Posted on 08/25/2008 2:27:39 PM PDT by Enfant Terrible
TRANSLATION FROM BABELFISH
The Swiss Foreign Minister lends “to sit down with the table of Bin Laden” LEMONDE.FR with AFP | 25.08.08 | 21:11
evant nearly 170 ambassadors at this meeting in Bern, the Swiss Foreign Minister, Micheline Calmy-Rey, declared themselves lends, Monday August 25, “to sit down with the table of the Al-Qaida Usama Bin Laden leader” to engage a dialogue. The Swiss minister breaks a taboo thus, while becoming the first responsible for the diplomacy of a democratic country to consider a direct dialogue with the chief of an terrorist organization. “The refusal of the dialogue is in the final analysis always sterile”, underlines M me Calmy-Rey, for which the Swiss diplomacy must “fight against the simplistic rejection of the dialogue”, including with “the “infréquentables”.
Switzerland does not lay out, like other country, of list of prohibited organizations. The membership of an organization considered as terrorist, including by UNO, is not penally reprehensible there, only the criminal activities of members of these organizations being able to be continued.
“Certainly, of the organizations like Hezbollah, Hamas, [the guerrilla Colombian of] FARCs, them [separatist tamouls of] LTTE or [Uganda rebels of] the LRA resort to terrorist methods which we condemn. Remain that they are political actors of weight, impossible to circumvent in the search for a payment of conflict”, put forward to it responsible Switzerland. “Some are indignant by seeing in this realism a slip proto-terrorist. We do not let deceive: the dialogue unrelentingly does not result in accepting the unacceptable one; to include/understand does not want to say to excuse and does not mean complicity”, it insisted.
CRITICISMS INTERNATIONAL
With these new declarations, it responsible Swiss should attract new criticisms. The United States, Israel and the German chancelière, Angela Merkel, already deplored the Swiss relations with Iran, shown to finance terrorism and to want to obtain the nuclear weapon. The comments on a visit in March in Teheran of M me Calmy-Rey were particularly severe. Not satisfies to supervise the signing of a large contract between two gas undertakings Switzerland and Iranian woman, the minister, the veiled head, was photographed, smiling, at the sides of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, under a monumental portrait of the ayatollah Khomeiny.
The Colombian authorities also regularly reproach Swiss for having given refuge to persons in charge of the guerrilla of the FARCs and even recently blamed the role of the Swiss mediator in the business of the hostages. Jean-Pierre Gontard is suspected by Colombian justice of having given 500.000 dollars to the guerrilla for the release of two employees of the pharmaceutical group Swiss Novartis in 2001.
Always did like the sound of the word “fjord”.
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