The fundamentalists are used for the wider geostrategic restructuring of the entire Middle East
Intervention of George Loukaides, member of the Political Bureau of AKEL, in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
Strasburg, 2nd of October
In April 2009, the then American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared the following before Congress: “Let’s remember here… the people we are fighting today we funded them twenty years ago… and it was President Reagan in partnership with Congress led by Democrats who said… let’s go recruit these mujahideen… let them come from Saudi Arabia and other countries, importing their Wahabi brand of Islam so that we can go beat the Soviet Union.”
Despite this confession, and despite the September 11 attack, the United States pursued the same tactics. Together with the European Union they continued, in previous years, to support by various means, extremist fundamentalist rebels in Syria to overthrow the Assad regime. Other countries in the region as well, among them Turkey, also played a leading role in supporting these forces.
As a result, today, humanity is following with indignation the horrific crimes committed by the “Islamic State” organization. It is indeed our obligation to support the people in Iraq and Syria and stand for their fundamental rights. But we, the Unified Left, are sure that there are far better means than the dangerous foreign military intervention.
If we really want to support the citizens in the Middle East, all actions of the international community should be in line with International Law and the UN Charter. Furthermore, the struggle against extremism and terrorism should be waged by following an overall strategy that will eliminate the roots of this phenomenon, which was, and indeed continues to be fed by extreme poverty, injustice, inequalities and the on-going humiliation of national or/and personal human dignity.
Instead, leaders of Western countries don’t seem to take into account the destructive results of their recent military intervention in Libya, which has been drowned in blood, in Iraq which faces the danger of being partitioned into three parts, or in Afghanistan and Pakistan where the fundamentalists are gaining more popular support among the local population.
The inescapable truth behind the continuous actions of the USA and its NATO allies is that we are in the midst of the enforcement of the plans for the wider geostrategic restructuring of the entire Middle East region, always within the framework of the international competition with regards energy. In this context, the fundamentalists are used, at times as allies and other times as opponents.
In conclusion, we have to underline that it is a serious mistake for anyone to remain indifferent to the horrific crimes being committed by the fundamentalists. However, it is at least equally wrong, for certain circles and forces to express their sensitivity in a selective way and pretend to be surprised when confronted with the results and consequences of their very own actions. And it is even worse when these forces are still insisting on promoting their selfish interests, regardless of the legality of their actions and regardless of the fact that the results of these actions are almost always opposite to those publicly declared.
