November 27, 2008	Thursday	Ziqa'ad 28, 1429

KARACHI, Nov 26: Admiring the spirit of cooperation that binds together the diverse nations of the European Union, former information minister Javed Jabbar hailed the 27-nation bloc as “an antidote to unilateralism” that many in the Muslim and Arab worlds would do well to learn from.

He said this on Wednesday while delivering a keynote speech on the first day of a two-day international seminar organised by the University of Karachi’s Area Study Centre for Europe (ASCE) at a local club. The seminar, titled ‘EU as an emerging international power: its Middle East policy,’ has been organised in collaboration with the Hanns Seidel Foundation, Islamabad.

“The EU is neither a hard power nor a soft power. It is not unilateral and pre-emptive like Uncle Sam. It is in a class of its own. It is the collective power of 27 nations. It is a multi-sectoral alliance and is a nice antidote to unilateralism and super-powerism,” Mr Jabbar told the audience of foreign and local scholars, students and others.

He claimed that in the last five to six thousand years of recorded history, hardly any comparative examples of cooperation could be found. “It is an ongoing achievement.”

“The Middle East is the well-spring of Islam. God sent down all the revealed religions to the Middle East. It has received divine attention, yet parts of Europe are more Muslim than the Muslim world. They are practising the principles of Islam, such as social justice and democracy. We don’t need Bush to tell us about democracy,” he said, adding that democracy was part of the Islamic tradition.

Talking about the current world financial crisis, he said it was “a crisis created by the rich”, though the world’s poor had to suffer. Pointing out a definite dichotomy, Mr Jabbar said that though Europe had done a lot for peace, some of the world’s major arms exporters were members of the European Union. “They warn against nuclear war yet sell redundant weapons. War is good for business.”

He said he was not criticising Europe for starting all wars, but was pointing out that the continent was part of a historical process which needed revision.

Mr Jabbar said that Europe took a long time to catch up to the reality of Islam and was still trying to learn. He pointed out that Europeans translated the Qur’an about 700 years after it was revealed and even that was “full of distortions.” He said that it was not until the late 19th and 20th centuries that Europeans started studying Islam through scholarly methods.

‘The mess of 1948’

Delivering his paper titled ‘EU and the Middle East conflict’, Professor Dr Udo Steinbach of Germany said that Europe cannot be imagined without North Africa and the Middle East, adding that Europe was interested in finding a solution to the Palestinian question as it “was responsible for the mess of 1948”, referring to the creation of Israel, and that it had supported Zionism.

He added that access to resources, containing terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and stemming the tide of immigrants from the Middle East into Europe motivated the EU to take a more keen interest in the region’s affairs.

He said that after the attacks of Sept 11, 2001, the situation regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict became worse as former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon had convinced US President George W. Bush that the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Osama bin Laden were one and the same. “No Europeans contradicted this. The Quartet’s roadmap – which was a very good idea – never materialised.”

Dr Steinbach said the western approach to the conflict was not even-handed, as the Palestinians were asked to stop resorting to violence, while Israel was not censured for its brutality. “The Europeans failed to recognise the elections that brought Hamas to power. This resulted in radicalisation of the Palestinians,” he said, referring to the 2006 election victory of the Islamist resistance movement.

He also dubbed the 2007 peace conference held in the US city of Annapolis, which, he claimed, brought together Israel and “moderate” Arab regimes on a platform against Iran, as “a non-event”, as even its “minimum achievements were not achieved.”

“The EU fell into the trap of US policy. It followed blindly. The EU has economic potential and could have placed conditions on cooperation with Israel”, he said, adding that European economic assistance to the Palestinian Authority was key, as without it, the authority would have collapsed.

Islamabad-based scholar Arshi Saleem Hashmi, in her paper titled ‘The Lebanon-Israel war and the role of Europe’, argued that the 2006 war should not be seen in isolation and was an extension of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, adding that the war brought the differences in foreign policy between the EU and the US to light.

Israel’s hegemony

She said the EU’s role in the Lebanon war had been “partly positive and partly negative.” She argued that UN Resolution 1559, which called for the disarmament of Lebanese militias, was aimed principally at Lebanese Islamist resistance movement Hezbollah. “The resolution was a set-up for Israel’s hegemony” over Lebanon as “it was designed to achieve what the Israeli Defence Forces could not”, ie defeat Hezbollah militarily.

She said Israel wanted to promote sectarian war in Lebanon by pitting the government against Hezbollah, while the contention of some “Arab pessimists” that a “radical Shia arc including Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon” was complicating matters. Ms Hashmi said the Europeans wanted to settle the conflict multilaterally while the United Sates was openly pro-Israel.

Former ambassador Tariq Fatemi, in his speech titled ‘EU’s relations with Israel’, said that “Israel is a goal, a dream, a dream that goes back 5,000 years. Many Europeans share this dream, while the neo-conservatives believe all Jews must gather in Israel to ensure the Second Coming of Christ.”

He added that the guilt of the World War II Holocaust of the Jews also weighed down on Europe’s conscience. “The Muslims were not responsible for the Holocaust. However, Israel capitalised on these factors very intelligently and drew concessions, while it also used blackmail,” he said, adding that an even-handed solution was unacceptable to the Zionist entity.

Dr Florian Baumann from Germany and Prof Dr Mary Farrell from the UK also delivered their papers, while Dr Naveed Ahmad Tahir, ASCE director, presented the welcome address.