Jon Davies

Working with Afghanistan and Yemen - not 'killing Muslims' ?

"I held a press briefing yesterday on this week's London Afghanistan Conference and Yemen Meeting. One of the journalists noted my previous blog on Gaza and asked why it had emerged relatively late. I promised to try to be quicker, so here goes with the next one.
 
As I say, much of the briefing was about Afghanistan. I won't get into the details here because you can see a lot more at the dedicated Foreign Office website. But it is worth repeating that it is absolutely right that Egypt is represented at these events, by its Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit. In both Afghanistan and Yemen, we and Egypt agree that progress and stability will come through the international community working with the Governments of those two countries. The London events should help galvanise that effort.
 
Egypt, like Britain, has a global network of Embassies, including in testing places such as Sanaa and Kabul. Like Britain, Egypt knows the risks which that entails: the memory of the murder of Egypt's Ambassador to Iraq is still fresh here. But Egypt has a new Ambassador to Iraq. And they, we and many other countries will continue to send our people to difficult and dangerous places. That is more and more commonplace: quite a few of my colleagues in the Embassy now, including the Ambassador, have served in Iraq or Afghanistan (or both). Several who have served in this Embassy are now in Afghanistan (our Ambassador in Kabul, Mark Sedwill, for example), or Iraq, or Yemen. It is not easy work, and the risks are real. From the relative safety of Cairo I can only admire what they do.
 
But as I do so, it makes me annoyed and puzzled when I see some of what is said about what our country and others are trying to achieve in these places. On several occasions, figures of real influence here have talked loosely as if there is somehow a policy of "killing Muslims". Why on earth would our country, or any other involved in Afghanistan (where the Troop Contributing Nations include Jordan, Turkey and the UAE) have as an objective "killing Muslims"?  As well as simply being wrong, to say this strikes me as divisive and negative. At a time when many here are stressing national unity and the need not to exacerbate religious differences, to use one's influence to feed radical thought in this way seems irresponsible - and to whose benefit I am really not sure". 

Posted at 10:08 28 January 2010 by Jon Davies  |  Comments[0]