February 27, 2007	Tuesday	Safar 9, 1428

LONDON, Feb 26: The British Council will close half of its European offices in the coming year in favour of a more prominent presence in the Middle East and Central Asia, The Times reported in an early edition of its Monday newspaper.

Martin Davidson, the organisation’s Director-General designate, told the daily that there is a “gap in trust that is becoming increasingly well-documented between Britain and the Muslim world”.

The British Council will close 15 offices in Europe, reducing its presence on the mainland continent from 19 countries to nine – Finland, Hungary, Slovenia, Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Slovakia and all three Baltic states will no longer have British Councils.

British Council libraries will be closed unless they can raise revenue by running their own education courses.

Activity will be increased in the Gulf states, Yemen, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Uzbekistan, among others. It will also increase its presence in Nepal.

“We started a year ago to ask the question: given the gap in trust that is becoming increasingly well-documented between Britain and the Muslim world, what are we going to do to react to that?” Davidson told The Times.

“Many aspects of our society are very attractive to people in the Islamic world, but there is a widening gap of trust.

“We are trying to bridge a gap that has probably always been there. We are just identifying it more clearly than probably we have done before,” he was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

According to Davidson, Europeans who wanted to learn about Britain were mostly doing so over the Internet.

Iraq and Afghanistan, where Britain currently has about 7,100 and 5,600 troops respectively, are two of the 15 countries where funding will increase by 50 per cent.—AFP