CAIRO: As Sweden assumed the rotating European Union presidency from July 1, Daily News Egypt sat with Swedish Ambassador to Egypt Malin Kärre to discuss EU policy regarding Egypt, the region and others in the international community.
Daily News Egypt: You stressed that the EU does not interfere in Egyptian politics, but the volume of trade between Egypt and the EU is over 20 billion euros. How do you reconcile the fact that you have an enormous amount of trade with a country that has such a poor human rights record and lack of democratic reform?
Ambassador Malin Kärre: You’re making an analysis I wouldn’t agree with at all. I do think that trade is an important instrument in enhancing relations between countries and also understanding each other much better. I’m very proud that the Swedish Minister of Trade [Ewa Björling] was here in Egypt in January and discussed a number of things including issues related to human rights.
I don’t see how they go against each other or be a contradiction to each other. On the other hand, it is important for us that we do have discussions on political issues and those discussions we had, precisely in the past two days in the subcommittee of political affairs, where we’ve been going through a number of issues with Egypt where we have said what we think about certain things and Egypt has said what they think about certain things in Europe.
So we’ve been discussing issues like the death penalty, torture, freedom of expression for media and bloggers, gender violence, etc. and Egypt has been quite explicit with us on what they think about issues such as xenophobia and possible racism in our countries. And this kind of dialogue partnership is possible just because we have partnerships also in trade, so I don’t see a contradiction at all.
So you have no problem trading with countries that have documented poor human rights records?
There are certain situations where a country has almost gotten out of the international community, and such a valid example was South Africa during apartheid where people were treated like animals and slaves. There was a formal UN decision on [South Africa], so Sweden followed that decision, but otherwise we would see no problems trading with a country.
Are you going to be pushing for the inclusion of groups that have been deemed terrorist by the United States such as Hamas to be brought to the negotiating table in the Palestinian/Israeli peace process?
Such details I don’t think Sweden should have a decision on them, at least not in public. The simple reason [for that] is that there are now negotiations being taken care of by Egypt. And Egypt is reporting back to the Quartet (US, UN, EU and Russia) from time to time, most recently I believe was two weeks ago and we simply have to sort of trust what the negotiators do.
How do you intend to approach the US and Russia during your presidency?
We have a transatlantic process going on and we expect it to continue and hope to enlarge that. With the new American administration there is a deepened window of opportunity, as they are now coming forward on, for instance, the Middle East peace process. With Russia we are organizing a summit and we will continue our discussions with it. We’ve had in depth discussions with Russia these last years on energy matters. They also relate to [our] security policy.
We are also looking forward to further dialogue with other big actors [such as] India [and] China. We want to make sure that we keep the dialogue going on with all the important partners in the world.
