RELIGION: More Politics Than Faith at Global Meet

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Deidre May

KYOTO, Aug 29 2006 (IPS) - While delegates to the World Conference of Religions for Peace (WCRP) keep highlighting the value of religion in resolving conflicts, the discussions at the 8th assembly, underway here, are decidedly political.

But, with many high-profile figures from the troubled Middle East such as Jordan’s Prince El Hassan bin Talal, Chief Rabbi David Rosen from Israel and former Iranian president Seyed Mohammad Khatami present for the four-day meet, it is considered natural for discussions, particularly informal ones, to veer towards the political.

A joint-statement is to be issued, at the end of the conference on Tuesday but no details were being made available of the backroom discussions for security reasons.

In an interview with IPS, Rosen, president of World Religions for Peace and founder of the Inter-religious Coordinating Council in Israel, said that the meet offered a rare opportunity for dialogue or joint-action.

In the Middle East it is difficult for religious leaders to meet and discuss issues, he said. ”This happens every day. You have statements that come from Muslim leaders that appear in the Arab press but never in the Hebrew or English language press. So just to have these expressed will be an achievement, especially if these are expressed together and come out jointly.”

He went on to say: ”In Israel one million of the citizens are Arabs, so already Jews and Arabs are living in peace. The vast majority are Muslim and about 150,000 are Christian, but what we all aspire for is affirmation of the dignity of all who live there. And we all basically agree that what we want is a two-state solution where there is a Palestinian State living alongside Israel in peace.”

But Sheikh Tayssir Tamimi, who headed the Palestinian delegation to the assembly, said, at a press conference, earlier, that the real problem was that Israel was bent on ‘Judaising’ Jersualem, a common heritage of many faiths, and isolating the city from its Palestinian neighbourhood with an ‘apartheid wall’.

Rabbi Rosen, however, spoke of a shared future for the Middle East and said he was confident that ”once a Palestinian state is established there would be a regional federation between Jordan, Palestine and Israel”.

When it came to the conflict in Lebanon and the role of the United States, Rabbi Rosen did not mince words. “If you were to ask Hezbollah or Iran or Hamas they would certainly say they see America’s support as an obstacle, because they want to see Israel eliminated”.

He said that if Israel is to find a way to live in the Arab world, there needed to be peace brokering and expressed regret that the idea of a quartet comprising the United Nations, Russia, the Europe Union and the U.S. had crumbled.

Israel, he admitted, had a difficult relationship with Hamas but he was confident that the enormous pressure exerted by Europe and the U.S. was helping to transform it from a terrorist organization into a responsible ruling party.

But not all the delegates shared Rabbi Rosen’s faith in outside, or at least Western, involvement and certainly not Jordan’s Talal who is considered a moderate voice in the Middle East.

Speaking about his experiences in Iraq, Talal said he often met with the ‘’true representatives of Iraq’s religious congregations and witnessed their exclusion from reconstruction initiatives from outside”. ‘’The leaders of Iraqi communities must be given the power and dignity to act on their intentions to regain dignity for their communities,” he said.

As for resolving the crisis in Lebanon, the prince said it was important to include troops sourced from Muslim countries in Asia in the U.N. peacekeeping force headed for Lebanon.

While countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and Bangladesh have offered to send troops for the peacekeeping mission, Israel has opposed the participation of these Muslim countries on the grounds that they did not recognise Israel diplomatically.

The U.N. plan is to deploy some 15,000 soldiers in Lebanon, half of them drawn from Europe, and tasked with the job of securing Israeli troop withdrawal from the Hezbollah-controlled southern part of the country.

The prince has also been vocal about the exclusion of Syria and Iran from last month’s conference in Rome on the Lebanon conflict. He said he believed that if Damascus and Tehran are sponsoring the Hezbollah, it made sense to involve them in finding a solution.

Another influential figure at the meet, Khatami, put the blame for the rising conflict levels in the Middle East on the erosion in the authority of international institutions, particularly the U.N.

Speaking on the sidelines of the meet, Khatami said he has been urging a restructuring of the U.N. to make it more effective. ‘’Even the U.N. secretary general agrees with this,” he said.

Khatami, known as a reformist cleric, also said many problems arose as a result of blatant ‘’double standards” adopted by the West, especially with regard to Iran’s controversial nuclear programme.

While Iran is signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) and had the right to pursue peaceful uses of nuclear energy, three countries in Iran’s neighbourhood that were non-signatories were known to possess nuclear weapons, Khatami said. The reference was clearly to Israel, Pakistan and India.

Addressing a news conference on Sunday, before leaving for Tokyo, Khatami warned that it would be a ‘’great mistake if they (U.N. Security Council) were to start a new crisis” in the Middle East by imposing sanctions on his country.

Iran, one of the world’s major oil producers, has, so far, shown no signs of meeting a Thursday deadline set for stopping all uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities or face sanctions.