We must recognise that we are experiencing a war and that the battleground covers the whole planet, said Tunisian Foreign Minister Abdelwahab Abdallah at the European People’s Party Conference yesterday.

Speaking at the conference, which is being held at the Radisson SAS Baypoint, Mr Abdallah said he was referring to terrorism. “This is undermining social, economic, religious and even human relations. And here I must express sympathy with the United Kingdom for the daily battle they are fighting,” he said.

However, he said, to solve the problem meant delving into matters which run much deeper than security. “To solve the problem of terrorism, we must look into the matter of developing the countries that are spawning extremists,” he said. He said that another key to the war on terror was “finding international consensus to find the best way to deal with it”.

Mr Abdallah said that another area that needed direct attention was solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

He also mentioned immigration and said: “If we refuse to understand that the problem is just as bad for the southern Mediterranean states as it is for the north, then we will never sort this situation out.”

He said that in his opinion, patrols and security were not the answer. “Again, it is a development issue, we need innovative ideas as to how to help these African countries come up to par,” he said.

Mr Abdallah said that one idea could be the drafting of a legal framework that would allow people from the southern Mediterranean to work in Europe legally. “Tunisia and Italy, for example, have an agreement whereby prospective immigrants are informed beforehand where they are to be placed and for how long. In that way, they can learn Italian beforehand and can have a definite plan,” he said.

Mr Abdallah said that the north and the south of the Mediterranean can be seen as chalk and cheese, but they should complement each other. However, he did make some criticism by saying that the south was expecting more solidarity at a time when developing nations were striving every day to push up their GDP. “We would like to see a true partnership and I will close by voicing support for French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s notion of setting up a Mediterranean Union which would work parallel to the European Union,” he said.

Meanwhile, Maltese Foreign Minister Michael Frendo said that we should not underestimate the importance of the Euro-med region. “This region is important to the EU and other states. It is strategically important for all of us to political, social and economic integration,” he said.

However, Dr Frendo said that after the initial impetus of the Barcelona process some 10 years ago, the Euro-med process was now suffering from “political tiredness”. “There has been dialogue, but in my opinion – although it is an important issue – too much emphasis has been put on the Israel-Palestinian conflict,” he said.

More work needed to be done, he said, to establish a free trade area in the Mediterranean and for more transparency and foreign direct investment. Another area where the Euro-med nations needed to work together was energy security and combating climate change, said Dr Frendo. He also said that there was a need for more cooperation in the academic field by organising exchanges of both students and teachers.

Dr Frendo touched lightly on the matter of irregular migration and said that the Euro-med area did, in fact, need the movement of people. “However, the phenomenon we are all witnessing at present distorts the whole concept. We cannot have free trade and free movement of people in this region if we do not tackle the issue of irregular migration,” he said.

Dr Frendo also said that it was important not to destabilise moderate governments in this region, which does have elements of extremism. “It is a balancing act and one area where we can combat terror is to ensure that all countries in this zone have a good social security safety net. If there is no social security, the vacuum is filled by extremists like we have seen with Hamas and Hezbollah,” he said.

The key to secure the Euro-med process, said Dr Frendo, was to have cooperation in every field, ranging from economic issues and political to education and especially the involvement of civic society.