ISSUE 43: SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER 2006

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Former Iranian leader calls for dialogue among civilizations

Former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami speaks at UNU Centre.

Mounting pressure on Iran to abandon its nuclear program is creating another crisis in the Middle East, former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami told an audience at UN University Centre, Tokyo, August 25.

Mr. Khatami was at UNU to deliver the 13th U Thant Distinguished Lecture on the topic “Dialogue Among Civilizations: A Necessity for Living in Peace and Non-Violence, Bridging the Development Gap among Nations and Building a Global Citizenship”. 

He defended Iran's "legitimate right" to develop nuclear energy, claiming the program is completely peaceful and poses no threat, but warned that pressure aimed at forcing Iran to abandon the program is "creating another crisis in a region that is already ready to explode."

Mr. Khatami said that when the United Nations was established in 1945, it was recognized that “political and economic relations between governments would not suffice” to ensure peace and security. He had been seeking a paradigm of “dialogue among cultures and civilizations instead of a clashing between them” — a dialogue that must be both intra- and inter-civilizational.

“Today, the world’s coffers of peace are emptier than its coffers of war, both materially and spiritually,” he said. “As long as governments and nations’ investment in peace is just a fraction of their investment in war, the seeds of security, hope, and progress will not grow in the minds of the people of the global community.”

The concept of peace is now different from the previous model in terms of substance, Mr. Khatami observed. “Peace is now something more than security and pre-emption [and] includes a creative interaction which has been promoted from the level of relations between governments to relations between civil organizations. In the paradigm of dialogue, international, intergovernmental, national, and civil organizations all must adopt an approach towards and build structures for dialogue to take place”.

The U Thant Distinguished Lecture Series is a forum through which eminent thinkers and world leaders speak on the role of the United Nations in addressing the challenges facing the world's peoples and nations in the 21st Century. The lecture series is co-organized by the UNU Centre, the UNU Institute of Advanced Studies (UNU-IAS) and the Science Council of Japan (SCJ).

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