By Liza Jansen
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 21 2010 (IPS)

To halt the planet’s declining biodiversity and loss of critical natural resources, both the economy we live in and communication about science needs to be changed profoundly, says a prominent Dutch ecologist.

Louise Vet Credit: Netherlands Institute of Ecology

We presently live in a linear “take, make and waste” economy in which natural resources are running out and ecosystems are being destroyed, says Louise Vet, extraordinary professor of evolutionary ecology in The Netherlands.

But this clash between economic and ecological interests could be reconciled by implementing a so-called “circular economy”, she argues.

Vet, director of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, spoke with IPS correspondent Liza Jansen about how this circular economy offers concrete solutions to prevent further ecological losses and teaches how to commercially benefit from it. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Apart from your professional interest in outstanding ecologic scientific research, you try to arrange a good marriage between ecology and economy. How do you achieve this? A: It’s primarily a business challenge to do it differently. Many people are currently thinking and working on innovation to benefit the planet, economy, ecology and the people at the same time, the so-called People Planet Profit-model.

Since politicians would rather listen to businessmen and people from the industry than to environmentalists, we do a lot through businesses.

As an example: when a couple of years ago a new government was formed in The Netherlands, about 80 Dutch businessmen from multinationals were involved to stress the importance of sustainability in composing a new cabinet. The news appeared on the front-page of the major Dutch newspaper the NRC, with 80 signatures of these businessmen.

At first sustainability was seen as a left-wing thing, but because we present it as an innovation challenge with beneficial possibilities rather than a problem, right-wing people have gained interest.

On a regular basis my collegues and I lunch with politicians in The Netherlands, to talk about topics such as deforestation and policies regarding the fisheries, trying to get our ideas across the political agenda.

Q: What’s the biggest obstacle to reaching an agreement? A: We have very limited focus on long-term goals, which is difficult for present day industry. One of the major obstacles is the way we value things in our present day economy. We tax labour rather than resources.

If we’d change our financial system, which I think we should, other things would be valued. A great lot of resources on our planet are limited and should therefore be priced higher.

We’re trying to get to a different kind of financial economic calculation with, for example, paying for every used piece of carbon molecule. The rarer they are, the more expensive they get and the higher they are taxed. This would change the financial system completely and would therefore make different profits.

Q: How much more time is needed? A: I hope Western countries can get all their money together to save the forests that are so important for our planet. Right now a tree is only valued by the amount of wood it produces when you harvest it. But when the tree is valued on an ecosystem services basis, it is tremendously important for everybody on this planet.

Taking it away has a long-term affect on the ecosytem services: it catches CO2 [carbon dioxide], it filters air, it has its micro, fauna, flora, diversity importance etc. A tree contains so much more value than a simple piece of wood for a table or a chair.

Q: You recently invited everyone to come and poo in your research centre. Why? A: One of our most limited resources is phosphorus. Phosphorus is in every cell, in our DNA, in every living organism, plant or bacteria. We use it in our artificial fertilisers, making agriculture possible to feed the people in the world.

Worldwide, we’re disturbing the phosphorus circle, though we only have 80 years left before it’s done and its availability is limited to a few places in the world. As soon as that happens, we can’t have any artificial fertilisers anymore, which will be disastrous for food production.

Phosphorus in the future will be like fresh water.

What we do in the Netherlands: all our pee and poo goes straight to a sewage system that covers the whole of The Netherlands. Our sewage slush contains great concentrations of phosphorus, but we don’t do anything with it.

Therefore we’re trying to build a new model to regain the phosphorus from our own poo and pee by closing the nutrient cycle. We have vacuum toilets that hardly use any water because they use groundwater in stead of drinking water.

The pee and poo go to fermentation tanks, and after making energy out of “the black water”, as we call it, the [remainder] goes in there with all its minerals. Then it goes to algae, which take out the precious nutrients like phosphorous. The algae are harvested and given back to the soil (as fertiliser).

We’ll be the first office laboratory building of this kind.

Q: You state that we “live in the wrong economy”. What do you mean? A: We have a take-make-waste economy, not thinking about the stuff we use and what to do with it afterwards. It’s this so-called linear economy that is so wrong. We don’t value our resources enough.

Energy is not the real problem, we can solve that, it’s the resources. We’re in a spaceship, we have only a limited amount of stuff available on the planet and if we destroy it, we eventually make our own lives impossible.

Therefore we need to get to a circular economy, to at least keep the limited resources in the amount we have them now, rather than diminishing them even further.

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By Liza Jansen
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 21 2009 (IPS)

North Koreans are not as isolated from the world as the United States thinks, and in fact understand the U.S. better than the U.S. understands North Koreans, says regional expert Robert Carlin.

Robert Carlin Credit: Courtesy of Robert Carlin

“I know how little we knew,” Carlin noted at a recent U.N. conference. “When I was dealing with North Koreans, it was plain how much they knew about us. Their depth of understanding exceeds ours.”

Carlin has been following North Korea since 1974 and has made nearly 30 visits there. Currently he is a visiting fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

He also served as senior policy advisor to the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organisation (KEDO) from 2002-2006, leading numerous delegations to the North for talks.

In an interview with IPS, Carlin said that the overwhelmingly negative western portrayal of North Korea was simplistic, and even overly moralistic. Excerpts follow.

Q: In a speech at the U.N., you said that the Republic is not a reclusive country, although a U.N. report released in October asserted the opposite. Why? A: When I said that the North was not “reclusive” – not in any real sense of the word, anyway – I wasn’t making a moral judgment. Nor was I expressing optimism or pessimism. I was simply describing what I have seen and learned from years of talking with and observing North Koreans. They know more about the outside than we frequently imagine, and there is a swath of the population that has more interaction with foreigners, foreign goods, or foreign ideas than is commonly understood.

For myself, I try to keep the focus on observations that are less fraught, something that irritates many observers who don’t want to hear that the sun actually shines in North Korea, trees grow, and that people there live with the normal range of human emotions and human problems.

My particular view is that every observation about life in North Korea should not have to be qualified with a dollop of moral outrage or reference to human rights considerations.

Q: In your speech, you also said that “the world has rarely rewarded North-Korea for good behaviour”. What did you mean? A: “Reward” is exactly the wrong word, and I shouldn’t have used it. The North Koreans aren’t laboratory animals that we are trying to train to do new tricks. These concepts of reward and punishment, carrots and sticks have, I sometimes worry, overtaken our ability to figure out exactly what we are trying to accomplish and how we should act in regard to the North.

The point I was trying to make was that we have probably helped encourage certain policy choices by the North Koreans, choices that, in our eyes, aren’t the ones we want them to be making.

Q: When you went to North Korea, what did you experience of the country’s “abysmal” human rights situation? A: A foreign visitor would hardly expect to see or experience anything of the workings of the police, the courts, the prisons, or other internal security mechanisms.

Q: If North and South Korea ever reunited, they would form a vast, great power, combining the North’s wealth in natural resources with the technologically advanced knowledge of the South. How would you rate the chances of this happening? A: I started studying North Korea in 1974 – 35 years ago. The two sides have considerably more interchange now than they did then, and there is a potential for much more.

They were on a path to increased contacts a few years ago, but unfortunately the situation has fallen backwards. It is not unusual for this sort of process to move by fits and starts, however, and there is no reason to think things won’t get somewhat better again. The main thing is that when the process restarts, it almost always begins from a new plateau rather than having to go all the way back to the zero point.

Most people tend to think in terms of “reunification”, that is, the political unification of the country under one system. There are other ways in which the two sides could benefit from each other’s economic strengths for the benefit of both.

Whether and to what extent that would form a “vast, great power” is of course quite another question. It is worth bearing in mind that there are neighbours around the edge of the Korean Peninsula who might not be too happy to see such a powerhouse emerge.

Q: According to Vivit Muntarbhorn, the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in North Korea, the Republic has to alter its “military first policy” into a “people first policy” if the regime wants to survive. How do you see this? A: One thing I have learned not to do over the years is to tell people in other countries what is best for them. This is not to contradict the performance of the U.N. special rapporteur, whose job it is to make such recommendations.

If you look at the documents from the former USSR and Eastern European embassies in Pyongyang, you’ll see that the North Koreans were subject to a never-ending barrage of “advice” from their allies, most of whom were quite convinced that the North Korean leadership didn’t understand economic matters, had a poor grasp of communist principles, and basically needed the benefit of outside wisdom.

Both the USSR and the Eastern bloc have disappeared while the DPRK is still here.

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By Liza Jansen
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 14 2009 (IPS)

Five years ago, Morocco amended its family law to promote the idea of equality between men and women.

Nezha Guessouss Credit: Bomoon Lee/IPS

Nezha Guessouss, a member of the reform commission that brought the new code from inception to passage, considers it a true success story, although she notes that many women – especially those who are poor – have yet to secure their new rights.

“The law doesn’t necessarily mean there is equality in Morocco,” Guessouss told IPS this month, amid celebrations at U.N. headquarters surrounding the 30th anniversary of the landmark Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

Since King Mohammed VI adopted the law, the Mudawana, in January 2004, the legal marriage age for girls was raised from 15 to 18; a woman can ask for a divorce in court without her husband’s approval; and men are only allowed to have a second, third or fourth wife if they can prove it necessary for procreation and guarantee every wife the same quality of life, as written in the Quran.

Currently a professor at the Medical School of Casablanca, Guessouss told IPS that despite its revolutionary reforms, much of the family law’ code remains taboo in Morocco. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Morocco’s revised family code was groundbreaking. What was your role? A: I contributed to this whole process from the beginning, being a human being and women’s rights activist. From the early 1970s, I’ve been involved in actions and protests.

The Moroccan Family Law Advisory board was nominated by the king, and for a reason I will never know, I was nominated.

For the first time, women were involved in a commission in a Muslim country drafting a family law. Three women were on the commission, and I think the rationale was that one was a scientist – which I am – one was a social scientist, and the third one was a lawyer.

Q: What was the greatest challenge in drafting the law and ensuring it would pass? A: Everything, 100 percent of what we did was a very big challenge. You have to sit down with all these people from different [theological] backgrounds, trying to introduce some modern rationality in the discussion because you have to move from a law in which all the power is in hands of men, and allow a principle of equality. You can imagine how large the gap is.

It was very hard, there were a lot of fights and public demonstrations going on, but it worked. Still, it is only a step, a lot remains to be done.

Q: According to Fatiha Layadi, a member of the Moroccan Parliament, the new freedoms for women are not without controversy and educated women are still considered a threat by many Muslim men. How do you see this? A: That’s true, but I am not sure if it needs to be related to Muslims or Islam. I think it is much more linked to tradition. Islam is not our only culture, it is part of our culture.

There is a lot of women’s poverty and a lot of women are not aware of their rights, because poverty kills awareness. For example, the family law says women can ask for a divorce, getting it in a maximum of six months. But if she hasn’t got a job or anywhere to go, how is she able to enjoy her right?

I have never faced any discrimination, but I am very privileged because of my educational background. Educated women are in a position in which they can ask for their rights and are sure their rights will not be violated.

Under Moroccan law, for example, men and women have [job] equality. Unfortunately, it does not always work like that in reality.

Q: How much more do wealthy people in the country benefit from the law? A: The law definitely is a little elitist. Educated women, in the position of getting a job, earning money to buy a house, aware of the provisions of the law and able to pay a lawyer to defend them, can much more benefit from the law then poor, uneducated, jobless women who are dependent on their husband, father or brother.

But the eternal question is: should the law wait until the situation is correct to be changed, or is the law one of the ways to change the situation?’

I think we did both in Morocco. We had to wait almost 30 years after the old law was proclaimed. During those years, women’s position drastically changed. One out of 20 Moroccan families in the country is currently headed by a woman: the wife, the mother, the sister or any other woman.

Q: Have you seen any change in your personal life since the law has been implemented? A: As a major change in my environment, I would say that in general women feel better protected and are more confident, even those who don’t know the provisions of the law or cannot benefit from it.

However, I personally still know a lot of women who have been suffering for a long time trying to [obtain a] divorce but did not get it.

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Hoping to emotionally engage world leaders and ordinary citizens, hundreds of people from around the globe have entered their fifth week of fasting at the start of the Copenhagen Climate Conference.

Anna Keenan, one of the hunger strikers, has a tattoo on her neck that reads "climate justice". Credit: Robert van Woorden

“I am doing the Climate Justice Fast (CJF) because all the other forms of activism – while very necessary – are clearly not working fast enough,” Anna Keenan, one of the organisers of the fast, told TerraViva.

The CJF is an international hunger strike to call for immediate action to cut greenhouse gas emissions and address the climate crisis. Participants have pledged to go hungry until at least the end of the Copenhagen climate summit in mid-December – a total of more than 40 days.

“The fact that they are doing this is symptomatic of a huge public frustration. I understand and respect it, but I’m asking them not to put their personal health at risk,” Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is organising the Copenhagen conference, told TerraViva.

Seven climate justice activists have committed themselves to a water-only hunger strike, and have gone totally without food since Nov. 6, joined by hundreds of solidarity fasters from 22 countries.

“I feel that hunger striking it is the only action I can take that truly reflects the depth of my emotion and convictions about this issue. Climate change is a great injustice and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to stop it,” said Keenan, 25.

Keenan, a Danish citizen, studied with former U.S. vice president and environmentalist Al Gore in 2006 and has now fully immersed herself in advocacy for climate justice.

“The situation is absolutely desperate, and we’re seeing buck passing and delaying tactics from the leaders of developed countries rather than the real, necessary action to avert catastrophe,” CJF founder Paul Connor said in Canberra at the beginning of the hunger strike.

Members of the CJF say that both world leaders and the global public must use the much-anticipated summit as an opportunity “to shift away from business-as-usual and start addressing the root causes of the climate crisis – fossil fuels, overconsumption, and a socio-economic paradigm that rewards abuse and exploitation of people and the planet”.

“This is a global emergency driving us towards an almost unimaginable catastrophe, and our governments’ inaction is set to make them complicit in the greatest crime against humanity in history. We’re already seeing the world’s most vulnerable people suffering the consequences of a problem they did not cause,” Connor said.

CJF started in Australia, and now includes people from all ages and walks of life in the United States, Britain, India, France, Germany, Canada, South Africa, Belgium, Honduras, Bhutan, New Zealand, and the Philippines.

Hunger striking is a non-violent form of resistance that has been successfully used throughout history to capture attention or achieve a specific goal. “Under certain circumstances, fasting is the one weapon God has given us for use in times of utter helplessness,” Mahatma Gandhi once wrote.

CJF advocates that developed countries reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 350 parts per million or less and commit to spend at least 160 billion dollars a year to help developing countries deal with the impacts of global warming and help them shift to clean energy sources.

“In order to solve the climate crisis, we must challenge the assumptions that fossil fuels are ‘cheap’ forms of energy, that infinite economic expansion on a finite planet is possible, and that people and places are expendable commodities,” Keenan said.

“We could change all the light bulbs in the world, we could install solar cookers in every village in Kenya, but unless global public and political consciousness wakes up, stops burning coal, and stops over-consuming, climate justice cannot be achieved,” she told TerraViva.

The hunger strikers say they are well aware of the medical dangers a water-only fast entails. After three weeks, the body enters starvation mode, at which it “mines” the muscles and vital organs for energy, and loss of bone marrow becomes life-threatening.

Still, “People believe that this is something worth taking a risk for since we’re talking about the future of humanity,” Ted Glick, one of the U.S. fasters, told TerraViva.

The activists show no sign of abandoning their fasts or easing their moral call for immediate, effective action on climate change. A number of them will be present inside the building where the Dec. 7-18 U.N. climate summit will be held.

By Liza Jansen
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 2 2009 (IPS)

The 30th anniversary of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) this month has brought women’s rights champions from around the world to the United Nations to share their success stories. One is Sujata Manohar, who helped create a national law in India that bars sexual harassment in the workplace.

Sujata Manohar Credit: Bomoon Lee/IPS

“Some people believe the traditional way of life is better, but they are not in the majority and there is a clear move towards elimination of all kinds of discrimination,” says Manohar, a Supreme Court justice.

CEDAW, adopted in December 1979 by the U.N. General Assembly, is an international human rights treaty exclusively devoted to gender equality and is often described as an international bill of rights for women.

The Convention consists of 30 articles defining discrimination against women and an agenda for national action to end such discrimination.

“When it was adopted in 1979, the Convention pioneered the concept of substantive equality for women. It made clear that laws and practices must not discriminate against women,” noted Jessica Neuwirth, director of the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, at a U.N. press conference Wednesday.

The Convention is widely accepted, with 186 countries having ratified it. Only a few have not signed – Iran, Nauru, Palau, Somalia, Sudan, Tonga. The United States has signed but not ratified the treaty.

IPS spoke with Justice Manohar, CEDAW’s national partner for India to ensure gender equality and outlaw sexual harassment in workplaces, about the importance of legal mechanisms to enforce women’s rights.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

IPS: One of CEDAW’s 30th anniversary achievements is its near-universal ratification. How universally accepted is the Convention in India? SUHATA MANOHAR: It is very much a national commitment, and as a result of that, they set up the National Commission for Women to work for the removal of discrimination against women. Of course, India is a vast country. There are pockets of orthodoxy.

IPS: Can you give some examples? SM: All the personal laws have been amended. In 1954, we amended the Hindu Law to remove all legal discrimination against women in the Family Law. Women can now inherit and they have the same rights as men, as far as inheritance is concerned. Then, they amended the Law of Adoption, so that women can adopt, and girls can be adopted.

Over the years, we have amended other religious laws because these laws were based on old traditions and religious values and [were] therefore discriminatory. Christian law has been amended to remove discrimination against women in the field of marriage and divorce, Parsi law has been amended to remove discrimination as far as inheritance is concerned.

Only one little Muslim law still needs to be changed, but there is a strong move now for reform within the Muslim community itself.

IPS: Islam and women’s rights have always been a thorny issue. The Convention has currently been ratified for the Muslim population in India, but with reservations – the law will change for the minorities when they agree to the change. How will you lose these reservations? JSM: I think Muslim women in India are slightly better off since they have access to education, they are exposed to the outside world and they are not secluded the way they are in some of the countries. They are starting the reform movement, and other women are asking for changes in Islamic law.

I am very glad that Egypt, Jordan and Morocco have changed their laws. That is an object lesson because if they are able to change their laws, then why wouldn’t it be possible in India?

I am very hopeful, I am glad that some of the Muslim countries are coming forward to improve women’s conditions.

IPS: What main obstacles did you encounter when implementing the convention in India? JSM: The orthodoxy in the country, it is very difficult to change a mindset. People have been brought up with, we should call it culture. They don’t like to change, so it takes time.

I think conventions like this are very important, they tell people how the international community thinks, so what is orthodoxy in isolation? There are a lot of non-governmental organisations in the country working for elimination of discrimination.

It takes time but both the country and the people are changing.

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By Liza Jansen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 29 2009 (IPS)

National governments and the international community, the U.N. in particular, must rethink and debate the way post-conflict reconstruction is carried out, says a long-time U.N. expert and author.

Graciana del Castillo Credit: Courtesy of Graciana del Castillo

Despite continuous aid supplies from Western countries, developing a realistic comprehensive strategy for countries coming out of war often fails because of a lack of effective aid, technical assistance, and existent institutional arrangements, says Dr. Graciana del Castillo.

Del Castillo was the first senior economist in the cabinet of the U.N. secretary-general in the early 1990s and has been involved in ongoing post-conflict operations in Central America, Asia and Africa. She is an adjunct professor at Columbia University and recently published a book entitled “Rebuilding War-Torn States”, in which she evaluates the post-Cold War era of reconstructing countries in transition to peace.

In an interview with IPS, Del Castillo spoke about the difficulties the international community, in particular the U.N., faces in the process of rebuilding war-torn countries.

Excerpts follow.

IPS: In your book, you state that the U.N., as the leading global institution, would be ideally placed to deal with reconstruction but lacks the operational and technical capacity. What reforms does the U.N. require to properly deal with the reconstruction process? GRACIANA DEL CASTILLO: In the transition to peace, illegal, war-ravaged, state-led economies need to be transformed into functioning market economies where people can support themselves. Reconstruction is not development as usual. It is a political process since anything you do will have political implications and the country could revert to war.

Reconstruction will fail unless political reconciliation – not optimal economic policies – becomes the bedrock priority. Reconciliation requires that former combatants be reintegrated through productive activities. This requires job creation.

The U.N. lacks the institutional arrangements to integrate economic and political issues for effective reconstruction. The political department should lead in this area but it lacks the economic expertise needed to deal with other stakeholders in reconstruction, particularly the international financial institutions.

IPS: In your book you quote Lawrence of Arabia, a British military officer noted for his liaison role during the Arab Revolt of 1916-18, who once said: “Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly.” Is the international community following this principle? GDC: The international community as a whole needs to be more in the backstage. They have to accept that countries coming out of war might not do it the way the international community wants it, and that is fine, as long as it is done

IPS: Do you think the U.N. is contributing positively? GDC: Actually, I think the U.N. does very badly in this area since they do not have the capacity nor the expertise to work more effectively with other players. They need to acquire such capacity.

If the U.N. were more involved they could ensure that the political objective of the transition takes precedence over some of the development issues. The record of countries in the transition to peace is both dismal and expensive. Half the countries go back to war, the other half ends up aid dependent. Why? Because the international community has been unable to help these countries to create jobs.

IPS: Has the U.N. peacebuilding commission improved the U.N.’s capacity to deal with reconstruction? GDC: The U.N. created a peacebuilding commission and a peacebuilding support office that lack operational capacity. Such capacity is essential if the U.N. is to play an important role in supporting countries in reconstruction. The commission has an advisory role only in countries that are not under review by the Security Council. This has added more duplication and waste in the process rather than improving it.

IPS: What is your advice? GDC: The transition to peace is a very complex situation. There is an imbalance between what the international community has done in the military and security areas and what it has done in the area of reconstruction.

To give you an idea, the United States has spent 225 billion dollars on the Afghanistan war since it started. Ninety-five percent of that money has gone to the Department of Defence and most of that money is spent outside Afghanistan. The five percent spent in reconstruction has been spent in a very fragmented way. In fact, the U.S. and other donors channel 75 percent of their aid outside the government budget, thus failing to support government priorities.

IPS: Some people think that reconstruction may last on average for at least three years. GDC: It will very much depend on the country. In Liberia, for example, nothing had been done in the first three years. In El Salvador, the reconstruction plan was implemented in five years. In Afghanistan, it will take much longer.

IPS: What particularly struck you when compiling the book? GDC: I have been directly involved in many cases and many things struck me, but what affected me the most is that 15 years after I first started working for the secretary-general’s office in 1992 on these issues, many post-conflict countries and those supporting them are still discussing the same issues as if there were no lessons learned.

IPS: What would you consider to be the next best step? GDC: Well, at the time of the Marshall Plan in 1947, the U.S. government made a very important effort to debate the political issues but also the technical issues related to reconstruction. One of the things that was debated, for example, was whether it was good to give countries aid without a quid pro quo.

Because countries coming out of war at the end of the post-Cold War were at low levels of development, reconstruction was treated as “development as usual” but with large volumes of aid.

But after 20 years it is clear that this approach has failed. It is clear that if conflict ever arises between the political objective of national reconciliation and the Millennium Development Goals, the former should prevail at all times. Otherwise the countries may relapse into conflict and development will fail anyway.

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By Liza Jansen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 6 2009 (IPS)

Since the terror attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, persistent misconceptions about Islam have contributed to a dangerous climate of mistrust and disharmony between the Muslim world and the West.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf Credit: The Cordoba Initiative

“The world is divided,” Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf told IPS in an interview. “People all over the world might reject politically, intellectually or spiritually the divide between the Muslim World and the West – but they recognise its existence.”

Rauf has dedicated his life trying to improve the relationship between the Muslim and the Western worlds. He founded the Cordoba Initiative, with offices in New York and Malaysia, and the American Society for Muslim Advancement, and is the author of several books.

In an interview with IPS, Rauf spoke about the problems and the challenges posed by this disconnect between the Muslim world and the West, and how Muslim youth leaders are working through the Cordoba Initiative to overcome them. Excerpts follow.

IPS: What are the main obstacles to a better Muslim-Western relationship? IMAM FEISAL ABDUL RAUF: Five key areas harm Muslim World-West relations: religious interpretation, policy/international relations, public perception/media, youth leadership, and gender equality. There is a pressing need to address each of these issues.

IPS: At a recent talk at the United Nations, you said distorted media coverage is often a factor in widening the gap between the Western and the Muslim worlds. How can the media play a more positive role? FAR: The media is a powerful tool to change perceptions and create change. However, it is also a weapon, and too often, it has been used to perpetuate stereotypes, to promote destructive actions and policies, and ultimately, to deepen the Muslim World-West divide.

In order to be a positive influence, it is important that the media do four things: stop depicting Muslims as terrorists in the media and entertainment industry; replace broad generalisations with positive and realistic portrayals; educate its members on the issues, enabling sophisticated reporting; focus on positive stories and examples of healthy Muslim World-West relations.

IPS: The Cordoba Initiative’s Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow (MLT) programme brings together young civic-minded Muslims from all over the world to help each other more effectively face common challenges. How different are these challenges on a country-by-country basis? FAR: The young leaders face a number of challenges in their work, of which some of are shared and global. For example, at the 2009 MLT global convening, 86 percent of the 300 participants said that Muslims face a crisis in religious authority.

MLTs also face unique challenges within their respective communities. For example, MLTs in Europe work on integration issues. MLTs in Pakistan are resolving tensions through conflict resolution training. MLTs in the Gulf are actively engaged in creating opportunities to address unemployment, motivate their youth, etc. MLTs in the U.S. and UK work on presenting a balanced portrayal of Islam and Muslims in the media.

Many of these leaders have become key figures and change agents within their communities as a result of the network and partnerships formed through MLT. The MLT community has grown from 125 in 2004 to over 500 in 2009. The MLT programme went truly global only in 2009, bringing in leaders from South Asia, South East Asia, Middle East and Africa.

IPS: The situation of Muslims in the West has clearly worsened since 9/11. In Europe, right-wing extremist political parties have emerged or gotten stronger, such as the National Front in France, the Vlaams Belang in Belgium, and the Freedom Party of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. What is the stance of youth leaders in Western European countries towards these extremist political parties? FAR: MLTs are the voice of their communities, and they are among the first to respond to instances of xenophobia or Islamophobia in their countries.

For example, when Geert Wilders’s movie, “Fitna”, was released, a number of Dutch MLTs petitioned against the film and published newspaper articles. They also launched a t-shirt petition campaign with the message, “Holland Loves Muslims” and “Muslims Love Holland” and initiated the “Sending Hugs” campaign, organising mass “email hugs” to Geert Wilders because “all he really needs is love”.

Famile, one of the Dutch MLT’s, even sent him flowers and thanked him for bringing her closer together with other Muslims. All of our MLTs espouse the core Islamic values of pluralism, freedom, justice, intellectual development, creativity, and leadership. In keeping with these values, MLTs in Europe are actively engaged in building bridges between Muslims and the larger community.

For example, MLT Shenila Janmohammed frequently speaks on integration, hijab, and women in Islam in the UK, and she has become a well- respected figure in the country. MLTs across Europe are reaching out to the media, becoming politically active, and transforming their own communities.

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