- Mr President, like others, I would like to take a long-term view in this debate on Rwanda. We should consider how our development cooperation policy in the European Union can take real disaster avoidance into account. We should not focus entirely in this debate or at any other time on what we do when a disaster has already occurred. If we do this we are simply waiting for those disasters to happen and we may not only be allowing European Union funds to be misspent but also, as has been claimed in the case of Rwanda, our funds actually used to discriminate against Tutsis by the former government and even, it is claimed, excluding them from the benefits of European Union funded projects. I would like to know whether messages to this effect were ever conveyed to Brussels and if so, was there any response to those messages.

I should also like to know why the suggestion to jam the propaganda radio, Mille Collines, was not followed up. The suggestion was made in April or May. The Member States governments' approach was they could not do it because that would be interference in the sovereignty of Rwanda.

We must always clearly take account in the European Union of discrimination by recipient governments in the European Union when those recipient governments are making judgments on ethnic or regional grounds. I should like to call upon the Commission to review and re-examine the history of cooperation policy in Rwanda, notably on how to pick up and transmit and act upon early warning signals when they occur.

Military intervention is not the issue here. Our policies were deeply flawed long before the point in April when military intervention became the only option to stop or to prevent genocide. I remind this House that Willy Claes, the Belgian Foreign Minister said in March: "In Rwanda it is five minutes to midnight". Tragically this and other informed warnings were not heeded or acted upon and as events unfold in Burundi, let us be warned.

Human rights monitors should be sent to Burundi as soon as possible to investigate the current situation in that country. Also, international monitors should be sent to the OAU's observation mission to monitor the activities of the security forces. These actions we can and must take now.