Topic: Conflict or Co-Existence? Where do we go?

Conference Opening and Panel 1

Jacques Rupnik
Ladies and gentlemen, Excellencies, dear friends, welcome to the opening of the ninth meeting of the Conference Forum 2000. It was meant initially as a one-off conference. Nine years later, you begin to wonder if it‘s not becoming an institution. And institutions, as we know, once created, have a tendency to keep going.
That was certainly not the intention of the founding fathers who precisely wanted to avoid such traps and wanted to create a loose network of people with different views but with shared concerns. So not another conference on globalisation, not really an institution – Forum 2000 was perhaps a state of mind. The real reasons for Forum 2000 today have to do with the place, the host and the issues. It is a sign of times that Prague, after a long eclipse, has become again a meeting place for intellectuals and politicians to discuss the issues of international significance. This has something to do with the personality of the convener of the Forum President Václav Havel who, over the years, has, through his writings as well as his personal itinerary, created a loose network of people from different parts of the world and very different persuasions. He brought them together to Prague to exchange their views about the challenges facing us, with no short-term political agenda but as an attempt to take the long view concerning the opportunities, the challenges and the threats posed by globalisation. Forum 2000, after nine years, has become even an object of study. Professor Musil is conducting such a study and he said they did a word count for the last eight sessions of the Forum. The most frequently used word he told me is the word “uncertainty.” Henry Kissinger who was one of the speakers at the Forum used the words “uncertainty in our understanding of the present world.” So this brings me to the relevance of this year’s meeting concerning the conditions and the pitfalls of our globalised existence. Perhaps the major reasons why we still feel the urge to meet in Prague for the ninth Forum is not just that some of the main issues concerning the foundations of an international community remain relevant but also because of the assumptions many people shared in the 1990s no longer seem to be working or no longer seem to be as persuasive. When Forum 2000 was conceived a decade ago, the dominant view of the post-Cold-War globalisation was that the opening of borders meant more trade, more growth and that in turn would help to bring about more democracy and more respect for human rights. At some level of generalisation, you can still defend such a view, but I think that the present decade, particularly since 9/11, has also brought to the fore the darker side of the globalised world, with the rise of new threats, nationalist tensions and religious divides, which in a way force us to return to what were some of the key questions that were present at the creation of Forum 2000 – What are the sources of coexistence and divides between cultures and civilizations? What are the foundations and legitimacy of universalist modernising projects? And what are the contrasting and conflicting perceptions of these issues in the media, which have become an actor in their own right in this process? These will provide some of the main themes for our discussions today based on a shared feeling of responsibility for the world we live in. No one represents better that sense of responsibility – “responsibility as destiny,” as he once put it –than the moving spirit of Forum 2000 President Václav Havel. It is a great honor and pleasure to give the floor to President Václav Havel.
Václav Havel
Ladies and gentlemen, Esteemed guests,
First of all, I would like to sincerely welcome you on the occasion of this year’s Forum 2000 working session.
Let me begin by touching upon one dimension of the problem to be debated at our conference for the ninth time—that is co-existence of different spheres of civilization and cultures in today’s world. After the bi-polar division of the world broke down and the iron curtain crashed down, we experienced something that no one expected. The world was faced with the task of finding a new world order, a new system of co-existence for nations, states, and continents.
This co-existence is at the same time confronted with the breathtaking developments of new modern technologies, with the immense influence of modern media and with fantastic mobility. We are witnessing such a mobility of population on our planet that today, in one day, more people move from place to place than in the whole year one hundred years ago. People traveling or fleeing from their countries to other countries are more directly than before confronted with the “otherness” of their neighbors, which results in various tensions and problems.
What, then, should be the spiritual starting point or the principles of a new world order? What things should become key to the new way of co-existence? All world religions have something in common; they articulate the same basic moral imperatives. This is true in every religious system in its own way--metaphysically anchored, but in the end, similar to each other. Therefore, I would say that there exists a spiritual and a moral minimum that is shared by all, or at least by a substantial majority of all, cultures and spheres of civilization or religions of today’s world. I have spoken several times about this issue during past Forum 2000 conferences.
I recall one story, which I will share with you. It was on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the UN and at the summit of many heads of states in which I was supposed to represent the Czech Republic. One important foreign politician asked me to try to write a short, inspirational manifesto; a statement, in which I would attempt to formulate a common will to cooperate on the basis of a spiritual and a cultural minimum. It was to be on the basis of common imperatives which everybody wants to honor, while, at the same time, manifesting the will to honor the “otherness” of others; not elevating one sphere of civilization or culture above the and to respect everything that makes them different from each other.
By using simple, uncomplicated and understandable words, I was supposed to write a text, which would then be processed by a complicated procedure and become a manifesto of the summit. I wrote the draft and gave it to the politician who asked me for it. He liked it very much but after about a fortnight he left a message that, although everybody likes the text and everybody agrees with it, it cannot be approved.
I think that this story illustrates what we so often debate at Forum 2000 conferences: a discrepancy between reflections and deeds. How many wise books have been written about the threats and dangers hovering over the world and what humankind should do to avert them? We probably have never had such a thorough and complete knowledge of ourselves. But it is as if we are carried by some blind perpetual motion in a direction, which we say is dangerous – or at least ambiguous – without being able to draw a lesson from this reflection and take some action. It is the same as with that UN summit. It’s as if there were a mysterious barrier between reflection and action.
As you know, Forum 2000 was supposed to take place only once, and all of us are surprised that this is the ninth conference. It is a Sisyphusian effort to yet again and again remind ourselves of the issues, to analyze them and to speak of them in the hope that someone will transform some of them into concrete deeds, which is reflected by the fact that we, again and again, meet here to follow up on our last debate and to deepen it.
I am looking forward to all the wise words that will be said here, and I wish success to this conference.
Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much, President Havel, for these opening remarks. My main duty, the organisers told me, is to announce now that next to this main meeting there will be two parallel meetings of great interest, I think; one concerning the Middle East and problems of the water in that region and the second, I think very topical, concerning Byelorussia, and, as you know, the candidate running for the opposition in Byelorussia is present in Prague and will be present at that meeting, and I think that it is particularly significant that Forum 2000 has organised such a meeting with him. Usually, the Forum 2000 used to meet for two or three days, and we had therefore a very leisurely pace in those days. Now, still covering the same range of topics, with an array of very brilliant and talented people, we only have one day, and therefore that puts a very tough time pressure on the moderators, who have to moderate themselves – that applies to me as well – but above all to the speakers. And with that warning, let me pass on the floor to the first moderator Mr Nemtsov, who will introduce the next session. Boris Nemtsov is known to you as a leading Russian politician. He has been first vice-prime minister in the Russian federation. He has most recently also been an advisor to the Ukrainian president, and it is a pleasure to give him the floor to conduct the next session.
Boris Nemtsov
Thank you, Mr Chairman. Thank you, Mr President, for the invitation to be with you. This is the first time for me to take part in such an outstanding forum that you organise in Prague. I will be a moderator for a very exciting morning session, which is Conflict or Coexistence: Where Do We Go? We have two outstanding keynote speakers today and seven panelists and I hope that we will try to find an answer to important questions today like what are the root causes of the current threats and how can they be most effectively dealt with? Would a counter-terrorism strategy be inappropriate abroad and in addressing them? Is the current global campaign on terrorism effectively addressing the comprehensive challenges of modernisation, human development and accountable government? And the last one: What are the shared values of our future coexistence – human rights or human security, civil liberties, rule of law or religious codes and imperatives? Is there a universal standard for global accountability? We have only less than two hours for discussion. That’s why we have a lot of limitation in time, but anyway I hope that our keynote speakers will take between ten and fifteen minutes and panelists between seven and ten minutes. I am very happy to introduce the first keynote speaker, Ghassan Salame, who is a former Lebanese minister of culture in 2000 and 2003. At present time he is a professor of international relations at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris and senior advisor to the United Nations Secretary General. He has been on the board of the International Crisis Group, L’Institut du Monde Arabe, the Arab Thought Forum, and The Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
Ghassan Salamé
Thank you, Mr Chairman. As you can see from what the president just read, the list of questions is very long and the time is very short. So one has to be selective somehow, and I will start immediately with the heart of the matter. I think that one of the least convincing answers to those who say there is a clash of civilizations or a clash of civilizations is in the making, is to say well let’s try to have a dialogue among civilizations. Or let’s have an alliance of civilizations. I think this is a very unconvincing answer. For one specific reason, I do not think that civilizations clash. I do not think that civilizations dialogue or ally amongst themselves. I do not think that civilizations exist as political actors on the global scene. Civilizations are reservoirs where we pick our values, our ideas, our ideologies, and sometimes do not do that, and go to other civilizations to pick our ideas, our values, our ideologies. Or we try to be modern and to forget about our civilisation and our traditions. But civilizations, as such, do not clash, do not enter into dialogue. They are just reservoirs for individuals and groups, where they can go from time to time and build their value system. What about religions then? Well, religions also have given a lot of thought recently to people and religions are like weapons: Sometimes looked after by the United Nations. They are of dual use. Religions are of dual use. Sometimes, they are used to legitimize autocracy and sometimes they inspire democratic movements, Mr Geremek. Sometimes they are the language in which conflicts start. And sometimes, on the contrary, they are leading voices of peace. Sometimes, religions do help in pushing for social progress, and sometimes they are the cement upon which social traditionalism is built. So religions are of dual use, and depending on the time, depending on the way you may look at religions you may make a case for them as a negative factor or, on the contrary, as a very positive one. Sometimes, the same religious institution play roles that are somehow disputed. If you look at Pope John Paul II in the past twenty-five years, you may find things with which you agree like, for example, his positions during the two Iraq conflicts, where he played a very crucial role in somehow avoiding the very concept of a clash of civilizations, but you may look at his conservative agenda and do not like it. So, depending on the way you look at things, I would say the same about Ayatollah Sistani in present day Iraq. He is the one who, from day one, told me in June 2003 “I will never accept an Iraqi constitution unless it is written not only by Iraqis, but by elected Iraqis.” So he is the one who brought elections about. So he played a very crucial positive role. But sometimes later he put all his support behind one slot of candidates. So you may like his first position and dislike his second position. And all these are concrete examples of how religion can play different roles. And, by the way, there are extremely bloody conflicts nowadays that have nothing to do with religion. One conflict that has been well studied by the International Crisis Group, and I am sure Gareth is going to say a few words about it, the conflict in Darfur is among Muslims. The longest war in the Middle East – eight years between Iran and Iraq – was among Muslims. And the conflict in Aceh, the conflict in Colombia, Latin America, these have nothing to do with religion. Even diplomatic alignments do not necessarily have to do with religion. So let us not put too much emphasis where it doesn’t exist. I do believe that religion is made of three different things. Religion is first a faith, religions second are institutions, and third religion is a language. And I think that most of the confusion nowadays is due to the fact that we keep sort of moving between religion as faith, religion as institution and religion as language. When it comes to religion as faith, there is some kind of interfaith dialogue. I don’t much believe in it. I do believe that any religion has a set of basic undisputable values and beliefs nobody is ready really to re-examine. That is why, although I have nothing against interfaith dialogue, I don’t believe this is the best road for dialogue between people. Now, among institutions, we have a huge number of dialogue fora, but I am not sure that established churches in Islam, in (inarticulate). in Hinduism and other religions are the best people to really conduct dialogue or interaction. Very often, it sounds like regular diplomacy. I have been to many of these sorts of fora, and it looks like interstate diplomacy with no real substance. So, what do we do? I do believe that we have three basic methods of approaching each other when you belong to a different civilisation or different religion. One is tolerance. I don’t like much tolerance. I do believe that in the concept of tolerance, you have a balance of power, where the strong, to a large extent, recognizes the existence of the other – the otherness of the other as President Havel just said – but in tolerance you have a balance of power, where the strong recognizes the weak, but wants to keep him weak and just accepts that he survives in the relations with him. So why not mutual respect? Mutual respect is a bit better, but I feel that mutual respect sounds, looks, operates like a Cold War: You have your domain; you have your territory. You stay there. I have my territory, my domain. I stay there. There is no interaction. We respect each other, but stay where you are, and I’ll stay where I am. This is mutual respect. Dialogue is better. Of course it is better, but not dialogue among religions and civilizations because neither religions in my view nor civilizations are political actors. Dialogue between individuals, groups or states. Why do I believe that religions and civilizations are not actors? Because I don’t want them to be actors also, because who represents whom in a civilisation? It’s a very undemocratic way of putting things. Why should I accept one Muslim and say “Of all 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, there is one guy who represents Islam just because he happens to be Muslim.” What is the democratic process through which he has been selected as spokesman for the whole of Islam? So it is very undemocratic to say civilizations talk to each other because nobody has ever given a mandate to anyone to speak in the name of hundreds of millions of people. So it’s undemocratic, but yes, dialogue between individuals, between groups, between states, this makes sense, somehow. But then be careful. I never thought that dialogue was an alternative to struggle or to conflict. I do believe that, to the contrary, dialogue is not an alternative to conflict but it’s a form of conflict. But in a conflict you are in conflict with the other, in a dialogue you are in conflict with yourself. Because in a dialogue you need to accept first “the otherness of the other,” again as President Havel has said. You have also to accept that it is legitimate for the other to be different from you. So you need to accept the otherness of the others, but the legitimacy of the difference between you and the other. And third, and this is the worst precondition for a true dialogue, you need to accept that through dialogue you may be able to change the other, but also to get changed by him. Because if you enter into a dialogue in which you only want to change the other and not to let the other try to change you, you are a hypocrite. You are a liar. You are not entering into a dialogue. That is why I say a dialogue is not an alternative to conflict, it’s a form of conflict with oneself and not with the other. Let me turn very rapidly now, because the list was long, at least to one question. If you don’t have mutual respect, if you do not have dialogue, if you do not have tolerance, you may have violence. And one topic mentioned for us to address, and I will do it very rapidly, is of course a specific form of violence in this twenty-first century. That is terrorism and anti-terrorism, which is a form of violence, and let us be clear among ourselves, we have no idea yet how to conceptualize the phenomenon. I have been like many among you looking at the possibility for the latest millennium summit of the United Nations to find a definition and a conceptualisation of terrorists and you certainly know that we failed in doing that, like in many other topics, by the way, concerning this famous document. Is terrorism an enemy or a method, a political instrument? If it’s an enemy, then you should fight against it. If it’s a method or a political instrument, then you should forbid it. It’s a completely different thing. I tend to believe that terrorism is not an enemy. Terrorism is a political instrument that should be forbidden and we should all cooperate in order to somehow evict it, isolate it, abhor it. Second, is terrorism a war that is launched, or is it a criminal activity that should be prosecuted like any form of criminal activity? Put before this very basic question, I would tend to submit that many governments, including the most powerful among them nowadays, has given the following answer: “On Monday, it’s a criminal activity; on Tuesday it’s a war we are waging.” I mean it is both, and we do not know. And, unless there is more conceptual clarity on this issue, ambiguity will not help in this fight against terror. Third, what is the relationship between terrorism and democracy? Is democracy an answer to terrorists? I am a democrat. I want one hundred and ninety one political units in the world to become democratic tomorrow. But let me be very frank, democracy is not the answer to terrorism. You need other answers to terrorism. And, by the way, all studies we have now clearly show – and the London terrorist attacks recently clearly show – that most of the perpetrators of terrorist acts and most of the victims of terrorist acts do come from democratic constituencies, which tells us something very important: that there are more terrorist activities, for example, in India – four hundred incidents last year – than in China – only nineteen – last year. So let’s face it. Democracy is a value in itself, and we should all fight for it, but it is too facile to say, “Well, if you have democracy, it’s the end of terrorism.” Terrorism needs a specific counter-terrorism strategy that probably could be helped in the long run by democratic institutions, but it is not a short-term answer to institution. So should we continue on that, or just start thinking about how to operate and define conceptually our counter-terrorist strategy. I will end with a question: Does military intervention always help? And for this, I will, in a very telegraphic style, say “Rather no, than yes.” Why? Because in order for a military intervention to succeed in fighting terrorism, you need to have at least seven preconditions. I will list them and shut up: You need first a very good knowledge of the terrain of the society you are intervening into. You need also adequate planning. The easiest job is regime change. The most difficult job is regime replacement. Look at what happened in Iraq. The regime change took place in three weeks. But two and half years after that, regime replacement is still not there. You need three: an adequate tempo and timeframe. Democratisation is not a religious conversion that happens in a minute. It takes years. It takes sometimes generations. Four, you need to have a very clear set of priorities and not do preventive wars while you are fighting terrorism, because it diverts your funds, your energy and the alliance we need to fight terrorism. Five, do not overestimate military means, because in fighting terrorism, you need all kinds of means and military is only one of them. Six, keep an eye on the oil market, because it’s a big, big constraint on your activity, especially when the barrel is at sixty or seventy. And finally, in order to fight such a war, you need to have a strong moral authority, which means a strong legitimacy, which means do not be unilateral in your approach but multilateral. Thank you all.
Boris Nemtsov
Thank you, Mr Salame, for a great speech. Our next speaker is famous Gareth Evans. Gareth Evans was a former foreign minister of Australia, president of the International Crisis Group. Since January 2000, he has been President of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. He came to the crisis group after twenty-one years in Australian politics, some of them as a cabinet minister. As foreign minister from ‘88 up to ‘96, he was best known internationally for his role in developing the United Nations peace plan for Cambodia. He has written or edited eight books, including Cooperating for Peace, launched at the United Nations. He was co-chair of the international commission on intervention and state sovereignty. He’s currently a member of the Zedillo International Taskforce on Global Public Goods and the Blix Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction. Mr Evans…
Gareth Evans
Well, thank you Boris. Ladies and gentlemen, the world as we see it around us doesn’t immediately suggest that we’ve learnt very much about peaceful coexistence, whether it’s Iraq, or Israel-Palestine, or Darfur or the eastern Congo, or London or Bali. Or wherever else in the world the golden media rule applies that if it bleeds it leads. We are assailed with a constant flow of news about war or potential war or violent extremism, which seems depressingly endless. But what I want to suggest today is that, for all that has gone wrong and all that continues to go wrong when it comes to war and civil war and mass violence and terrorism, conflict is not inevitable. For all that some political leaders are impenetrable to any form of education, we have as an international community learnt a great deal about how to prevent and resolve conflicts, particularly over the last decade. The record is rather better than it seems, at least in relation to war and civil war, if not terrorism. And we can do better still, if governments and intergovernmental organisations apply the right kind of policies and give, above all, the right kind of leadership. The basic point about conflict and extremist violence is that it is always context-specific. Big overarching theories about conflict, whether cast in terms of the clash of civilizations or ancient tribal enmity or economic greed or economic grievance or anything else, may be very good for keynote speeches, and certainly very good for royalties. They might also be quite helpful in identifying particular explanatory factors that should be taken into account in trying to understand the dynamics of particular situations. But big theories never seem to work very well when you’re trying to sort out between those situations, which are combustible and those which are not. Because, after all, for every case we know of religious or ethnic or linguistic difference erupting in communal violence, there are innumerably more cases around the world of people and groups of different cultures and backgrounds still living harmoniously side-by-side. For every group economic grievance that erupts in catastrophic violence, there are innumerably more that don’t. For every Muslim in the Arab-Islamic world whose feeling of grievance or humiliation against the US or the West takes a violent form, there are many millions more for whom it doesn’t. For every alienated, second-generation immigrant not succeeding in the New World, but feeling adrift from the cultural moorings of his or her old world, for everyone who translates that rage or despair into indiscriminate terrorist violence, there are innumerably more for whom that action is inconceivable. So all this simply means that there are no single causes or explanations. There are no single accompanying big fixes for any of the various continuing problems of conflict and violence that beset us. The problems are complex and multidimensional, so too have to be the solutions. But there are solutions and they do work. And we’re getting better all the time at identifying and applying them. Let me give you, right at the outset, just a few figures to make this point. They come from the long-awaited, Human Security Report, which is a Canadian initiative supported by five other governments that’s to be published in a big volume next month by Oxford University Press. And among the findings in that report are these: There’s been a dramatic decline in the number of armed conflicts since the early ‘90s. A decline of some 80%, in fact, in the case of conflicts with a thousand or more battle deaths a year. Although there are still some sixty violent conflicts being waged around the world, war between states, as distinct from inside states, has almost completely disappeared – now less than 5% of conflicts, and the overall environment is certainly one of major reduction. Second big finding: paralleling the number of conflicts, the number of battle deaths is also dramatically down, both in absolute numbers overall and in terms of the deadliness of each individual conflict. Whereas, back in the 1950s, and for years thereafter, the average number of deaths per conflict per year was 30 – 40,000, by the early 2000s, this number was down to around about 600, reflecting the shift from high-intensity to low-intensity conflicts and geographically a big shift from Asia back to Africa. Of course, violent battle deaths are only a small part of the whole story of the misery and horror of war. As many as 90% of war-related deaths are due to disease and malnutrition rather than to direct violence. But the trend decline in battle deaths is significant and it’s highly encouraging. And a final quick point, there’s been a dramatic increase in the number of conflicts that have been actually resolved by active peacemaking efforts – diplomatic negotiations, international mediation, conciliation and the like. The high-level panel, which reported to the Secretary General before this year’s UN summit, of which I was a member, came up with the startling but very well-researched statement that more civil conflicts have been resolved by negotiation in the last fifteen years than in the previous two hundred. There are a number of reasons contributing to these various turnarounds, including, back a few years ago now, the end of the era of colonialism, which generated, in fact, around two-thirds or more of all the wars that occurred between the 1950s and 1980s. Much more important recently has been the end of the Cold War itself, which meant no more proxy wars being fuelled by Washington or Moscow, and it also meant the demise of a number of authoritarian governments generating internal resentment and violent resistance that each side had been propping up. But the best explanation is the one that really stares us in the face, although there’s a great many people who don’t want to acknowledge it, and that is the huge increase in the amount of formal activity, most of it sponsored by the United Nations, which has taken place since the end of the Cold War in the area of peacemaking – that’s to say negotiation, conciliation mediation – peacekeeping and peace-building operations. The increase in that activity, depending on which area you are talking about, has been from four to twelve times over the last ten years and it has been reflected in results. All this in turn has been reinforced by the huge increase in the activity of other players, not least non-government organisations and other civil society actors, working alongside the UN system and governments, needling them into action, acting as partners in delivery, or playing critical support roles in institutional capacity building, community dialogue and confidence building, and actual peacemaking through mediation and conciliation. My own International Crisis Group, which didn’t exist ten years ago, is a case in point. Now it is an organisation of about 110 fulltime people active in some 50 areas of actual conflict or potential conflict around the world, and with a strong advocacy voice in all the major capitals. Well, what is it that we have learnt about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to war and civil war? What are the things that governments and intergovernmental organisations have been doing right up to a point but could do a lot more of and do a lot more consistently? Let me give you a few checklists of my own to add to those of Ghassan Salame from my own experience of the major lessons we’ve learned or should have learned from each main stage of the conflict cycle, starting with conflict prevention. The first rule of preventing deadly conflict is of course not to start it; a message that the United States is certainly now pondering after its rush to war in Iraq. There are circumstances in which there will simply be no alternative to taking military action, but military action -- I agree with Ghassan in this sense, not only in the context of terrorism, but in every other context -- should only ever be undertaken in circumstances of last resort and in very serious cases where it will, on balance, do more good than harm. The second rule of conflict prevention is to understand the causes, the factors that are at work – political, economic, cultural, personal – in each particular risk situation. Don’t be quick again to apply grand theories, or make assumptions on the basis of experience elsewhere: look at what is under your nose. The third rule is to fully understand, and be prepared to apply flexibly as circumstances change, the conflict prevention toolbox – the whole range of possible measures, both long-term structural and short-term operational, that can be deployed to deal with high-risk situations: political and diplomatic tools; legal and constitutional tools; economic tools, including sanctions but also incentives; and military tools, security sector reform, preventive deployments and, in extreme cases, the threat of military force. The fourth rule is to be prepared to put in the necessary government and intergovernmental resources, when and where they are needed, and particularly at the early prevention stage, where it's manifestly extremely cost effective. And the fifth rule is for governments to leverage their own resources by using all the extraordinary capability that is now available from non-governmental organizations and civil society generally in the ways I have already mentioned. When prevention fails, and the task becomes that of conflict resolution; again, there are a number of lessons we have painfully learned about what makes a successful peace accord: First, it is not an event so much as a process, and signing the agreement is certainly not the end of it. The critical need is to generate commitment to, and ownership of, the peace by the warring parties: so their commitments are not just formal, but in fact internalized, and will stick. We need to constantly remember the awful examples of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, taking 800 000 lives as it did, which followed just one year after the Arusha peace deal consummated great acknowledgement and acclamation one year earlier. We need to remember the 1991 Bicesse Agreement to end the war in Angola, which was followed almost immediately by a relapse into bloody conflict for another decade with another million or more lives lost. So the peace accord is only the beginning of it, not the end. Second, any peace accord must deal with all the fundamentals of the dispute, all the issues which will have to be resolved if normality is to return. Sometimes that can be done in a sequential, one-step-at-a-time stage-by-stage way, with confidence building measures now and deferring some of the key issues until later: that might be a way, for example, of dealing right now with the frozen conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. But the failed Oslo process for Israel-Palestine shows just how risky that approach can be. Thirdly, any successful peace accord must get the balance right between peace and justice. The South African truth and reconciliation commission model, with its amnesties for the perpetrators of even the most serious crimes, is very widely admired, but in other cases sustainable peace will not be possible without some visible trial and punishment occurring. What is clear is that the people of every country themselves, whether it’s Cambodia or Rwanda or East Timor or Liberia, have to resolve what works for them. You can't have a single model being applied from outside. Fourthly, the terms of any accord, and the method of its enforcement and implementation, must be sufficiently resilient to deal with spoilers – those who come along after the event determined to undo it all, those who seek to undermine or overturn it. Fifthly – and this follows particularly from the last point – a peace accord, to be successful, must have the necessary degree of international support, with all the guarantees and commitment of resources that are necessary to make that stick.
When you come to post-conflict peace building, there again is a checklist of issues that we've learned about through hard experience, particularly in the last decade, about what makes these missions successful, which are the ones that are and which are the ones that are not. The first lesson is to sort out who should do what and when - immediately, over a medium transition period and in the longer terms, allocate the roles and coordinate them effectively both at headquarters and on the ground. And this is, of course, at the high level at least, one of the crucial roles envisaged for the new Peace building Commission, just approved at the UN Summit – if its detailed operating arrangements, that is, can ever now be agreed in that diplomatic piranha pool of New York where it's currently now being debated. Second lesson for post-conflict peace building: commit the necessary resources, and sustain that commitment for as long as it takes. This again is envisaged as a critical role for the Peace building Commission, given the long and lamentable history of ad hoc donors’ conferences, and rapidly waning attention once the immediate crisis is over. Third rule about peace building: understand the local political dynamics and the limits of what outsiders can do. Iraq remains one of the unhappiest examples of how much can go wrong when that understanding is conspicuously lacking. Fourth, recognize that multiple objectives have to be pursued simultaneously: physical security may always be the first priority, but it cannot be the only one, and rule of law and justice issues, as KC was saying over breakfast this morning, and economic governance and anti-corruption measures, certainly deserve much higher priority than they have usually been given. And finally, in respect to peace building, all intrusive peace operations really do need an exit strategy, if not an exit timetable, and one that is not just devoted to holding elections as soon as possible, as important as it obviously is to vest real authority and responsibility in the people of the country being rebuilt.
Moving finally from conflict to terrorism, the contemporary problem here is in a number of ways more intractable and more alarming than that of war between and within states. Positive news confirmed in the Human Security Report that I’ve mentioned is that, even with all the carnage since 9/11 that we’re familiar with, the overall death toll from terrorist attacks is still very low by comparison with the numbers still to this day dying in battle, or from war-related disease and malnutrition. But of course that will be the case only so long as terrorist attacks are conducted with conventional weapons. The casualty rate will obviously soar dramatically if the so-called Big One, a major terrorist attack using in particular nuclear weapons, which is certainly still very thinkable. If the war on terrorism as it’s so far been conducted, has been an overall success, then that’s a very well-kept secret. Terrorist attacks classified by the US government as significant more than trebled last year worldwide to 650. This was the highest number actually since Washington ever began to collect statistics. And nearly a third of those attacks – 198 of them – and nine times the number the year before, took place in Iraq, which is of course meant to be the central front in the war on terror. I believe that the struggle against violent extremism, and that’s a much better terminology than war on terrorism, can be won but it’s going to be neither quick nor easy and it’s going to require a lot of thought and application and persistence, a lot more balanced approach, a lot more attention to underlying causes and currents, as distinct from surface manifestations and comes easily to most of the world’s policymakers. There’s been a number of ways of identifying the different elements that are needed in an effective terrorism strategy, including by Kofi Annan at the Club of Madrid a few months ago. I’d characterise it – and this is my very last checklist – in terms of five P’s. First of all, you need obviously a Protection Strategy – airline security, border protection and all the rest. It may not be very effective, but you can’t not do it. Secondly, again you need, obviously no argument, a Policing Strategy. Police intelligence and ultimately, but only in very extreme and exceptional situations, military operations. The hardest issue here, of course, is getting the balance right between doing this and having possibly counter-productive and indefensible-in-principle intrusions on civil liberty. It’s very hard to get that balance right, as we know. And that’s an issue in its own right. The third element, on which I want to spend a little more time, is a Political Strategy. There are a variety of familiar political grievances, the occupation of Palestine and Iraq pre-eminent among them, along with foreign support for so-called apostate regimes, where these constitute a significant part of the motivations of some categories of terrorist. What you have to do is address those political grievances, not so much because it’s necessarily going to impact on the motivations of individual terrorists, but because it’s crucial if you are going to deny oxygen in the communities in which they swim. In the case of governments, in countries where there is a strong street sentiment in favor of the political objectives in question, it’s a strategy that’s necessary – a political-grievance-remedying strategy – if you are to improve the will and capacity of those governments to cooperate effectively in the fight. Fourthly, you need a Peace-building Strategy. That sounds odd in this context, but it’s really the same point that’s been made before – all those things which are necessary to stop failed and failing states surfacing or continuing are very important in the struggle against extremism because of what we know about the capacity of those kinds of states to harbor terrorists and those who would support them. And finally, you need a Psychological Strategy designed to change the way in which people think and feel about terrorism and to remove any vestige of comfort zone around it. At the individual and group level, among those who are or would be terrorists, that psychological task is very specific: to find ways through community leadership and so on to influence their behavior. At a global level the psychological task is to get agreement once and for all, as Ghassan Salamé said, about what constitutes terrorism; to make attacks against civilians as indefensible, whatever the motivation, in the 21st century as piracy and slavery were in the 19th. The United Nations at the summit dropped the ball unfortunately on that issue, but it’s critical to pick it up again because the struggle against violent extremism starts with the battle of ideas. And of course it’s with the battle of ideas that this Forum 2000 is overwhelmingly concerned. Over the last nine years, a great many ideas have been canvassed around this table that have been fed into and have been influential in the evolving policy debate on conflict and violence and coexistence. We’ve come a long way in saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war, in that wonderful language of the United Nations. We’ve got a long way yet to go in saving people from the scourge of violent extremism, but that is a battle that can be won with the kind of ideas that have emerged over many years and will continue to emerge from this forum, provided of course that political leadership can be found to implement them. Thank you.
Boris Nemtsov
Thank you very much, Mr Evans. Unfortunately, we have only one hour and ten minutes for eight speakers. That’s why let’s be more careful about our time. Our next speaker is Mr James Woolsey. Mr Woolsey is a lawyer, a former director of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency and the ambassador to the negotiation of Conventional Armed Forces in Europe in Vienna from 1989 up to 1991. Currently, he is the chairman of the Board of Freedom House, a trustee of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies and the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He also serves as a vice-chairman of the Advisory Board of Global Options LLC, and is a member of the board of directors of other private companies. Mr Woolsey, welcome.
James Woolsey
Thank you, Mr Chairman. In 1999, Elie Wiesel was on a panel very much like this one, which was discussing the challenges of the 21st century. And all the other panelists said, “Well, the challenges of the 21st century are going to be globalisation and yaw-di-yawda…” Elie said, “No, the major challenge of the 21st century is going to be exactly the same as the principal challenge of the 20th century.” Everyone paused, looked at him curiously. He said, “It will be ‘How do we deal with fanaticism armed with power?’ ” He was, of course, right, as we are seeing today, and I think we should reflect – particularly along the lines of Gareth Evans’s comments about the battle of ideas – on the nature of this fanaticism in the 21st century. In the 20th century, the world’s democracies defeated four totalitarian movements, either entirely or largely secular in nature: Fascism, Nazism, Japanese imperialism, and Communism. The fanaticism that we must deal with today is of a rather different character. There are three, I believe, totalitarian movements in the Middle East, and I’ll focus here only on the Middle East for now. And one of them, Ba’athism, is essentially an Arab nationalist version of fascism, actually modeled after the fascist parties of the ‘20s and ‘30s. The other two are Islamist movements: one Shiite supporting the (inarticulate) Fadi el al faki (inarticulate) in Tehran, the other Sunni. And I believe those are the reasons for this war we are in. I don’t care whether one calls it a war against terrorism or extremism, but it is a long war. This war will, I believe, last for decades, not years. In Tehran, the regime is massively unpopular with the people of Iran, with the young people, with the women, with the reformers, and even with a substantial share of the Shiite clerics, because it stands at odds with the general Shiite tradition represented by Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq of quietism and separation of mosque from state. But the Sunni Islamist movement, particularly in its Jihadi form – Al Qaida and the others, or similar, organisations, have unfortunately some roots in the history of Sunni Islam, particularly the notion of the Caliph, unifying mosque and state. That’s the reason Bin Laden says 1923 was the darkest year in the history of Islam, because that was the year in which Kemal Atatürk disestablished the Caliphate. But the real problem is that the terrorist movements, such as Al Qaida share to an extraordinary degree the same intellectual – or ideological I should say – heritage with the Wahabis of Saudi Arabia. Both the Wahabis and the Islamist Jihadis such as Al Qaida are fanatically anti-Shiite, anti-Sufi, anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, anti-female, anti-music, anti-democracy, and so on. One needs only to look at the way the Taliban’s Afghanistan was governed with Al Qaida sitting close to the driver’s seat and the way Saudi Arabia is governed today. So the billions of dollars, much of which we pay for with our filling-up at the filling station – our small cars in Europe, large cars in the United States, much of those billions goes to Wahabi teachings in the madrases of Pakistan, in the textbooks being printed up for Indonesian children, in the mosques of Europe and the mosques of the United States. We have here a movement, which is essentially totalitarian, and which represents itself as being true Islam. That is as accurate as saying that in the late 15th and early 16th century Torquemada, and the Dominicans surrounding him serving Isabella and Ferdinand in that era of Spain, represented true Christianity. Torquemada burned Jews, Muslims and dissident Christians at the stake, and stole their money. That is about as far from the Sermon on the Mount as it is possible to get. And I would say, similarly, the ideology of Al Qaida and the ideology of the Wahabis in Saudi Arabia is about as far from the generally just and decent teachings of Islam as it is possible to get. Now, we have a problem here in the West, and among the democracies, because we are used to struggling against totalitarian secular movements and we do not like to get into people’s religions. If someone claims he is representing one of the world’s great religions, we tend, at least in part, to defer. We need to stop doing that. We need to recognize the totalitarian Islamist movements, whether Jihadi such as Al Qaida, or Wahabi, for what they are, which is the underpinnings of a long-term hostility, a long-term totalitarianism that must be defeated. We, I agree, should probably not call this a war against terrorism. We did not call World War II in the Pacific a war against kamikazes. Kamikazes were a terrible Japanese tactic, but they were only a tactic. The underlying reality is the totalitarianism itself. Now, both Mr Salame and Mr Evans spoke critically of the notion that the United States had intervened in Iraq. I believe there is a reasonable argument on both sides of the timing of that intervention, but the notion that one could wait for multilateralism in the form of the Security Council of the United Nations, given the close economic ties between France, Russia and to some extent China, and Saddam’s Iraq, is fanciful. That support would never have come. I believe that we have to recognize the importance of what Mike Moore said last night in his remarks: Democracy is, in fact, on the march. We have moved from 20 democracies in 1945 to nearly 120 today. By Freedom House’s numbers, 89 of those operate under the rule of law, another nearly 30, like say Indonesia, are electoral democracies in which there is free choice of leaders and there are a number of other states such as Bahrain, which are governed fairly and reasonably with freedom of speech and the like even though they are not democratically elected. The number of real dictatorships in the world are down to around 40, whether those dictators portray themselves as kings or as lifetime presidents or whatever. Those dictatorships are, from an American perspective, I would say fundamentally illegitimate. This is not a new notion. It was not invented by George W. Bush. It is embodied in the Declaration of Independence. With God-given rights, we endow governments with authority in order to protect those rights. Those governments are legitimate as long as they are responsive to the people. When they become destructive of those ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish them, Jefferson wrote. We are most grateful to Beaumarchais and Lafayette for their assistance in freeing us from George III, but George III’s tyranny was of very modest dimensions compared to the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. I hope very much – we won’t know for five days – that we will see, in the ratification of the Iraqi constitution, similar purple fingers held aloft as we saw on January 30th, as happy Iraqis finally, even after the bloodshed, begin to be able to govern themselves. I hope that that is what occurs. It may or it may not. But if it does occur, then all of those who have said how terrible it is that the United States and its allies have defeated Saddam Hussein and helped establish a road toward democracy and the rule of law in Iraq should at least be prepared to rethink their opposition. Thank you, Mr Chairman.
Boris Nemtsov
Thank you, Mr Woolsey. Well, we have 55 minutes for eight speakers. Don’t forget about that. Our next speaker is Anwar Ibrahim. Mr Ibrahim is a former deputy prime minister of Malaysia. He founded the Malaysian Youth Movement in 1971 and was its president for ten years. While serving as a minister of education, Anwar Ibrahim was elected the president of the UNESCO General Conference in 1989 up to ‘91. In 1998, Newsweek International named him Asian of the year. He was sacked from the government on September 2, 1998, later stripped of his party membership and incarcerated on 20 September on trumped-up charges. He regained his freedom in September 2004 after acquittal by the Malaysian Federal Court. He is currently a senior associate member of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University. Mr Ibrahim…
Anwar Ibrahim
Thank you, Mr Chairman. I must digress a little just to express my profound gratitude to President Havel, not only for this invitation, but for his support and sympathy for all the six years I was in prison. And so are many, many other friends from the Czech Republic. I don’t need to elaborate the circumstances nor the trial nor the meaning of freedom and the rule of law since you are all familiar with Kafka. But the only tragic point is that it resonates well in many countries and that should drive us with a greater sense of conviction and passion for freedom and democracy, particularly so in the Muslim world. Now, we talk about dialogue. I think Ghassan made a legitimate point. It is not a question of a monopoly to the clerics, or lama or the state or governments because whilst you may point out that the Muslim clerics, or lama do not necessarily represent the Muslim masses, many of the so-called Muslim leaders, even the so-called democratically elected leaders do not necessarily represent the conscience of the masses. So for a dialogue to be effective, it has to be at various levels. It has to be rooted out of real understanding and the humility to learn. We have heard in session after session of the dialogue what we actually have is more a monologue. People assume they understand and they appreciate and they tolerate, but they do not. So I think we must accept this notion. As a Muslim, living now in Washington, teaching in Georgetown, I of course have to face this sort of problem. I cannot serve and work and function freely in my country and I have, of course, to suffer in the process, particularly after 9/11, the problems and the prejudices towards Muslims generally. But still, given the option, I’m still a free man in America and not in a Muslim country. And this is the contradiction that Muslims have to address. That is why to my mind whilst we do accept the Islamophobia, the prejudices against Muslims generally, I think we need and probably the Honorable Prince Hussan can take the leadership in trying to encourage Muslims to meet and address the single issue of governance and accountability, because our failure to do so, will be perceived then essentially as a dictate of the West. Why must we Muslims wait for Washington to espouse this agenda, when we know and we have reasons to question particularly some of the foreign policy decisions in Iraq or the issue of dispossessed Palestinians? But it is therefore paramount that we take the initiative. After all, democracy is not necessarily a Western construct. Why must we choose to be so defensive and apologetic when it comes to the need for reform, the need to ensure that we observe the rule of law and there is a serious concerted attempt to rid most of our societies of endemic corruption, abject poverty and denial of equal rights to our women? Now we need, of course, these sort of more meaningful dialogues and I think that history is a great lesson we can choose to portray the excesses, and Gareth, of course, has a masterly sort of way of comprehending and summarising the issues and I don’t intend to challenge him on that, because he has an advantage – I was in jail the six years when he was working so my understanding, of course, is far more limited. But we have great histories. In my limited experience talking about just Jeffersonian ideals or quoting Tocqueville, many Muslims then ask necessarily, “Why must we choose to learn from the West and their civilisation?” I have always maintained that a civilisational construct, as Ghassan has said, is not necessary to be expounded to the exclusion of others. I think we mature because we learn and respect and understand. And whatever views or values are useful there, need to be adopted. Our problem is when dealing and looking at the international scenario and the position on the War on Terror – I don’t have any qualms about having to use frankly the War on Terror. I think, as a Muslim, I have to accept the fact that although there is some attempt to debunk the whole issue that this is not necessarily an issue confined to the Muslims. Yes. It is not necessarily emanating from authoritarian societies. Yes. But I think to cite an example in India is not very correct, primarily because in democratic India, you don’t have this problem. It is a problem of most of the terrorist activities surrounding some of the more explosive issues, say in Kashmir, and that should not be used to counter the argument that we need to be more forceful in our agenda to promote democracy. The problem with terrorism and the mushrooming of terrorist cells is mainly due to tyrannical policies, the absence of a democratic space. You provide democratic space – this is not necessarily a total guarantee or answer against terror. I think Gareth made the point very clearly that it is more complex. It needs all possible solutions, mechanisms to be put in place, but it is the safest bet against the mushrooming of terrorist cells and of course the issue… I come from a region – from Southeast Asia – that doesn’t have the same sort of millstone of greatness in the Arab world and I find with great difficulty that when people talk about Islam it is mainly confined to the experience of the Arab world. We are Muslims, but we are very multiracial, multi-religious. The most Islamist of parties in Malaysia or Indonesia has always talked about democracy and has always adopted for a democratic process. So you cannot then compare to the experience in some other parts of the Muslim world. But what we require is, of course, a more definite, concerted effort in confining the issue of terrorism not as Islamic terrorists or Jihadis because, you know, the term used here is seen differently. Muslims in Malaysia or Indonesia who are generally peaceful do not have serious objections to the term Jihad. We talk about Jihad in education, Jihad in economic development and so there is also a problem to redefine, reconstruct the narratives and the terms used, because otherwise we will alienate and antagonise more people in the process. That is why I believe to ensure an effective battle against terror we need to confine just the terrorist cells and work on them and do not allow issues or new areas – whilst resolving the conflict in Aceh, for example – don’t allow the conflict in south Thailand to just be ignored and allow it to become a community sort of struggle. Right now, it is a small group of criminals or terrorists, but you allow an authoritarian leader or purely a security solution to a problem, you then expand it to become a community struggle. And once that happens, like in Iraq, I don’t believe you are able to contain it even with the greatest military power on earth. Thank you very much.
Boris Nemtsov
Thank you very much, Mr Ibrahim. Well it’s a great pleasure for me to introduce our next speaker from Byelorussia – Aliaksandr Milinkievich. Ten days ago, Alexander was nominated as the united candidate in the up-running elections in Belorussia. I think that this is a real hope for this country. And he is a real hope of this country. And everybody has to be very strong and brave to fight against a dictator, especially the last dictator in Europe. That’s why, Alexander, everybody will ask you… Thank you for your brave decision and welcome to our conference.
Alyaksandr Milinkievich
Ladies and Gentlemen, it is my pleasure to be invited to this forum. We are talking about conflicts; we are taking about conflicts between civilizations; we are talking about conflicts between religions; we talk about nationalist conflicts. However, for hundreds of years these conflicts have not been in existence. We are historically one of the most tolerant nations; however, different conflicts emerge: conflicts between democracy and dictatorship, between freedom and dictatorship. Unfortunately we are not able to continue with our brilliant history, because if we do not have a conflict then the dictator finds the conflict and finds the enemy. His aim is to provoke a conflict and to find the enemy. We do not have much time, so let me just illustrate what I am saying with two examples. Two months ago the European media were dealing with the issue of the Polish minority in Belarus; however, this is a conflict that has not been in existence for a long time. Why? Because the Polish minority is the most powerful minority and it is more democratic than any. The dictatorship finds the existence of the Polish minority as an excuse to provoke and to raise a conflict. Another example of a religious conflict also from my country: we have a law in Belarus that stipulates that we have a single church, one church. We wanted to adopt an act on churches, the purpose of which would be to support the Orthodox Church that is supporting the dictator. And then it results in very difficult conditions for other churches to survive. The Protestants have a major problem, or are facing a major challenge: they are losing their legitimacy and they become outlaws. They are almost illegal, or illegitimate. Based on this example, it is clear that dictatorship is provoking both internal and external conflicts. There is only one remedy for that, and this is democracy. Our struggle against out dictator for freedom and democracy is the struggle against artificially provoked conflicts. Thank you for your attention.
Boris Nemtsov
Alexander, thank you very much. You spoke for three and a half minutes. This is an example for the rest of our speakers, I hope. Well, our next speaker is John O’Sullivan. He is an Editor-at-Large of the National Review, a conservative, political commentator and journalist in the United Kingdom and the United States. In 1970, he stood as conservative candidate for MP, later served as aide to Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher. He has held additional positions at the Daily Telegraph, The Times Policy Review, United Press International, and the Canadian National Post. In May of 1996, he founded the New Atlantic Initiative Group. In ’91 Mr O’Sullivan was honored as a Commander of the British Empire (CBE). Mr O’Sullivan, thank you.
John O’Sullivan
Thank you, Mr Chairman, and I’d like to join other speakers in thanking President Havel for offering me the privilege of coming here and also for setting such an example in his public life of the coexistence that we need. I should also say that I haven’t myself been to prison, and for the first time I’ve felt – round this table – this to be a social disadvantage, but I shall endeavor to make up for it. Let me begin by making a point that conflict and coexistence are presented in the program, so to speak, as opposites. And yet, are they opposed categories? They certainly are if conflict is seen as violent conflict or war. But conflict, less sharply defined, is endemic in human life. It results from the fact that there are differences between people – differences of interest, differences of belief, differences of values, of understanding, of religion, of civilisation and so on. We have until recent years forgotten about these differences of religion in Europe, but they have recently come back very dramatically to remind us. Conflict becomes war and violence when it is either unrestrained or when it is suppressed. We move towards coexistence when conflict is accommodated and when it is debated and discussed. Democracy, for example, is itself an expression of conflict. It is in a sense almost the ritualisation of conflict. We see that in the House of Commons, for example. We see the attempt to accommodate differences in the new Iraqi constitution, though not perhaps sufficiently. We shall see. So, properly considered, conflict is in a way the first step to coexistence, if we handle it sensibly. What we need are the institutions and the structures in which conflict can be examined, debated and hopefully resolved. For that reason, I differ with the first keynote speaker slightly in what I took to be his rejection of tolerance. Tolerance, it seems to me, is valuable precisely because it does not depend upon mutual respect. In fact, it incorporates mutual dislike and mutual distrust. The person who is, let us say, merely tolerant is saying, “I strongly and bitterly disagree with you, but nonetheless I accept that you have a right to say the things you say and believe the things you believe.” And, in a world where there are very considerable differences, I think tolerance is therefore a great unifying value. Unifying is perhaps too strong but it is a great value that prevents the emergence of violent conflict. It is the first step towards mutual respect and towards deeper forms of regard and cooperation. But it is a very necessary first step. Now, even if we accept the limited role of civilisation as outlined by the first speaker as, so to speak, a reservoir on which we draw, I think it does follow from even that limited definition of civilisation that conflicts will be more easily resolved and that cooperation will be more easily established within civilizations rather than between them. So I’d like to just, in the remainder of my remarks, discuss conflict resolution within civilizations within the West, in fact. And then secondly, very briefly, discuss it between them. Obviously, there is, at the moment, a very sharp difference growing up between the two halves of the West – the United States and Europe – over certain questions. They have been, most sharply, Iraq. Secondly, the war on terror, where there’s a good deal of agreement but also quite different attitudes as to how it should be developed and fought. And finally, in general, there are different attitudes to law and force between Europe and the US. As both Robert Kagan and Robert Cooper have pointed out, the United States tends to stand for a Hobbesian attitude towards force – although recently a Hobbes scholar Noel Malcolm reminded us that Hobbes was not, in fact, a realist in international affairs – and Europe, which stands for a more law-based approach. Now, I would like to argue briefly that the debate is not really between unilateralism and force on the part of the United States and multilateralism on the part of Europe. This is the usual formulation, but I believe it to be slightly wrong. It is an argument about the character of multilateralism. Can multilateralism work without the necessary commitment of resources, including force and the threat of force if necessary? The advocates of law and of what is called soft power, it seems to me, have to accept the words of Frederick the Great: “Diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments.” Their influence will be very limited indeed unless there is some military capacity behind that influence. At the same time, advocates of hard power and military force have to accept that Napoleon was right when he said that you can do everything with bayonets except sit upon them. You need both the political and peacekeeping skills to secure any peace that force may have temporarily gained. In other words, if multilateralism is to work, it must be muscular multilateralism in the final analysis. Some of the remarkable list of successes cited by Gareth Evans, it seems to me, depended precisely upon the fact that ultimately the UN was able to call upon military force as a backing for its diplomatic skills. So soft power and hard power – Europe and America – rely on each other and reinforce each other. If that is so, then Europe and the US are pursuing complementary rather than conflicting strategies in world politics, but I don’t think the division of labor between the two halves of the West can be quite that stark. America can’t be fighting the wars and Europe coming in afterwards to keep the subsequent peace. I think that would, in fact, create too much resentment even under a UN umbrella if the two sides were to do exactly that. Resentment would build up on both sides, and we already see anyway a very strong anti-Americanism developing in Europe and a somewhat less strong but to my eyes worrying beginnings of a very sharp anti-Europeanism in the United States. So what we need here, it seems to me, is for the US to devote more resources and respect to soft power strategies. This would be, of course, in my view, in their own interests, both in this continent and also – as the recent trip of Karen Hughes in the Middle East has shown – in the Middle East as well, since the distrust of the United States there, which seems to me to be largely unfounded, nonetheless is a factor that American policy must take account of. And Europe, on its part, must be prepared to add in NATO, and not I think in separate forces, but in NATO, the additional military power and military spending that would enable it to play a bigger role in fighting the war on terror and the concomitant wars that go with it. And, by the way, we are reminded by the terrible natural disasters over the weekend, and before that by the tsunami, that military forces can save lives as well as take them and that there is more than one role for them in world politics. So I would hope that the US and Europe would move together more. And for reasons that are bad as well as good I think that there are grounds for believing that they will. I think that Iraq, which like James Woolsey I supported and support, has nonetheless pushed the United States into accepting a larger role for the UN and for other forces in attempting to secure and stabilise Iraqi democracy, and I think that lesson has been well and truly learnt. And Europeans should take account of it. Secondly, I’m afraid that continuing terrorist outrages, on this continent but not solely on this continent – we saw the recent terrible attack in Bali – will push the Europeans to take a more realistic view of how to fight the war on terror and to see that military force is a necessary element in it and an important one. So I myself think that we are going to see a movement towards greater understanding between Europe and America in how to deal with the war on terror and in general how to deal with international organisations. Now, I’m going to try and keep my time short so I will say relatively little about the question of institutions and structures to resolve conflicts between civilizations and religions, partly also because Gareth Evans has given us chapter and verse on how international institutions have been progressively more successful in settling these kinds of problems. I think we would all agree that these institutions are imperfect and inadequate. I would add that we have to find ways of making them in a sense more democratic whilst still keeping them comprehensive, which I think is an important American point, which the Europeans don’t sufficiently take account of. But having said that, they exist. They are working better than they used to and we must try to make them work better in future. But that leaves a problem, which I think we have only begun to touch upon. And that is the clash of civilizations within societies, particularly within Western Europe, as a result, in recent years of mass migration and of course of the colonial links. What is the problem here? We thought that we had begun to solve that problem by policies of multiculturalism. By making our societies welcoming to other cultures so that anybody who came here – who came to Britain, who came to Holland – would not be made to feel too foreign, would find that their cultures were given equal respect and so on and so forth. It seems to me that the events in London and Holland have disproved that approach. That is not to say that I think that different cultures should not be accorded great respect. I certainly do believe that. That element, it seems to me, is a fixed part now of Western political culture. I don’t believe we are going to retreat from that, but I do think one of the great problems is that we have ceased to really believe in our own societies with any great force. The national identity of the Dutch in Holland is an extremely weak one. The national identity of the British is slightly stronger, but it is nonetheless something which has been significantly eroded in recent years and it certainly does not have the strong and emblematic quality it had, let us say, forty years ago. The United States, which I think is having more success here, is in fact a society in which the concept of being an American is still one of which people are extremely proud in the way that they used to be proud of being British or Dutch. Now, until we find a way of giving our own citizens pride in their own societies and a belief that those societies are worth defending and fighting for, and indeed in performing much lesser services for them, I don’t see why we should expect people who come to those societies with strong identities of other kinds to want to become citizens in the full sense of the societies in which they have arrived. So we have to put our own psychological house in order in order for us to truly welcome others and to accept them into a national identity, which will be broad – it is now – but deep as well. Thank you very much.
Boris Nemtsov
Thank you very much, John, for your understanding. Well, we have 25 minutes for four speakers. That’s why let me think about five minutes for each speech. Our next speaker is from France – André Glucksmann. André is one of France’s most renowned philosophers, considered a member of the French new philosophers who supported the 60s’ protest movement and opposed the communist regimes of Eastern Europe…
André Glucksmann
I will speak French; it will benefit from the interpreting. So first the topic: what is the topic? Is it conflict or coexistence? I believe that there is some mistake here, because if we are talking about conflict, if we are talking about clash, then we are talking about hard-core meetings, so to say, and I believe that "between clashes and co-existance" would be a topic for Forum 3000. I believe that we should talk about clashes and co-existance. We have to coexist and we have to keep conflicts under control, because we must not believe that one can exist without the other. Perhaps in the next 1000 years -- but now we have to bear with the conflicts and keep them silent and illuminate them to the degree possible. I would now like to leave the space for the Czech dissidents who have been thinking and talking about the issue I believe that we have in our histories, and I believe that these are the dissidents who can help us to understand better what the current times are all about. I would like to refer to Patočka, a Czech philosopher, who shows us how to treat a conflict, how to capture it. To understand a conflict you first have to understand where the front line lies; you have to have experience with the front line; you have to have experience with violence. And this was most of all the experience of the First World War: it was a major experience with conflict where killing was involved in a great scale. The United Kingdom in those days was a great country, a big country, together with Germany, and we have taken the lesson that even large nations and civilizations can die in a conflict. Of course this was mostly the experience of the man in the front line, the simple soldiers. And then we had the Second World War, and that was another experience with conflict, and in this conflict everybody was involved. While in the First World War eighty per cent of the victims were soldiers, in the Second World War these were the civilians -- eighty per cent of all casualties of war were civilians. And what we have in current conflicts or what we had in the Second World War is that the front line is merged with the back line, and what we see after September 11 is that everybody is involved, including the nations who possess nuclear weaponry. We were originally talking about nuclear weapons, and now we see that even people can be used as weapons. These are people who are willing to cause disasters such as was the Hiroshima bombing; it is just that they fortunately do not have the weapons yet, not in their hands. All you have to do is to blend the fanaticism that we know and that led to Auschwitz with the weapons that can be made available to them. This is the experience we should learn from when talking about combating terrorism. You cannot combat terrorism they are not able to, they are not capable of. What we need to talk about now is to combat deliberate aggression of people who possess weapons and who are recruited from helpless nations. I believe this is the current definition of what we are talking about, and for us to face the challenges of what the future might bring is to understand that the helpless become terrorists and the majority of their victims are civilians. That means we are not fighting army to army -- these are not armies fighting against each other. This is a war against civilians. And saying that, we must not forget the dirtiest of all disgusting wars currently running, and this is the war in Chechnya. It has been lasting for the last ten years. There are not many Chechens, but if you kill one out of five you can liquidate the whole nation in a while. If you liquidate a capital that originally had four hundred thousand inhabitants, this is a disaster. It is horrible and awful. This is something that can be compared with the destruction of Warsaw in World War Two. This is a morally unbearable situation. It is unbearable even in the terms of political realism. I would like to greet most cordially Mr. Nemcov, who was the Lord Mayor of Novgorod, and he was among those who protested against the launching of this war. People like himself have to get all the support, because if somebody is courageous enough to speak loud and say "no", it has its weight. We must understand that we are talking about an aggressor who possesses a lot of weaponry. Chechnya is a country where oil is found, and we have to understand the war in Chechnya to understand what war on terrorism is about. Patočka, the Czech philosopher, had another concept. This is the "solidarity of the shaken". Remember the scenario in Afghanistan: the army was devastating the territory of Afghanistan, and because we did not support moderate Islamists like the commander Massood it turned out that the Islamic extremists took power. Now the Russian army is devastating the North Caucasus and it is destroying those who are moderate, just like Aslan Maskhadov was. And all of a sudden we have people like Shamil Basayev rising from the front line. If we want another 9/11, if we want to face a disaster of Chernobyl caused deliberately, then just let Putin do what he does or has been doing already. However, if we think of the future of our children, the future of the world, we have to support not the Chechen terrorists -- because we have those, too -- but we have to support, and we have to become passionate with, the Chechen civilians back in Grozny. It is the second time in the last fifty, last one hundred years: it was Stalin who was the first to send them to the gulag camps in Siberia, and they are devastated for another time. This is not a lesson to be learned on Russia only. We have forgotten many other lessons that we should have learned from. In three months a million Tutsis were killed in Rwanda, and we all knew about it, and nobody did anything against it. All we needed to do was send five thousand Blue Helmets, and one million people would have been saved. I would like to remind you of another issue that will make us see that we are not talking only about the conflicts that are involving Muslims. The population that caused genocide -- both those who were the perpetrators and who were the victims, both of the parties -- were Catholics, and this is something that we should not definitely be proud of. Our government produced the resolution but took a wrong side. I believe we should face the reality, and admit that the clashes are the end of humanity. We have withdrawn from hydrogen bombs and we have shifted to human bombs, and this is not an exclusively Muslim issue. I believe everybody can do something against it. Let me mention an example: a handful of French students organized a reception and they invited a handful of guests from Chechen students. They invited them and they asked them to stay, to learn to be journalists. This is a very simple initiative -- you just ask people to come, you offer them lodging, and you help them this way. Of course I am talking really about a handful of people, but this is just an example of a possible small but efficient activity. If you educate people, you at the same time build a tool against terrorism. And now the people in Grozny know that elsewhere there is someone who knows about them dying, because it must be horrible to die silently, without anybody knowing that you are even dying, just like the people were dying in Rwanda, just like the people who were dying in the Second World War.
Boris Nemtsov
Thank you very much, Mr Glucksmann. I hope that we will discuss Chechen problems and Russian problems maybe in the future sessions. For us it’s very, very painful, and I don’t think that we will find a very easy and quick decision, but we have to think very carefully, especially, more than about Kremlin policy, about the subject. Well, our next speaker is from Taiwan – Mr Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao. He directs the Centre for Asia Pacific Area Studies and he has been a presidential policy advisor since ‘96. He’s one of Taiwan’s leading sociologists and has written widely during the ‘80s on the transformation of Taiwan’s social structure and political democratisation, particularly the position of the middle classes. During the course of the last decade, his work has focused on environmental protest movements and civil society development. Welcome…
Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao
Thank you, Mr Chairman and ladies and gentlemen. I don’t want to add more pain on you when we come from Taiwan and probably most of you expect me to say something about cross-strait relations and that is a pain. But I would like to use the five minutes to give my full observation on the more broader perspective on the global coexistence in the context of Asia, and particularly in the cross-strait relations – My four observations of ironies: The first one: the conflict or tension could occur within one civilisation. It’s not between civilizations. Look at Taiwan and China. We both belong to the Confucian tradition. So it’s not a civilisation that caused a clash, but the modern way of life, the philosophy of democracy and also the people’s choice. So… it could happen. So it’s not inter-civilisation. The second observation I like to provide is this: The conflict could occur when one side decided to seize conflict. That means civil war. When Taiwan decide to stop the civil war and certainly it’s now welcomed by the other side. So when one side wanted to stop the long-lasting civil war, it could occur. It could happen. It could cause another kind of a civil war, could occur another kind of a conflict. So it’s not a mutual conflict, it’s when one side would and the other side would not. Number three observation is this: When democracy also could bring about conflict. When Taiwan went through 20 to 30 years of democratisation through the collective effort of the Taiwanese people and cultural awareness in the ‘70s, to bring Taiwan into the cultural picture. Through 1980s, the twenty kinds of a social movement organized by middle class and civic organisations. In ‘90s, on the political and constitutional reforms, and that all then brought about Taiwan’s democracy. And because of democracy, that means that people can make a choice. That means that people can reconsider its future. So that caused conflict across the strait. And that’s number three of the ironies. And number four: If you look at the country since the 1980s, the tension could exist in one aspect, yet coexistence can exist in the other aspect. The former is the political tension. Taiwan is facing 700 missiles. That’s very real. And, on the other hand, the trade volume across the strait is increasing. So capitalist logic can exist in cross-trade – that means coexistence, the capitalist coexistence. But yet the military, the strategic, the threat is still there so that’s my number four irony. Now my one hope – I like to follow the great chairman’s order in five minutes – Now given this, there must be room for the two parties to engage in dialogue. That’s called bilateral. There have been several incidents that could happen but, all in all, as I observed there’s a tremendous lacking of mutual trust and confidence and therefore there is no way the bilateral could continue in a very healthy way. And one as I see, as this morning Kim Campbell mentioned, you cannot have a predetermined outcome, but if one side predicts or dictates only one option then the other side could not accept. I should mention democracy in Taiwan. Democracy in Taiwan means people can have a collective consensus, or collective decision about what the future will be like, so it should be open-ending, open solutions. Now, if one side determines one outcome, and the other side cannot accept. So therefore Taiwan welcomes multilateralism, but in a more sensible way. We liked the multilateral interest. We liked multilateralism to pay attention to the cross-strait relations. To look at the four observations I just cited. We understood very clearly there is a great interest of the market in China. We also understand there is a realism in the geopolitical interest in Asia, in which China has played a role. But don’t forget we also wanted to uphold the values of human rights, we also wanted to uphold the value of democracy. So what if this multilateralism is plotting to the cross-strait to pay attention… Certainly we know we cannot force our friends in the international community to completely ignore the market interest nor the geopolitical considerations, but we only humbly ask, “Don’t sacrifice the values of human rights and democracy,” which I think Taiwan for the last three decades has worked so hard to get it. So the only thing – the multilateralism we welcome – and we also have a dream: the world is big enough, the globe is big enough to accommodate two sides of the cross strait. Thank you very much.
Boris Nemtsov
Thank you very much. Our last speaker in this morning session is Prince Hassan. He’s a member of the oldest Hashemite royal dynasty and a writer, philosopher and economist. Prince Hassan is President of the Club of Rome and chairs and is a member of many international organisations. He’s an advocate of tolerant coexistence of Islam, Judaism and Christianity and the active dialogue between these religions. His Royal Highness supports democratic processes in the Islamic world and plays a prominent role in the Middle East peace process. He’s an author of several books about the Middle East. Welcome.
El Hassan bin Talal
Ladies and gentlemen, I think you’ve heard enough monologue about the need for dialogue. I am also a Marxist of the Groucho kind. Groucho Marx said, “military intelligence is a contradiction in terms,” and with all due respect to the military – I just came from Washington where I addressed the Eisenhower Foundation and the National Defense College – I was delighted to see generals standing and saying, “We have to address the issue of conflict intelligently in recognizing the totality of the risks we are facing.” So let me touch on soft power for a moment. In 1924, the eastern province of today’s Saudi Arabia entered Mecca after unbroken legitimacy in a city, which is the address of Islam. Kissinger once asked, “What is the address of Europe?” Well, the address of Islam is Mecca. This line of Sharifian rule – you were kind enough, Boris, to introduce me as a prince – the concept of monarchy only entered in this century. Before that it was honor enough and it is honor enough to be a Sharif – a member of the lineage of the prophet’s house. The concept of Sharifian rule was broken. Why? Because in the 1918 at the Versailles peace conference – I was once told by a Turkish friend, “When there is an end to a war and there is a peace conference, it is better to be at the table than on the menu.” Well my great-grandfather was on the menu. Why? Because the stubborn old man refused to allow oil concessions to British and American companies, which were conveniently offered by others, as we well know, and refused because he wanted to see a United States of Arabia. Having said that, we Arabs are only 22% of the Muslim world. And yet, at prayer, a different Imam from the four schools of orthodoxy, stretching from the Shafi'iyyah in East Asia to the Malikiyyah in Northwest Africa, led the faithful in prayer. When I met Ayatollah Khamenei in 1997, he said to me through an interpreter initially, “You are the first Jordanian official I have met.” I said to him in Arabic, which he then responded in, “If the black turban that you are wearing denotes your pertinence – you are a pertinent to the line of the prophet’s family – then we have met over centuries of Islamic history.” I am a Muslim. I am not an Islamicist. I received a degree at Queen’s University in Belfast, with a Jewish chancellor in a non-denominational university and a Muslim recipient. And I asked my Irish friends, “Is there such a thing as Christianist terror?” I’m the only Muslim member of the Centre for Hebrew Studies at Oxford University. And in conversations with nine faith groups, – incidentally, Ghassan, I am elected as the moderator of the World Conference for Religions and Peace; a contradiction in terms, a prince who was elected, a prince who promotes civil society… I have always emphasized that the separation of church and state, of mosque and state can only come with the elevation of religious values above day-to-day politics. The Hajj is not only a pilgrimage; it is also a conference, a consultation. A consultation that should give us answers on issues ranging from stem-cell research to the war on terror and the exploration of space. Today, we have forsaken that right to the privatisers of religions – Abu-this and Abu-that, the new acronyms. The President of the United States from his high office refers to Zarqawi, who was really a street thug in the streets of Zartar, his hometown in Jordan, and who now has gained notoriety of recognition by the President of the United States. In a region of West Asia where 35 million job opportunities have to be created in ten years, where the gap between rich and poor is so obvious – 42 billion dollars spent on weapons – with the majority of the population – 70% – under the age of 25 and effectively a Middle East region, which is described in Washington as from Marrakech to Bangladesh, we have a problem. The problem is we are the poorest, the most populous and the most dangerous region in the world. And I would like to make it clear that there is no regional responsibility, i.e. there are no regional commons. And this is why I am happy to be here today to talk about the regional community of water and energy for the human environment. To quote Shimon Peres: “With water you can make politics; with land you can make wars.” And it is interesting to observe today, that some Israelis are more interested in the land than they are in the state, whereas Palestinians are more interested in the state than they appear to be in the land. Jordanians are interested in demography, first and foremost. And the individual concerns are minimalist as they stretch through Iraq. We are told by CNN that there are Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq. I don’t know whether I’m a Sunni Muslim or a Cloudy Muslim but I would like to make it clear that it is time that we spoke about Arab Muslims, or about the Muslims of Iraq. After all, Kurdishness, with all due respect, is an ethnicity. It is not a religion, so we are actually talking about apples and oranges. I think the time has come to speak about the region with ECOSOC, an institutional responsibility. There is no institutional responsibility. Prime ministers from this region do not meet. I am, according to the United Nations, an Asian Arab. Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd is an African Arab. My Israeli friend over there, according to the United Nations, is not a part of any region. He’s whatever he wants to be every morning he wakes up. Although Shimon Peres tells us he would like to see a Greater Middle East or a New Middle East, I think the word that is missing in this equation is a partnership in achieving a more important goal than the promotion of nationalism. Aldous Huxley described nationalism as “a common misunderstanding of history and a common hatred for your neighbor.” So what is that goal? If we are talking about religion – Ghassan, I am not talking about dialogue between religions – I am talking about dialogue in partnership for our common humanity. And that includes liberal fundamentalists, secular fundamentalists and coreligionists. Incidentally, André Glucksmann, before you feel that you are alone in speaking of the Chechen question, I am also the head of the Chechen-Jordanian Friendship Society. So when Mr Putin invites me to St. Petersburg to speak about tolerance, I say, “Only if you recognize my credentials. I want to speak about 20 million Muslims in the former Soviet space.” And I think it is important to express your views and your anger, but at the same time I think it is important to engage in promoting the noble art of conversation, which is not a martial art. So our identity as Muslims today is jeopardized. Our identity as Semites is jeopardized. My friend Greville Janner and I had an organisation of Muslims and Jews, who recognized the importance of working against Semiticophobia, working against Islamophobia, but at one and the same time, we and many others like us – the late Yehudi Menuhin, Walter Sisulu in South Africa, people from different worlds – recognized the importance of working for something. So I am glad to say that we have created a parliament of cultures in Turkey, which, with the newfound status of Turkey as a discussant with Europe, I hope will be an asset in promoting the other side of the story, not only Karen Hughes’s education engagement, empowerment and exchange, but a two-way exercise. And I think that this conversation is possibly something that the Prague Forum should consider: How do we develop a communication strategy. In this room and in similar rooms for the past several meetings, we have the nucleus of the silenced majority, not the silent, but the silenced majority. I remember the great act that attached me to this forum was when Václav Havel opened the doors and let the students in. And they told us what they thought of us. Of course, being a prince, I was a natural target. So was the head of the World Bank and the IMF and so on and so forth. However, several years later, it is wonderful to be sitting with the students, not talking down to each other or talking up to each other, but talking directly to each other. Similarly, let us recognize that in our world, in the world of religion, which we were addressing earlier, let us invite a situation where religious authority, moral authority is re-established in holy cities – in Mecca, in Najaf and in Jerusalem. The politicisation of religion for reasons of nationalism, for reasons of political opportunism is tearing us apart, and I believe that the time has come to see religious institutions reaching out – to leprosy, which was mentioned by Yohei Sasakawa. We worked in Sudan in 1985 with lepers. The “we” being Muslims and Christians together. As Gareth Evans said in one of his reports of the ICG, there are three types of extremists: proselytisers – those who try to convert, anarchists – those who try to create explosions all over the world and, according to a study at Chicago University, they are not a majority of Muslims, as it happens, or Islamicists, and the third category – those who have entered government as in the case of Turkey. But I am talking about the moral authority which is separate from all of this, which promotes initiatives which are not just 500 million dollars to the survivors of Louisiana and nothing for the survivors of the tsunami to be remembered. Not for political reasons, but for the right reasons. In this way, I think that we can mobilise through altruism the silenced majority. By empowerment, by stakeholding, by creating a true campaign against legal illiteracy, social illiteracy, political illiteracy we create citizenship from the bottom up and build democracy in the face of – as Jim Woolsey said it, and I’ll say it even more directly – presidential monarchy and hereditary presidency, which incidentally is not limited to our part of the world, nor, for that matter is fanaticism limited to our part of the world, either to state actors or non-state actors. You see why I’ll never join the United Nations. I want to say very clearly that the time has come to recognize, as I did the other day, standing at the Royal Court Theatre with 500 people in the theatre with the sign up “Talking to terrorists.” Yes, we were talking to the representatives of what in 1981 we called the liberation movements of the world. And the purpose was? To address a racial equality index, to address the fundamental rights of humanity, to address human security – the Canadian initiative you mentioned, to address what the Dutch foreign minister raised the other day – an initiative for a Human Rights Council. To put some spirit into the Millennium Development Goals, to put anthropo-policy not petro-policy at the centre of the Millennium Development Goals. And I think in this context we can talk about promoting security. I hope that you recognize the importance of the role of women. Iraq today is 62% women – 62% women – and women who are raped need to talk to women. We need to see this involvement. I thank you, Chairman, for giving me this opportunity to say a few things about how we can reverse the process of bloody coexistence with bloody conflict. In Tallburg, the question was in Sweden only a few weeks ago – the Tallberg Forum “How the hell can we live together?” And the question today is: “How can we prioritise this marketplace of ideas and of egos, including my own, and come out with some practical suggestions, putting religion where it should be, putting regions where they should be, putting vested interests where they should be, and rediscovering the public good. Remember the Byzantine sophist who had written on his epitaph in the sixth century: Il a été touché par l´amour du bien-être publique. As though it was the reason for his death – he was touched by the love of the public good. How many of us here are prepared to die for the love of the public good? Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
Boris Nemtsov
Thank you very much to everybody who took part in our very exciting and very important morning discussion. Fortunately, we listened to very different views on very bloody and serious subjects like terrorism, coexistence and wars. I hope that we will continue our discussions with the second and third panels, today, and now I can say that fortunately this is the lunchtime and Mr Zogby will make a keynote speech and we’re a little bit late for 15 minutes. That’s why we have to do everything very very quickly. Thank you very much to everybody.