BRUSSELS, Feb 19: They say it couldn’t be done, but Europe will soon be speaking with a single voice, as part of a massive pan-European protest against the US incarceration at Guantanamo of two dozen European “Taliban”.

European lawmakers say they are being detained under questionable circumstances. The action is seen as good a rejoinder as any to former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who used to quip that Europe, for him, did not exist as it was so divided that “in a crisis, I never knew,” he would say, “whether to call Paris or London or Bonn or Brussels.”

Now all of that is to change, paradoxically thanks to the United States and the way it’s upset European public opinion with its incarceration of “Taliban” prisoners, notably those who hold European passports.

There are at least 20 such prisoners who are nationals of six European countries: France, Great Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Spain and Belgium.

Part of the conflict concerns indeed the precise number of European Taliban who are being detained at Guanatanamo. After French authorities were informed by the CIA in January that seven of the Taliban detainees were being considered nationals of France because they were heard speaking French, a delegation sent to Guanatanamo by the French foreign affairs ministry determined that in effect only two of the men were holders of French passports.

What is further surprising about the decision to put out a joint position protesting the detention of European nationals at Guanatanamo is that the call for such a protest cuts across the “great divide” that over the past few months has been created across Europe, notably between countries like France and Germany, which favour greater governmental intervention in their economies, and Great Britain, Italy and Spain.

On Feb 15, London and Rome, through the intermediary of their political leaders Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi, announced creation of their own axis, which they said would also include Spain, as they felt that the concept of Europe expressed by Paris and Berlin was not necessarily their own.

Blair and Berlusconi let it be known during their meeting in Rome — which strangely enough was conducted in French, neither man speaking the other’s language — that they wanted for Europe to be economically more liberal, and not as anti-American as they accused Berlin, and notably Paris, of having become.

But that position has apparently changed somewhat, as the major architect of the joint position on the European prisoners is British Prime Minister Tony Blair who has sent out a questionnaire to the Brussels-based representatives of the six European nations with prisoners at Guantanamo asking them to state their positions on the issue. As far as Blair is concerned, Europe should let it be known, and adamantly so, that any European “Taliban” should be judged in the countries where they hold citizenship, certainly not in America, and this for two reasons that make their trials on US soil of questionable legality: Europe banned capital punishment 20 years ago, and also opposes the use of military tribunals.

Certainly the major reason behind Blair’s decision to get the matter moving on a Pan-European basis is the growing impatience being expressed by Britain’s Muslim citizens. It’s a phenomenon also being experienced in France, which has a Muslim population of at least five million, and which has also forced national leaders to attempt to also bring home for judgment the two French citizens presently held at Guantanamo.

Actions undertaken individually by Britain, which was the first country to send a delegation to Guantanamo to interrogate three British “Taliban”, and by France a week later, to persuade Washington to allow the repatriation of their nationals, have been met “by a wall of silence,” in the words of one French diplomat, and it was in large part this attitude that decided Tony Blair, as well as French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, to think in terms of jointly undertaking an action on a European basis.

It’s those very European elites who have now decided to let Bush know loud and clear that before taking his crusade on the road, he should very well first think about doing away at home with certain practices, like the arbitrary detention of European prisoners at Guantanamo, that have their role to play in fomenting the very terrorism that Washington says it is doing all it can to eradicate.