Nearly four years after officially submitted, it remains unclear what the Alliance of Civilizations intended . The Alliance of Civilizations seeks to coordinate an effort by the international community to alleviate the tense situation created by the Muslim jihadists attacks , both institutional and civil society, but the truth is that the so-called Report of the High Level Group devotes disproportionate amount of its space to criticizing the West as Muslims guilty of the attacks.
By George Chaya
Published by America 's Daily 17/01/2008
Up to the neck because of its many scandals in as many fronts as questioned everywhere due to its ineffectiveness from Sudan to North Korea , UN opens a new front with another of its questionable initiatives, the so-called Alliance of Civilizations, which is scheduled to hold its first meeting in Spain this week . The program was widely praised in 2005 by the last UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, as a bridge over cultural and religious differences, but involves a long chain of associations and organizations of dubious reputation that cast serious doubts on the project itself of the UN ability to postpone the scandals of the past decade.
Nearly four years after officially submitted, it remains unclear what the Alliance of Civilizations intended. According to Annan´s statement in 2005, the Alliance is designed to "overcome prejudices, design errors, misconceptions and polarization", but in clear terms the only real thing that has so far kept the Alliance busy is to mount its own secretariat with an initial budget of $ 3.7 million and a meeting of its "High Level Group" of a weekend in Mallorca, Spain.
Beyond this mandate, caught with pins, and a system of leadership rather vague - both factors characteristic of the methods used by UN and already criticized in the investigation of Paul Volcker, one of the outstanding scandals of the UN Oil For Food - the most striking of the Alliance are the close collaborators of Annan to which the Spanish initiative employs.
Among the officials involved in the Alliance two names in particular stand out: Iqbal Riza, former director of Annan´s personnel between 1997 and 2004, and Giandomenico Picco, a veteran high officer of the UN who returned to the organization as a personal envoy of the Secretary-General and later as a his close adviser. The first is accused, inter alia, to destroy large amounts of documentary evidence from Annan´s office in December 2004, a full investigation made by Volcker. The nebula Giandomenico Picco connection with the Alliance of Civilizations is more problematic, since he alternated his post at the UN with a seat on the privately held company IHC Services (conflict of interest), which had generous contracts with the UN.
Although it is known that in early 2005 Picco Riza worked helping to assemble the initiative of the Alliance of Civilizations UN, the program goes back to a UN previous program, called Dialogue among Civilizations, which initially centered around the year 2001 (a dialogue that obviously did not help to prevent the September 11 th ) and that for years consumed funds in the form of various UN conferences and panels.
The Alliance of Civilizations today is stained by a third scandal. While Picco alternated his positions in UN and IHC Services, according to the research of the American authorities, appears a whole litany of bribes to a UN official, Alexander Yakovlev (convicted by a federal court in Manhattan in August 2005), and the director of the Monitoring Committee budgetary UN, Vladimir Kuznetsov, (who was prosecuted in court in September of that year). All roads lead to Rome except United Nations, which often result in bribes deposited in numerable accounts in tax havens, and then to a cell in New York.
What leads to a Western country to convert an initiative torpedoed by his own works? Since the 2004 elections that brought back the Socialist Party to power, after eight years of Spanish People's Party government, the principle of multilateralism has prevailed in Spain . The Spanish president surprised both Europe and the United States with its hasty withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq , and later urged the other countries involved in the conflict to do the same. Their actions have been openly criticized by both the Bush administration and by former president Aznar, not to mention many senior officials from Brussels to Australia .
It was in autumn 2004, while beginning to fall throughout the manufacture of bribery of Dialogue among Civilizations as the UN house of cards, that Zapatero made his famous speech of the "Alliance of Civilizations" in the 59 United Nations General Assembly in New York , urging an alliance between Western and Muslim worlds. Since then, NATO has become the cornerstone of Spanish foreign policy, 7 years after the birth of the original one .
While the Alliance political ideas remain in the air (the argument sustained by its critics is precisely that it is full of air), the fate of its predecessor does not seem to foretell well. Although Khatami´s political views, the founder of Dialogue, have been popular in the international arena, his policy confronts often with Patients Iranian members of parliament. It was in 2005 when he was replaced by the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then being enlisted for the high-level group formed by the United Nations to guide Zapatero´s initiative .
This link between Khatami and Zapatero is as interesting as significant. Both leaders consider a new precedent for international cooperation and understanding between Western and Muslim worlds, those who claim to represent. Unfortunately, these precedents have not resulted in meaningful cooperation regarding Iran 's nuclear program, for example.
Shortly after the announcement of the International Agency for Atomic Energy (consisting of a board of 35 countries) that referred the matter of Iran's nuclear program to United Nations Security Council, Zapatero held a joint press conference with the then Secretary-General Koffi Annan. The Spanish President stressed the importance of negotiations to reach a consensus while Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, met with NATO officials in Bulgaria and also supported a diplomatic consensus on the matter. While Spain undertook this way to use diplomacy to urge Iran to cooperate with the Agency, Great Britain , France and Germany joined the United States to demand immediate results. The Spanish government remained isolated ( actually with Iran ) to support diplomatic negotiations across the Agency. The Alliance of Civilizations met due to what appears to be the axiom of overall program, UN serves only to evil.
At a theoretical level, the results are not encouraging. The Alliance of Civilizations seeks to coordinate an effort by the international community to alleviate the tense situation created by the attacks of Muslim jihadists, both institutional and civil society, but the truth is that the so-called Report of the High Level Group devotes disproportionate amount of its space to criticizing the West as Muslims guilty of the attacks. It also appears some vague reference to education systems, being the West which has to retouch as well : countries like Saudi Arabia or entities as the Palestinian Authority can continue educating their offspring with pearls like "the Jews are the children who have pigs with monkeys "or that" Europe will be conquered through the belly of the Muslim ", this is not a problem for the Alliance.
This first official document of these UN programs is a further testament to the limited value of these exercises. The Alliance of Civilizations focuses obsessively on alleged failures of Western countries to voluntarily ignoring the mistakes of the Muslim countries, even implicitly justifying imposing limits on press, expression or religion freedom for the sake of stopping "the spread of hatred resulting in Islam phobia, xenophobia and anti-Semitism" (the second and third are ornamental, judging by the space devoted). The Alliance also proposes a dubious agenda to "improve" the treatment of non-Muslims to Muslims (something unprecedented for any democracy that can say "press freedom" with some property).
The little information that exists about the Alliance of Civilizations prevents a trial to be clear, although the information that has transcended would have an idea of time: this is a huge jaw to make the western media, whenever they dare to apply to Muslim countries, tenth of the criticism they devote to the United States or Israel . Further irony is that this UN program in Spain , a country that has done so much for getting rid of censorship of its past risks both for having a minimum of freedom in all its geography.
If this is the Alliance that Zapatero wants to ally to, it is clear that civilization has rather little.
* George Chaya is Professor and Political International Analyst, Lebanese origin, Expert in Middle East . Expert and Lecturer at the International Consulting in Policy on Middle Eastern and Latin America .
Official Web Site www.georgechaya.org
