Euromed conference is overshadowed by ongoing violence in Middle East

The Euromed conference which began in the southern French port last night could not have started more inauspiciously.

The Euromed conference which began in the southern French port last night could not have started more inauspiciously.

A meeting of foreign ministers from the 15 EU states and 12 Mediterranean countries was almost cancelled last night because of violence in the Israeli-occupied territories.

Syria and Lebanon decided at the last minute to boycott the talks. "Clearly, this meeting is taking place in an unfavourable context," the French Foreign Minister, Mr Hubert Vedrine, said.

France, which holds the EU presidency, abandoned plans to push through the "Euro-Mediterranean Charter on Peace and Security", which has been four years in the writing, because Arab participants wanted nothing to do with a "security" agreement involving Israel.

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Events forced President Jacques Chirac to abandon his plans for a Marseilles summit of heads of state. The meeting will be chaired by Mr Vedrine instead and Mr Chirac - who knows how to spot a disaster in the making - decided to stay away.

To placate Arab leaders who have criticised the French presidency and the EU for their limp response to the violence in the occupied territories, Mr Vedrine agreed to devote the opening dinner to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. It promised to be a long and acrimonious evening.

Israel is a full member of the "Barcelona process" that was launched in Spain five years ago. But so are the Arab countries of north Africa and the Levant, and the Arab League has frozen all ties with the Jewish state.

Egypt and the Palestinian Authority, nonetheless, wanted the conference to take place - with Israeli participation - in the desperate hope that it could prompt Europe to take a stand.

Arab diplomats are expected to submit a resolution criticising Israel. Such a text is unlikely to be accepted by all 15 EU members.

It is hard to imagine how Europe can succeed where President Clinton failed. "Every time we try to talk to the Israelis, they say, `go tell the Americans'," a high-ranking French official told me recently. "How can Europe be involved when the Israelis don't want us?" Political violence in Algeria, where more than 200 civilians are murdered every month, is another serious issue which Euromed should - but will not - address.

France's sponsorship of the conference will not make Israel more amenable to European arguments. Just last month, the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, accused President Chirac of "encouraging terrorism" because he supported Mr Yasser Arafat's demand for an international commission of inquiry into the violence in the occupied territories.

The Marseilles conference is also a test of what the right-wing US magazine Policy Review recently dubbed "Vedrinism". Mr Vedrine believes that Europe can be a superpower with a foreign policy distinct from the US. Nowhere is the need for an alternative to US domination so strongly felt as in the Middle East.

Yet, France's bilateral problems with three of the Euromed participants - Israel, Turkey and Libya - have helped to handicap the Marseilles conference.

Ankara is furious because the French Senate last week recognised Turkey's 1915 genocide against the Armenians. A French judge's threat to arrest Col Muammar Gadafy for the 1989 bombing of a UTA flight had put the Libyan presence in doubt.

Mr Vedrine counts the mere fact that the 27 Barcelona "partners" have continued to meet for the past five years a success. But the failures he lists are a summary of everything undertaken by Euromed. None of the 12 Mediterranean governments has carried out the political and economic reforms demanded by the Barcelona declaration.

The EU's MEDA assistance programme disbursed only a quarter of the €4.7 billion allocated for the 1996-1999 period - mainly because Brussels red tape discouraged potential recipients. Only three countries (Israel, Tunisia and Morocco) and the Palestinian Authority have concluded economic agreements of association with the EU.

France, Italy, Greece and Spain feel particularly threatened by the violence, Islamic fundamentalism, poverty, high birth rates and mass emigration on the southern shores of the Mediterranean.

"It is very clearly a French priority," Mr Vedrine says. "But I think the partnership will not truly succeed until there is no more need for `mentors', when the Union as a whole sees this Euro-Mediterranean link as something that is geographically obvious, and necessary on a political, economic and human level."