Sarkozy launches Med vision

Source: Agencies  |   2008-7-14  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

FRENCH President Nicolas Sarkozy urged countries around the Mediterranean Sea yesterday to make peace as he launched an unprecedented Union for the Mediterranean.

"The European and the Mediterranean dreams are inseparable," he told leaders from more than 40 nations in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. "We will succeed together; we will fail together."

Sarkozy brought together for the first time leaders from rival nations such as Israel and Syria, Algeria and Morocco, Turkey and Greece.

Coping with age-old enmities involving their peoples and others along the Mediterranean shores will be a central challenge to the new union encompassing some 800 million people.

"We will build peace in the Mediterranean together, like yesterday we built peace in Europe," Sarkozy said. He insisted the new body would not be "north against south, not Europe against the rest ... but united."

Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, co-presiding the summit with Sarkozy, said: "We are linked by a common destiny."

He said the union has better chances of success than a previous cooperation process launched in Barcelona in 1995 because the new body focuses on practical projects parallel to efforts toward Mideast peace.

Mubarak called on the new union to tackle reducing the wealth "gap" between north and south, and cited other "challenges" as education, food safety, health and social welfare.