a Muslim? They say, “But you are more European than a Muslim.” I say no. That’s why I coined the term Euro Islam, European Islam.’
Using the language of medieval Muslim rationalists from Farabi to Ibn Rushd, famous in the Latin West as Averroes, Tibi defines Islam of the Enlightenment as advocating the primacy of reason. He also takes a definition of Enlightenment from Kant: that reason is the court in front of which every-thing must establish itself. But Ibn Rushd made this point in the 12th century, he says. ‘So why are we Muslims now dismissed as underdeveloped people when our greatest philosopher, Ibn Rushd, foresaw things six centuries ahead of the greatest philosopher of Europe?’ In fact, he says, Ibn Rushd perhaps has more relevance to our age, ‘the age of the return of religion’, because his work focused on the unity of faith and reason.
This certainly is the battleground now. The much-needed reformation of Islam will not be about headscarves and beards. Terrorism will only end when scripture is not taken literally. In pursuit of such an enlightened future, Tibi’s work can remind westerners — and Muslims — of a different, less divergent history.
Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko should no longer be recognised as president from November when his term expires, the European Parliament said on Thursday (17 September), calling for European Union economic sanctions to be imposed on him.
In an overwhelming show of support for pro-democracy protesters in Belarus, the EU assembly voted 574 to 37, with 82 abstentions, to reject the official results of a 9 August presidential election that the West says was rigged.
“The EU needs a new approach towards Belarus, which includes the termination of any cooperation with Lukashenko’s regime,” said Petras Austrevicius, a Lithuanian centrist EU lawmaker heading parliament’s efforts to pressure Belarus’ top officials.
While the European Parliament’s vote is not legally binding, it carries political weight and can influence how the EU invests in Belarus or grants financial support.
“Once the term of office for the incumbent authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko expires on 5 November, parliament will no longer recognise him as the president of the country,” the parliament said in a statement.
Mass protests since the August election have posed the biggest threat yet to Lukashenko and his attempts to extend his 26-year rule, although EU governments have yet to respond with sanctions.
Moscow’s backing has become crucial for Lukashenko’s survival as president and the Kremlin has accused the West of seeking a revolution in the country.
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“No country, hospital or clinic can keep its patients safe unless it keeps its health workers safe,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.
Towards that end, to ensure health workers have the safe working conditions, training, pay and respect they deserve, the UN health agency released the Health Worker Safety Charter, on Thursday, coinciding with the World Patient Safety Day.
The Charter calls on governments and those running health services at local levels to take five actions to better protect health workers.
The actions include protecting health workers from violence; improving their mental health; protecting them from physical and biological hazards; advancing national programmes for health worker safety; and connecting health worker safety policies to existing patient safety policies.
In addition to the Charter, WHO has also outlined specific World Patient Safety Day 2020 goals for health care leaders to invest in, measure, and improve health worker safety over the next year.
The goals are intended for health care facilities to address five areas: preventing sharps injuries; reducing work-related stress and burnout; improving the use of personal protective equipment; promoting zero tolerance to violence against health workers; and reporting and analyzing serious safety related incidents.
COVID-19 has not only increased the risk of infection and illness among health workers and their families, it has also exposed them to very high levels of psychological stress.
Although not representative, data from many countries indicate that COVID-19 infections among health workers are far greater than those in the general population, said WHO.
They represent less than 3 per cent of the population in the large majority of countries and less than 2 per cent in almost all low- and middle-income countries, but around 14 per cent of COVID-19 cases reported to WHO are among health workers, with the proportion as high as 35 per cent in some countries.
Thousands of health workers infected with COVID-19 have lost their lives.
WHO Video | Healthcare workers are at risk.
However, with limited quantity and quality of data, it is not possible to establish whether health workers were infected in the work place or in community settings, according to the UN health agency.
Added psychological stress
In addition to physical risks, the pandemic has placed extraordinary levels of psychological stress on health workers exposed to high-demand settings for long hours, living in constant fear of disease exposure while separated from family and facing social stigmatization.
Before COVID-19 hit, medical professionals were already at higher risk of suicide in all parts of the world, said WHO, adding that a recent review of health care professionals found one in four reported depression and anxiety, and one in three suffered insomnia during the global health crisis.
WHO also highlighted an “alarming rise” in reports of verbal harassment, discrimination and physical violence among health workers in the wake of COVID-19.
They have had to bear with assaults and armed attacks, physical and psychological threats, denial of services, eviction from their homes, and stigma, obstructions and cyber attacks.
A little patient, held by two health workers, receives a routine vaccine in Kosovo.
World Patient Safety Day
Observed annually on 17 September, the World Patient Safety Day recognizes patient safety as a global health priority and underlines the need to ensure the safety of patients while receiving care.
The Day was established in 2019 by the World Health Assembly, which called for global solidarity and concerted action by all countries and international partners to improve patient safety. The Day also brings together patients, families, caregivers, communities, health workers, health care leaders and policy-makers to show their commitment to patient safety.
This year, the Day is being commemorated under the theme, “Health Worker Safety: A Priority for Patient Safety.”
