Cosmetic reforms will not do, Emir tells US-Islamic forum
Web posted at: 4/11/2005 7:20:55
Source ::: The Peninsula

The Emir H H Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani addressing the US-Islamic World Forum at the Doha Sheraton yesterday.

DOHA: The dialogue between the US and the Islamic world on democracy should be an issue of agreement and not contention and an issue that binds the two sides instead of tearing them apart, the Emir H H Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani said here yesterday.

He was inaugurating the US-Islamic World Forum at the Doha Sheraton yesterday. The three-day conference, attended by a host of luminaries from the Islamic world and the US aims to promote peaceful relations between the US and the Islamic world and encourage dialogue on key issues concerning the region.

Speakers at the opening session also included Martin Indyk, director, Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, Shibley Telhami, professor, University of Maryland and Senior Fellow at the Saban Center, James Steinberg, director of Foreign Policy Studies, Brookings Institution, Sadig al-Mahdi, president, National Umma Party and former prime minister of Sudan and Saad Eddin Ibrahim, chairman, Ibn Khaldoun Center for Development Studies.

On the US- Islamic world relations, the Emir said : “The dialogue between the two parties on democracy needs to be an issue of agreement and not contention, an issue that binds and not disunites, specially when in a number of experiences of democratic transformation in our Islamic world, from Afghanistan to Palestine and Iraq, the sound of weapons got mixed with the votes of electors in varying degrees to the extent of leaving a gap in assessments not only between the American and Islamic sides but also within each one of them, regarding the ideal way the outside world could help in democracy building.”

He noted that if there was a minority within the Islamic world who would like to urge the outside world to put strong pressure for democracy, there were others who were averse to such pressures but yet wanted democracy without any external influence.

“When the Islamic world sees the American attention to democracy after being affected by the September 11 events, it wonders in some of its parts whether this interest is an expression of a stance by an administration or whether it embodies complete change in the position of a state. Perhaps this is the question why the reform efforts in those parts of the Islamic world are still slack, and had to start after September 11, and are still betting on the time factor, and that some slight changes could do for the time being,” the Emir said.

“This requires of the USA and the Islamic countries to arrive through dialogue at a point of transparency where any obscurity is clarified regarding the future of an unprecedented experience for political transformation that has begun and must be completed, so that the Muslim peoples, who are the prime persons concerned with reform can be assured that their hopes will not be betrayed due to changes that might take place in the balance of interests, and that their wide expectations can no longer be rewarded with some limited cosmetic changes,” he added.

The Emir noted that there was another vital issue that needed to be addressed, that would produce significantly improve relations between the two sides. “An observer of the Islamic world, in heart or peripheries, can see burning hotbeds of tension and acute problems that affect the national security and territorial integrity of a number of its countries, the regional and international complications of which have often gone beyond those narrow boundaries where those problems started.

“The stability and prosperity of the Islamic world, which constitutes a huge block of land where about 27 per cent of the world’s population lives, and which has abundant resources, must mean a lot to the world. That is why I think that part of the American Islamic dialogue must be directed to find means of easing the tension in those hotbeds and helping Muslim countries, the preservation of whose national integration represents a cornerstone in regional stability in more than one place, especially since the USA had in the last few years, either entered or got near to the core of the most complicated developments in them,” he said.