Mohammad: Battle poverty to check terror

Dalian: Education and enlightenment are the strongest weapons in breaking the vicious cycle of poverty and fundamentalism and those who seek to divide the world on the basis of civilisations are as fundamentalists as terrorists, His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, said yesterday.

"If we want to be heroes of progress, we cannot ignore poverty, which prevents people from joining the wide current of human development," Shaikh Mohammad told more than 2,000 business leaders and dignitaries at the World Economic Forum in the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian.
The three-day World Economic Forum meeting, which began yesterday, brings together hundreds of business leaders.

In his speech, Shaikh Mohammad spoke at length on knowledge economies and their direct role in boosting a country's prosperity, the need for global cooperation on development, fundamentalism and several other issues.

"Several countries in the world are facing great difficulty in building knowledge economies. The UN's target for the third millennium in offering primary education for every single child by 2015 may not be achieved until 2050. Any soil infested in poverty, ignorance and neglect is always a good breeding ground for fundamentalism and produces fundamentalists," Shaikh Mohammad said.

"It is impossible to remedy this situation without reason, and probably one of the most important reasons for such problems is the stubborn resistance put up by fanatic schools of thoughts," he said.

"The stubborn ones belong to a different world than ours, they try unsuccessfully to stop progress, and they wrongly think that they can stop the process of history. Likewise, there are those who advocate the clash of civilisations — they are terrorists, fundamentalists in thought and deed. They build walls, they build material or spiritual divide between people and cultures to gain materially or politically," he said.

Shaikh Mohammad also stressed the role of young leaders in bringing about reform, and sustainable development by interacting with other cultures and civilisations. "The new heroes your esteemed forum would like to hear about are the ones who stand in the face of this fundamentalist coalition and work to widen the channels of dialogue between East and West and foster a spirit of acceptance and co-existence," he told the delegates.