ABUJA, 9 March 2003 — Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto yesterday urged non-Muslims, and more particularly the Western world, not to confuse Islam with terrorism.
Constant clashes between the West and the Islamic world were a bad omen for the future of the world, she said at a public lecture in Abuja given in memory of former Nigerian vice military head of state, Shehu Musa Yar’Adua. “These clashes threaten to eclipse our future,” said Bhutto, who arrived here Friday as a guest at the commissioning of the Olusegun Obasanjo Research Library yesterday at the Yar’Adua center.
“It is challenging for non-Muslims, the West in particular, to distinguish between Islam and terrorism,” Bhutto said.
Terrorism was a product of the contradiction in foreign policy of the West which she said encouraged dictatorship in Afghanistan when it was under Soviet control, Bhutto said. “If we had established democracy in Afghanistan, terrorism would not have had a sway and Osama Bin Laden would not have had a refuge,” she stated.
She slammed the West for allegedly establishing 2,500 schools in Pakistan to train activists from which emerged the likes of Bin Laden.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, whose government has in the past four years witnessed ethnic and religious unrest which claimed more than 10,000 lives, warned against any attempt to equate Islam with terrorism. “I feel alarmed about gross misunderstanding of Islam by most leaders of the West,” said Obasanjo, a Christian, at the same ceremony.
“We (in Nigeria) are about the only country in the world evenly divided between Islam and Christianity and if we can pull together in peace, then we have something to teach the world: that it does not matter what faith you proclaim, you can live together,” he said.
