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Round Table: Dialogue among Civilizations United Nations, New York, 5 September 2000 Provisional verbatim transcription

Address by Attiya Inayatullah (Pakistan)

Ms. Inayatullah: First, if you permit me, I should like to repond to what we heard this morning. At the outset may I congratulate and thank President Khatami from the land of Hafiz and Saadi for the launch this morning of the dialogue of civilization. At the launch the President and those who participated gave us enough food for thought. I will come back to the gender perspective later on if we have the occasion.

I think what we heard from President Khatami this morning was the capacity of Islam to integrate and to augment cultural repertoire. He mentioned, as did many of the speakers this morning, how Islam overcame dualism but encouraged pluralism. He also mentioned the essential unity of Islam. Thereafter he commented on the fact that unfortunately in the twentieth century there was an absence of dialogue, and then he said X and these were his words X that through this one year of the dialogue of civilizations he hoped that we would get an alternative paradigm for international relations. He was seeking an alternative, new paradigm, to replace the present paradigm of military and economic force.

From there I move on to what we heard from the Secretary-General and from the Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), both of whom have asked us, through you, Sir, to frame the issues for the Secretary-General's report. That was a very important message to us in which the Secretary-General said that we use diversity as an asset in an increasingly interconnected world. So I would like to raise some of the issues which I feel could be the focus of the year-long discussion on this subject.

The first point I should like to take forward is what we heard President Wahid of Indonesia say. He was basically saying that first we need to internalize this dialogue of civilizations within our own national setting. He alluded X something I completely subscribe to X to the fact that each country could within itself look at good governance. He talked of ethnic and religious divides and he talked of putting our own house in order. Then he talked of a process of dialogue between civilizations which starts at the national level, goes to the regional level and then on to the global level where I feel it fits into the United Nations function of harmonizing the actions of nations.

The first issue is the process and I should like to take it at all three levels. I am sorry I am not a thinker or a scholar but I am a practitioner of development so please excuse me if I am being very practical in what I say. The second issue is that I compliment the United Nations on giving UNESCO the lead role this year because I believe it is the right forum for this activity. There should be a link with the 1995 year of tolerance, because we got a lot of messages from that. This year, there is the culture of peace, and then we heard about racism, xenophobia and the upcoming South Africa conference. I feel that here there was a very important message that we heard today from the President of Mali when he said that we should avoid empty discourse. That is the way I heard it and I fully support what he said.

Here I should like to request that we talk of a depoliticizing of the dialogue of civilization. In this depoliticizing he mentioned that communication through the Internet and information technology is not dialogue. I want to depoliticize this within the context of globalization X although I do not want to go into that X but I am looking for peace through democracy. I am talking of a democracy in which the President of the World Bank, Mr. Wolfensohn, said that the single most important element to development is the human contribution. If the President of the World Bank said it, he must take himself seriously because we do. We from the developing world believe in this. When we are talking of depoliticizing the dialogue, my second element is that we must give a lot of strength and power to civil society. Here I am talking of the Helsinki and East European process, in particular of Havel.

The third point I should like to raise as an issue for the dialogue during the whole year is the issue of violence X and if I am not wrong I think it was again the President of Mali who raised it X violence which is due to fear and suspicion. How do we remove fear and suspicion? I go back to what President Wahid of Indonesia said. He said, I have a feeling as a sociologist that fear and suspicion arise from the conviction of my internal truth. That is the way the President of Indonesia mentioned it today. It is the conviction of my internal truth which becomes coercive and does not provide space for pluralism, or for other opinions. The President of Latvia talked of survival and the animal instinct. We are living in a world of globalization so there is fear, suspicion and the animal instinct. Then you have globalization which is neither just nor equitable. I completely agree with Mr. Soyinka that globalization is not civilization. One of our efforts during this dialogue of civilizations should be to study and understand the cause of violence at a regional and national level.

My fourth point from what I heard this morning is that the President of Latvia said that humans have the endowment of civilization. These are the words she used. She put it very beautifully. She said that humans have the endowment of civilization and then she said that we must have open minds, hearts and spirit. I go back to President Khatami saying that during this year we should search for a new paradigm for international relations. What I am seeking here is that we forge an awareness of the unity inherent in human diversity. The unity that is inherent in human diversity is something UNESCO is working very hard on. That is easier said than done but here we have to shake off the syndrome of the clash of civilizations. It is not relevant because there the non-identical is the evil other and that disrupts all co-relations and makes civilization an impenetrable unit. It is like a museum piece whereas dialogue must be very alive. There must be civilization inclusiveness instead of exclusiveness.

I should like to end with one thought of civilization's inclusiveness. For example, there is an unconscious dichotomy between what we invoke and what we provoke. On the side of provocation you have the word jihad in Islam. For us in Islam it does not mean war. It is the effort, any effort, in the path of God. The word jihad means "endeavour". So I do believe there is great scope and potential this year for a dialogue, not a dialogue of the deaf but a dialogue I hope of those who will listen and hear in full respect for the initiative taken by President Khatami, the people and Government of Pakistan wish not only to extend support but are planning to hold an important international dialogue on the Indus Valley civilization. We do hope that we will have the support of those on the podium and everyone else is welcome.

Mr. Picco: Following up your comments perhaps we could ask Dr. Yakovlev to help us a little with his comments on the focus of dialogue, in particular on an expression which is being heard more and more in these conversations, and that is the inherent unity of human diversity, diversity being the subject that the Secretary-General and myself have decided to focus on. We may be wrong, so that is the purpose of this conversation. We speak of the inherent unity of human diversity. Dr. Inayatullah said that she was not a theoretician but comes from the experience of development. I come from even lower than that, I come from the streets of countries at war where I was blindfolded and taken away, so my encounter with civilization was very illuminating and yet I found in that my explanation of the unity of human diversity. Dr. Yakovlev may wish to go further with that concept.

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