By Ilker Girit
ISTANBUL
Political figures, academics and journalists interested in Middle East issues met Saturday in Istanbul for a two-day forum to discuss solutions to stabilize the region.
The Al Sharq Forum, titled “Envisioning a Post-Crisis Regional Order in the Sharq [the East] Region”, aims to discuss the problems in the Middle East and in North Africa on the 100-year anniversary of the Sykes-Picot agreement, which divided the lands of the dismantled Ottoman Empire into various British and French-administered areas that did not take into account ethnic, tribal or sectarian distinctions on the ground.
Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus spoke at the opening of the forum saying: “A 100 years ago, the winner of the [First World] war, the British, the French and the Russian met around a table, took rulers, compasses, and drew artificial borders on a map without any historical and cultural reality.”
Kurtulmus stated that this caused numerous problems today.
"We have the obligation to contribute to a global consensus," he added about regional crises affecting the entire world.
He stressed that there were two main problems that have shaken “all capital cities in the world”, i.e. global migration and global terrorism, which according to him were the result of recent foreign interventions in the region.
Kurtulmus said the 2003 U.S. military intervention in Iraq had sparked political and economic instability and eventually triggered the rise of Daesh influence in Iraq and Syria.
He added that Daesh captured the oil-rich city of Mosul (in mid-2014) in only one day because of the political uncertainty and sectarian conflicts in Iraq following the U.S. intervention.
“If we cannot solve our problems within ourselves, with our own power, […] strangers come from 10,000 kilometers away to our land and invade our homelands,” said Kurtulmus.
He also said “creating democratic societies” solved problems within themselves democratically, peacefully, stressing that the alternative was “chaos” in the Middle East and North Africa.
Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin spoke at the first panel titled “Breaking the Cycle of Crisis: How to Reach a Post-Crisis Phase in the Region?”
“We have to find our solutions for our problems,” he said. “Blaming others only does not solve problems.”
Kalin also stated that the region was suffering from a lack of good governance and transparency, alongside radicalism and extremism.
“Non-state actors, terrorist organizations, radical groups, violent extremists also come in and take advantage of the situation,” he added.
In addition, Kalin denounced growing sectarianism among Muslims, saying it was a “purely political issue”, not a religious one.
“At the end of the day, it is just destroying everything that we have,” he said. “Most of the time, nation state interest is interfering. […] Sunni or Shia, it is mostly nation state politics.”
Kalin stressed that Muslim countries should rid themselves of these types of conflicts, and take advantage of their “young creative, open-minded generation, the best human resources in the world.”
Meanwhile, Moncef Marzouki, former president of Tunisia between 2011 and 2014, said: “We need to create democratic societies, […] and people should be included into the decision-making process.”
“Polarization should be ended,” he said. “Diversity should be tolerated” among Muslim communities in the region.
But he worried that current regimes were “destroying people, society, and ethics.”
Estimating that countries should work together to eliminate differences, he gave the example of the EU.
“The European Union became successful” after World War II, with many different ethnicities, languages, sects now living together, he said.
Wadah Khanfar, President of Al Sharq Forum also pointed out that the European Union could be considered an example, as European countries fought each other for many years, resulting in the deaths of millions of people, but live in stability today.
He stated that cooperation among Muslim countries could rely on economic interests, like in the European Union.
“What would happen if we achieved prosperity and peace? Automatically, we are going to see reforms and a decline of sectarianism,” Khanfar said.
The Al Sharq Forum is an international non-profit organization, which organizes conferences worldwide, and undertakes political research with the participation of political figures, intellectuals, civil society organizations and journalists.
The two-day forum ends Sunday.
