JEDDAH/NEW YORK: People around the world pin tremendous hope on the UN General Assembly’s Culture for Peace conference, which is scheduled to open in New York on Wednesday. The conference is being held at the initiative of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has described the two-day conference as very important.
“It offers a good opportunity to deepen understanding and appreciation of other religions, faiths and cultures, and all other problems, which will also create a favorable atmosphere, even for the resolution of political issues,” he said.
UN General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, a Catholic priest, has invited all member countries and observers, including the Vatican, to attend the conference, which it called a “useful preparatory step” toward an interfaith and intercultural meeting to be held in 2010.
King Abdullah, accompanied by a high-level delegation including Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal, Prince Muqrin, chief of intelligence, Labor Minister Ghazi Al-Gosaibi, Finance Minister Ibrahim Al-Assaf and Culture and Information Minister Iyad Madani, has already arrived in New York to take part in the historic event.
Prince Khaled bin Saud, undersecretary at the Foreign Ministry, said the New York conference was being organized by the United Nations. “We hope that the conference would foster peace, coexistence and closer relations among the followers of different faiths,” the Saudi Press Agency quoted the prince as saying.
In its front-page editorial, Al-Riyadh Arabic daily expressed hope that the conference would help deepen human and moral values. “This is an important meeting for the welfare of humanity. Divine religions have come only for the reform of human beings and implant noble values in human dealings and relations,” the paper said.
Enrique Yeves, spokesman for the General Assembly’s president, said the conference would focus on more than religious dialogue, the topic of the Madrid meeting, and also touch on cultural issues.
“This is not a meeting on religious dialogue only, it is about dialogue among cultures,” Yeves said. “I don’t know who has called it interfaith because its official name is ‘Culture for Peace’. For some reason most people, especially in the media, believe that it is only religious dialogue but it is more than that,” he explained.
Brockmann believes the initiative “should be broadened to talking not only about religions but about cultures, about all the common values we have,” Yeves said. “He would like that we talk not only about dialogue, but about joining forces in order to work together with all these common values to address the major issues that we are facing right now in the world.”
