Burscheid /
Mahmood
Ahmadi-Nejad
President of the Islamic
Mr.
President,
dear Dr. Ahmadi-Nejad
I am
not sure whether the President of the
I
will close with some proposals for an agenda to be initiated by
1.
As you, many of us Germans are trying to find a clause in respect of the growing
international tensions, crises and wars, the millions of people being displaced
and hurt, even murdered, cities, houses and civil infrastructure being
destroyed, local cultures being neglected and eroded and nature being harmed,
partly in an irrevocable way. As you, we notice severe contradictions in
positions, words and deeds of politicians and leaders. If I may add:
politicians and leaders of any nation and creed.
There
are light-handed explanations as the power-vacuum left from the collapse of the
Soviet empire. And I would also concede that Western states and organisations
tried to make use of the new strategic situation and tried to actively become a
spearhead of a Western style global civilization. At the same time, technology
flow and the effects of globalisation seem to have made states more vulnerable
and stateless nets more of a danger, even for broad infrastructure and for the
performance and even existence of weaker states. As you, I guess that the sovereignty
of any state is the prerequisite for an international peace order, and my
strong conviction is due to the German aggression in WW II. Furthermore we may
agree that dangerous aggression is not limited to military action, but includes
economic aggression and especially cultural forms, where the basic texture of a
society may be destroyed by new aims and values, new knowledge and a new
adjudication of resources.
2.
On the other hand – and even more disturbing in nature – we may argue that
peace and stability are not guaranteed automatically but need a continuous
effort to neutralize the aggressive, conspicuous and explorative traces of
mankind. That is why teachers, mullahs, rabbis and priests bear a very special
responsibility and why as far as I know any kind of belief has modules of
reconciliation and forgiving. Please allow me explaining a very personal
experience and lesson:
Some
years ago I went running at a weekend. I like running through nature, for it
clears my spirits and gives me a closer look at the beauties of God’s creation.
It was early evening and the sun was setting behind me, casting yellow-red
beams through the leaves of the surrounding trees and painting patterns of
light on the soil and the trunks right before me. In a distance of
approximately 25 meters, there was a wooden post of a telegraph line; and on
that post I could see an arrow of the very same colour, directed right up into
the sky.
For
a second it crossed my mind that someone high above tried to address me by that
arrow of light, and that it would be a kind of gentle menetekel (Daniel 5, 25-26). As a man raised up with science and
technology, I quickly dismissed that thought and passing the post, I definitely
noticed that it was an arrow of trivial paint, not of light. The notion that I
would like to draw attention at follows right now: I suddenly felt disappointed.
That arrow could have shown a special kind of relation to God honoured by a
sign of light. And I somewhat tried to keep up that first interpretation by a
new attitude: That I just was taught a special lesson, still addressing me
personally and with a special privilege.
Interim:
People attending the speech of Pope Benedict XVI on May 28 in
A
second interim: Whilst writing about that scene on my laptop, I missed the
station to leave the bus for work. It gave me a nice extra walk of thousand
meters and a look at nature. Who ever looks upon us, he definitely has humour
of a kind.
For
some time I tried to figure out the lesson of that day. After intensive
contemplation that lesson seems to be: Like a child in a family of many
children, men tend to crave for any sign or symbol of privilege, by father or
mother, by teachers – and by God. And unanimously men form their conception of
God according to their individual looks, customs, and behaviour. Whilst I
strongly believe that the world visible and not visible to us would not exist
without the presence of a creator, I find it not probable that this creator has
looks like we have or that he thinks thoughts like we do. So I fully agree with
the holy books that there should be no picture or even a sign symbolizing that
creator.
Going
a step further – and assuming that this creator is everywhere or nowhere,
joining everybody or nobody – I come to a reconciling and at least to me most
logic conclusion: It is neither sensible nor fair to think of God addressing us
personally or as division of mankind. There is no promised land or a God’s own
country or an ethnic group elected by God; there is just a mandated world,
mandated to all mankind. God is therefore not to be found amongst those rules
and symbols, that differ between the various religions, creeds and beliefs, but
just and only in the combining, consensual and congenial factors. I may add
that especially the crucifix is a symbol so loaded with cruelty and sacrifice,
that children and non-believers cannot possibly understand the peacefulness,
mercy and human compassion of the thereby represented belief.
Hans
Küng, a very reputed Swiss theologian outside of the mainstream theology, told:
“There will be no world order without peace between the nations and peoples.
There will be no peace between the peoples without peace between the religions.
And there will be no peace between the religions without their dialogue. The
only way to political peace is the way of a mutually accepted ethos, based on the religious traditions
of mankind.” The even more famous Leonardo Boff fully consents in his “Ethics
for a New World’ and adds: “World Ethics is the basic understanding in respect
of binding values and irrevocable standards and attitudes that can be indorsed
by all religions, even by non-believers and atheists. The elementary values to
be built upon are definite truth and irrevocable justice. At the core of
universal ethics lies humanitas,
which means the obligation to treat any man and woman in a humane way,
irrespective of his or her situation, class, religion or age.” I guess it would
be worth while to organise an Iranian-German workshop on the idea of world
ethics and the perfect place to do so might be
3.
You hesitate, dear Dr. Ahmadi-Nejad, to believe in the history of
In
respect of
There
may have been miscalculations and exaggerations according to numbers of
murdered persons. But is beyond any scientific dispute that the Jewish people
in the area controlled by German forces were purposefully deprived of any civil
rights, were displaced to concentration camps in the East, and died over there
in hundreds of thousands by gas, by deliberate famine and forced work and by
mass-diseases due to worst sanitary conditions, not to speak of the masses of
victims in Jewish ghettos like the Warsaw ghetto. I would like to draw your
attention especially to the study of Jean-Claude Pressac, ‘Les Crematoires d’
Auschwitz’, Paris 1993. Pressac originally was – as you are – very sceptical in
respect of the organized murder in German concentration camps and he collected
any accessible information, which after the collapse of the Soviet empire was
completed by evidence gathered by Soviet troops at the end of WW II. From
Pressac’s work you may derive a number of 470.000 up to 550.000 persons, predominantly
women, children and elderly people, murdered intra muros in the gas chambers of
I
would like to add here: Apart from the fact that Europe did not take much
notice of the murder of Jews, Sinti and Roma, enemy soldiers and physically or
mentally disabled Germans – actually there was some intelligence and protest –
you are possibly not convinced that a state with the cultural heritage of
Germany was able to organize a crime of that dimension. My explanation is
simple, almost trivial, but nevertheless most worrying: As well as the German
troops left millions of Russians starving, confiscating the regional harvest
and storage, the Concentration Camps seem to have murdered those detainees,
that could not be made use of by nearby German factories, just because they
could or would not feed those people. So just an economical, semi-logic reason
may have made men to objects without value. This gross inhumanity is not so far
from people harmed or killed in refugee camps. Or from the innocent women,
children and elderly people victimized by suicide bombers – to be more precise,
by the structures behind this phenomenon.
There
are perseverative samples of inhumanity in the history of mankind, whether in
ancient times by Timur or Tamerlan, a devoted Muslim and friend of finest arts,
later by Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot, nowadays at Srebrenica, and there is a
countless number of massacres unmentioned today. To me, all this shows the
broad responsibility that God has left to us personally: to actively shelter
men and prevent repercussions of a most inhumane and deadly past. So it should
be our joint effort to work out the dignity and uniqueness of humans as it is
laid down in our sources of faith and make it an irreversible paradigm of our
professional and private behaviour.
4.
You might know that in
Unfortunately,
the documentation of the attached poll is available just in German. So I add a
file displaying some reported results as well, which are at the core of the
poll, with my personal English translation.
It would be most interesting to know, how the very same questionnaire would be
answered in
5.
Although I fully endorse the right of any country to build its future on
science and technology, I have to accept that items of science may contribute to
the mistrust between countries. Almost any aspect of science may be seen as
critical under this aspect, even findings in medicine. You may know that in WW
I even the development of antibiotics was estimated as of tactical importance
and as critical, because it could increase the war-leading ability of enemies.
Therefore the finding was kept a secret in the course of the war.
Any
development that may lead to the ability to build nuclear weapons may amplify
mistrust among nations. I would appreciate any instrument that combines
transparency and incentives for the disarmament of nations that already possess
nuclear weapons. A very interesting new approach would be to increase the
public control over science and technology, which will be another proposal made
at the end of this letter.
6.
Let me come to a point that according to my analysis gravely contributes to the
global unrest, but is rarely mentioned. Unlike most commentators and a trend
set by Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations-theory I do not believe that the
most driving factor behind the virulent terrorism lies in different race,
ethnics, belief, culture or customs. As a matter of fact, especially the traditional
cultural bridges between the Islamic orient and the Christian occident – with
embedded Jewish communities – are very manifold. Between Jews and Arabs there
are lots of cultural parallels, for example in the traditional law of families
(e.g. the iqrar, by which a child
born out of wedlock is declared legitimate), in religion, language and writing.
You are certainly by far more familiar with those cultural similarities than I
am.
My
conclusion would be as to the causes of terrorism and to possible strategies
against terrorism: We are facing today more of a clash of countries or groups
of different age than of different culture. Especially those men
recruited for terrorist action were brought up with western technologies, are
surprisingly often members of middle or even upper class families. Their
personal development resembles very much those terrorists, who shook up Western
societies in the Seventies and Eighties. Therefore the patterns of cultural
estrangement might be – at least as far as terrorism is concerned – misleading
and definitely not be to the advantage of our countries and peoples. So we
should foster a mutual strategy of better understanding, personal interaction
on the level of the peoples and of building up of sustainable trust, especially
among the youth.
7.
Let me finally propose an agenda of an overriding mutual and even global interest,
where
a)
World ethics
I
propose to establish an international and intercultural dialogue, that leads to
a set of values and rules acceptable to men of any religion, belief, creed,
even to those not adhering to God. The dialogue could be initiated by an
Iranian-German workshop, organised in
b)
Internationally
acceptable rules of conflicts
Derived
from the formulation of ‘world ethics’ it would be important to discuss the
rules of international crisis management, but not concentrated on rules for
procedure (e.g. an international body for decision making) but focussing on
material law, i.e. the concrete conditions and facts under which an
intervention is assessed as internationally tolerable, e.g. in cases of proved
gross violation of human rights, ethnic mass murder, but definitely excluding
e.g. wars that shall secure natural resources or trade channels.
c)
Democratic control
of research; cultures of democracy in comparison
Research,
especially research strategies relating to security, is commonly planned and
executed by government authorities without special interaction with the voters.
It would be interesting to discuss, whether there could be an earlier point of
information of the public or even co-determination and whether such procedures
of transparency would contribute to a better international understanding and to
the reduction of mistrust and crises. In
In a
broader context the culturally different approaches to democracy and the amount
of responsiveness to the prevailing wishes and needs of the citizens, that any
of the systems is able to produce – the degree of democratic efficiency –
should be discussed as well.
d)
Young and aging
population; fostering apprenticeship
The
populations of
That
activity could possibly be combined with an effort concentrating on education
and especially vocational education and training in both countries, addressing
the pressing problem of better integrating young people with a migration
background into the education systems, pushing international personal exchange
and reducing juvenile unemployment.
e)
Craftsmen, artisans
and writers
Islam
– and ancient
f)
Living history
An
item of special interest for the youth could be to show and demonstrate in
plays or productions the respective degrees of social, cultural, economical and
scientific development in Iran and Germany (or in further countries), that were
reached at important incisions in history, e.g. at the birth of prophets, the
outbreak of wars or on the eve of basic scientific developments.
g)
Sustainability
h)
Malaria
i)
Men and women
I
do not want to offend by proposing this item for a mutual effort. According to
my personal impression women are subject to subordination both in the East and
in the West. In the West they are often sexually vilified under the pretext of
liberation and they still are underrepresented in politics, culture and
economy. In
I noticed that the majority of Iranian students is female. Nevertheless those
high, visible and influential positions in society seem to be accessible and
accepted even less than in the West. At the same time ‘womens’ rights’ is a
major item of misunderstanding between the cultures, even between women of
different cultures. Therefore it would be worth while to concertedly work out
more transparency and empathy.
j)
Mutual public
opinion polls on the perception of Christianity and Islam
It
could be of a mutual interest to cooperatively organise and annually repeat a
survey on the respective perception of the religious values and attitudes. The first step could be a cooperation
with the Allensbach Institute of Public Opinion Polls to launch an opinion
survey in Iran equivalent to the poll ‘Eine
fremde, bedrohliche Welt’ (May 2006).
k)
Drug abuse
There
seems to be a mutual interest in understanding and fighting the fast rise of
drug abuse. It would be interesting to discuss and develop further strategies
as well for the regions of drug origin as for the parts of society that are
especially endangered in our countries, notably the youth.
l)
Criminals,
mullahs/priests, criminologists
This
may be my most surprising proposal: It could be fruitful for both sides to
organize a meeting of (1) former criminals, that have been successfully
rehabilitated and want to prevent further criminality, of (2) representatives
of both religions (or possibly including Jewish representatives as well), and
of (3) specialists in criminology to discuss the respective strategies,
measures and successes in reintegrating of convicted criminals and in
preventing crime. I am certain that the Jesus described in the Holy books would
have appreciated this approach very much.
More
or less by chance these are twelve proposals that could be put into
effect one by one any month, covering a year of intensive Iranian-German
dialogue. Certainly there are more and much better opportunities of cooperation
on all levels of society to be brought into discussion and especially
addressing the youth.
I am
looking forward to any feedback on these views and proposals and I will address
copies of this letter to appropriate German authorities.
Faithfully
Dr. jur. Karl Ulrich Voss
Kuckenberg 34, D 51399 Burscheid
www.vo2s.de,