HE Hervé de Charette
Ladies and gentlemen, very dear friends, it gives me great pleasure, joy and honor to be with you at the end of this day initiated by Maha Chalabi. I wanted to tell you, Mrs. Gendreau-Massaloux, that I have listened to you with great attention and your enthusiasm was exceptional, it was invigorating. It shows us that the spirit of the Union for the Mediterranean is still present, it is strong, it is powerful and no doubt it will have effect throughout the coming years under the leadership of all those who were the initiators and especially the two co-presidents of that organization, President of the French Republic and the President of Egypt.
Ladies and Gentlemen let me first welcome all the personalities that are present here but you are all eminent personalities and I think I know you all. I greet the mayors who are here and who signed the Charter of the League and I welcome Ambassador Dorin who read this Charter with his authority and who reminds me of so many good old warm memories. Finally I would like to welcome Mrs. Maha Chalabi, the brilliant, passionate and inexhaustible Secretary General of Tyre Foundation and the Association for the Protection of Tyre and if you believe me ladies and gentlemen you should applaud her warmly.
She deserves it because she took an incredible number of initiatives to continue the mission she had assigned to herself but that was later on backed up in a way by all of you around her. It's from Tyre that comes today the initiative that brings us together. Tyre, whose magnificent history has been written by the Phoenicians who bring us together today, but also by the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the crusaders from Europe, who didn't always have the best intentions and now the Lebanese Shiite community who form the bulk of the population of Tyre. That Tyre, the cradle of international trade and that under the leadership of the Phoenician people was somehow the inventor of the international trade and maritime commerce, and I dare to say, probably even the one who laid the foundations of international trade law. Tyre gave us this initiative; Tyre that was the famous city of the purple color declared imperial color by Emperor Nero who used it to drape himself as other emperors did. It is especially Tyre, a city at the same time radiant but also coveted and often martyred as have been the scene of the greatest civilizations destroyed by Alexander the Great who, on that day, probably did not deserve its title, a city that is still too often victim of hatred and madness of men. Yes Tyre gave us the idea of bringing together the cities that have marked the history of the great Phoenicians and their brothers Canaanite and Punic civilizations. The Phoenician is contemporary to ancient Egypt. Its territory was a piece of Palestine. It is a shared space between Syria, Lebanon and Israel today. Where did the Phoenicians come from, it is not clear but they came without doubt from the confines of the Persian Gulf in the third millennium before Christ. They lived in this narrow strip of land between Mount Lebanon and the sea, they were relatively wealthy farmers thanks to the rich space and land, the weather was favorable as it is always. They gradually became a maritime and commercial civilization that developed for nearly two thousand five hundred years until the fateful conquest of Alexander destroyed the Phoenician Tyre. Phoenician cities were ports. It is a nation of seamen and traders. The Phoenicians had this special character that has not really disappeared from the territory. You'll immediately know what I mean.
Phoenicians were not very focused on the establishment of a state as much as organizing themselves around communities of cities. These cities got along together, more or less, and you would have recognized the vitality but also the spirit of independence of the Lebanese people. This small population, that was not organized, unlike the Egyptians who established in a state from Upper Egypt, was often dominated by its neighbors and this is why we may imagine it like this. In all cases, it turned towards the sea, space of freedom. For several centuries, the Phoenicians were masters of the Mediterranean and they did it their way, not to conquer, not to install and administer, not even to mark the footprint of civilization that is to say impose their own values, but simply to establish cities, install a commercial basis, develop trade, share values, it was neither Greek expansionism that we will see later, nor the Romans will of power that lead them, and it is not to the Carthaginians that I need to teach how to cross the lands and seas of the Mediterranean or the spirit of conquest of the Spanish conquistadors fifteen hundred years later, no, it was the idea of sharing, exchanging, communicating.
And we haven't mentioned yet Phoenician counters, with their names spread in Cyprus, Tunisia, Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearic Islands, Spain, on the Atlantic coast, in Tangier since the Phoenicians passed columns of Hercules and were seen in the south of England and Herodotus claims that under the reign of the Pharaoh Neko around 600 BC, a group of Phoenician ships traveled around Africa. How could Herodotus know that we can make the tour of Africa in the sea if this expedition has not really taken place?
Obviously it is a formidable first. And what do they do? Well, they are trading. Placed between two of the richest regions of the Mediterranean i.e. the richest in the world of that time, Egypt and Mesopotamia, there natural vocation was to be intermediaries. They store and distribute the goods and riches of the entire East. Copper, gold, metals Caucasus, ivory, precious stones, skins of wild beasts of Nubia, the incense, the sight onyx Arabia; spices, cotton from the India; wheat in Mesopotamia, the carpet and the scents of Syria. They design and produce to themselves luxury goods such as crockery or tableware of silver, jewelry, glassware, precious objects, and they have been pioneers.
First by the audacity of their commercial expeditions, they were the first before the Carthaginians, before the Greeks, the Romans to unite East and West. "The discovery of the West by the Phoenicians opens a new era in the history of antiquity as the discovery of America in the late 15th century AD marked the history of Europe at the beginning of the modern era".
It is the famous historian Jacques Pirenne who noted that. This movement has a much stronger meaning than the Phoenician sailors or traders imagined; it is a profound movement of history that marked our own origins. Mrs. Gendreau-Massaloux when talking about the Union for the Mediterranean, for me the Phoenicians were in some ways the founders of the Union for the Mediterranean three thousand five hundred years ago.
They were also the pioneers of writing, the Phoenicians were certainly merchants, sailors, farmers, skilled and prosperous farmers, they were also artists, scholars, researchers, writers, at the end they will become all that. Before them was the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing and the cuneiform of Mesopotamia but both forms of writing were both complex and unspecific. It is for Scholars Phoenicians that we owe the invention of a system whereby we could represent each word by a group of letters chosen among twenty, it is a decisive step, and it is indeed a change, reprinted, comprehended and systematized by the Greeks. Our alphabet has found its origin, but also the development of human thought. The great philosopher Jacques Chevalier says in this respect that the human mind starts from the discovery of a logic that allows writing to express thought accurately.
It all happened in Phoenicia some fifteen hundred years BC. So Ladies and Gentlemen you understand why we must now greet the initiative of Maha Chalabi to create a League for Canaanite, Phoenician and Punic cities, where story reaches the present and the present tries to find its roots in the past. Of course, the civilizations are mortal, and the Phoenician civilization disappeared and we know more than others in the Mediterranean what makes civilizations mortal. But what has been sown remains and is never forgotten: the Phoenicians first brought together East and West of the Mediterranean.
They were the first to accomplish this in a spirit of peace and not for purposes of conquest, they opened the door to other populations but they did it in a manner that now seems loaded with meaning. It seems that in such excellent conditions again today Phoenicians of our time are taking the initiative of bringing us together and are trying to gather the cities they founded it three thousand years. That is the Union for the Mediterranean.
Dear Maha Chalabi, I hope that your new initiative meets a huge echo in the Mediterranean. Already the number of signatures gathered today leaves us much hope. Tyre was in turn Christian and Muslim, it has been a friend for the tribes of Israel and with the cedar wood that was delivered to King Solomon; it helped build the temple of Jerusalem. It is a city that gathers. Today at the beginning of 2009 the Mediterranean hesitates between peace and war, the tragic events in Gaza - which I can tell you here I find inexcusable, inexplicable and unacceptable, these tragic events that moved us deeply and marked a heavy shade at the beginning of the year 2009. The process that started on 13 July 2008 in Paris is being hindered and obviously we are trying to revive it.
Mrs. Gendreau-Massaloux told us that the civil society would take up the torch that regional leaders were reluctant to take in a firm hand. The Lebanese President, General Sleiman was in Paris, a couple of weeks ago and its presence constituted a strong and positive sign for us. Today, you are here.
Ladies and Gentlemen, in the history of humanity, amidst the pain and hardship, there are always some who have the responsibility of bringing the light of hope. Dear Maha Chalabi, you are one of them and you ladies and gentlemen too.
Congratulations and thank you.