Spain and France call for summit on Somalia
By Victor Mallet in Madrid
Spain and France will call for an international conference on Somalia as the two European countries step up their joint struggle against terrorism, piracy and drug smuggling, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spanish prime minister, said on Tuesday.
Mr Zapatero, standing next to Nicolas Sarkozy, French president, after a bilateral summit in Madrid, said the aim was not only to tackle piracy against cargo ships off the Somali coast "which is afflicting both our countries and others", but also to find a comprehensive solution to Somalia's broader economic and security problems.
European and other navies, including Spain's, have increased patrols by air and sea to quell the surge of pirate raids on cargo ships off the Horn of Africa, although years of overfishing by EU vessels is said to be at least one of the reasons for rising poverty and insecurity in the region.
In the past few days, Somali pirates have mounted two attacks more than 500 miles from Somalia's coast.
Mr Sarkozy and Mr Zapatero insisted they had put any personal differences behind them following reported remarks by the French president at a Elysée palace dinner implying that Mr Zapatero was not intelligent even if he was politically savvy.
"Did we speak of it? No," said Mr Sarkozy, dismissing the reports as tawdry French politicking. "Does it interest us? No. Did we turn the page? We didn't even open the book." But he concluded with a flourish, indicating Mr Zapatero: "That doesn't mean I don't think he's brilliant."
Spain's struggle against the violent Basque separatist group Eta has been boosted by a series of arrests of Eta leaders on the French side of the frontier. The two governments now want to deepen their cooperation in other areas, including the pursuit of Islamist terrorists and the repatriation of illegal immigrants, and agreed on Tuesday to establish a joint internal security committee to meet twice a year.
The joint campaign against Eta, said Mr Zapatero, "is a good model for the prevention of Islamist terror".
Although they come from opposite sides of the left-right political divide – Mr Zapatero is a Socialist and Mr Sarkozy a Gaullist – both men supported the idea of more economic intervention at the EU level to deal with the economic crisis.
Mr Zapatero predicted that Spain's EU leadership in the first half of 2010 would be "the presidency of economic recovery" and of "a new economic model". He said he had agreed with Mr Sarkozy that if the EU wanted to be a political union it needed a more solid "economic government" with the right tools
Mr Sarkozy agreed. "José Luis and I have thought for a long time that Europe suffers from a deficit of economic government," he said. The independent European Central Bank and the euro were all very well, he added, "but we think that the economic guidance cannot be ignored".
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