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AAI in the News

Forum Focuses on Global Conflict

By Scott Domer
The Prague Post
Posted on Wednesday October 12, 2005

The Middle East and terrorism debated at annual Forum 2000

Political instability and terrorism in the Middle East drove debate at this year’s Forum 2000, marking a departure for a conference that has traditionally concerned itself with the more abstract issues of economics and globalization.

“We shouldn’t call it a war on terrorism, we should call it a war on totalitarianism,” James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told a roomful of political leaders, scholars, philosophers and journalists from around the world who gathered in Prague Oct. 10.

Woolsey said the goal in Iraq was for Iraqis to govern
themselves.

“If it does occur, I hope those who opposed the United States and its allies defeating Saddam Hussein and establishing democracy in Iraq [would] rethink their opposition,” he said.

This was the ninth installment of Forum 2000, which former Czech President Václav Havel, Japanese philanthropist Yohei Sasakawa and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel founded in 1997 to identify key issues facing civilization and to explore ways in which to prevent escalation of conflicts that have religion, culture or ethnicity as their primary components.

This year’s conference examined conflicts in the world and how they affect peaceful coexistence in the international community. Delegates examined religious justifications, economic and social divides and cultural misperceptions and alienation that have created international conflicts.

For Forum 2000 Director Oldřich Černý, this year’s theme was a departure from past forums, the first time the event took on current events — and the issues underpinning them — directly.

The event aimed to take “globalization back to civilization,” Černý said. “We thought, we can’t go on talking about trade and tariffs while people are having their heads cut off online.”

While panelists cited examples of conflict in Africa, Southeast Asia and the former Chechnya, instability in Middle East took center stage.

Woolsey, in a lunchtime keynote speech, talked about the global movement toward democracy and its importance in the greater Middle East and China, which he called “the last bastions of the regional, autocratic, or dictatorial rule.”

Woolsey also said that the world’s dependence on oil put it at the whims of terrorists in the Middle East. By embracing fuel-efficient technology such as hybrid cars and developing alternative fuel sources, Woolsey said the world can lessen its reliance on a volatile Middle East while also taking money out of the hands of leaders who promote fanaticism.

James Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute in Washington, D.C., stressed the need for more understanding before countries engage in conflict. There are also people who are promoting “this clash, this war, this unending conflict” for their own interest, he said, referring to the war in Iraq.

“They’ve made a terrible error in calculation and they’ve led my country into a war that we will need to extricate ourselves from at some point,” Zogby said. “Despite their efforts, there is a growing sense in the world that we need to find other ways of resolving these tensions.”

While there appeared to be some tension in the room, sharing different opinions and solutions from different places around the world gave everybody a lot to think about.

“I was not surprised by anything knowing where each person comes from,” said Mike Moore, the former prime minister of New Zealand and former director general of the World Trade Organization. “There were some strong things said about the tensions in the Middle East. I have a few more books to read.”

By providing a platform to discuss these topics openly, Forum 2000’s goal is to enhance global dialogue, promote democracy in nondemocratic countries and support civil society, human rights and religious, cultural and ethnic tolerance in young democracies, organizers say.

Participants in this year’s conference included Kim Campbell, the former prime minister of Canada; Anwar Ibrahim, former deputy prime minister of Malaysia; Michael Melchior, deputy minister in the prime minister’s office, responsible for the Israeli Society and the World Jewish Community; and Robert Cooper, senior British diplomat and director general for external economic relations, common foreign and security policy at the Council of the European Union.

Students were also in attendence, like Katie Pivec, 20, an American from Minneapolis who is studying religion at Charles University.

“I think it’s a really good opportunity to get a lot of people together from different places that have different experiences talking about common things,” she said.
Scott Domer can be reached at sdomer@praguepost.com

How does globalization affect global coexistence?

“The theme ‘from riches to rags’ is the theme of the major disparity that exists in the world today in terms of man against man and man against nature. [We must find an] ‘anthropolicy’ that is a policy with human dignity and where human beings matter. I think the greatest disaster in terms of globalization is the lack of a contract between our generation and future generations in facing disasters of man against man or man against nature.”
— El Hassan bin Talal,
prince of the Jordanian royal family

“I am afraid that it perhaps on one side changes [global coexistence], to provoke some reaction because [globalization] has a tendency to unify everything. It perhaps leads to the reaction that more nations, religions, continents, would like to differentiate their identity, which in a global world could mean more tensions and more conflicts.”
— Václav Havel, former president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic

“I think it both challenges, but more significantly enhances, coexistence. There is an increasing awareness we have of the world, an empathy that didn’t exist before. There is a growing awareness of evil, but also of tragedy and that brings, I think, in the end, people closer together. ”
— Dr. James J. Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute

“In most areas it’s a good thing. Integrated economies and societies are the least likely to hurt each other. It’s not an accident that those countries that do the best in all things that are important are the ones that are the most integrated. The more tolerant and diverse the economies are, the more welcoming they are. The more advanced they are on human rights, gay rights, women’s rights … the more likely they are to attract the knowledge worker, and in the new generation the knowledge worker is an extremely agile person.”
— Mike Moore, former prime minister of New Zealand and former director general of the World Trade Organization