Queen Noor inaugurates Seeds of Peace Middle East Youth Summit, 1 May 1998

"CHILD WELFARE" PRESS RELEASES

Queen Noor gives keynote address at Middle Eastern Youth summit in Switzerland.

Friday 1 May 1998

For Immediate Release:

"You must build your peace treaty on a foundation of justice by ensuring the full human and national rights of all sides. More specifically, we hope that your treaty will affirm that the peoples of the Middle East have an equal right to sovereignty, security, stability and progress. All the parties to the conflict must be able to live in viable states -- or else the structure of the peace we seek to build will collapse." This was the message of Her Majesty Queen Noor’s keynote address at the opening of the Middle East Youth Summit on Friday in Villars, Switzerland.

The week long Youth Summit is being held under the auspices of the Swiss government and with representatives of the governments of Jordan, Egypt, the Palestine National Authority, Israel and the United States. The delegates are all teenage graduates of Seeds of Peace, a U.S. based organization that promotes coexistence programs for young people from regions of conflict. They will work on developing a viable peace treaty by negotiating a compromise between the parties on critical issues that include Palestinian statehood, refugees, Jerusalem, settlements and security.

According to the Queen, one of the reasons that the peace process is stalled is because Palestinians are being "forced to live in an odd patchwork of disconnected land units in which they can exercise only partial rights", which contradicts UN Security Council decisions requiring Israel to "withdraw from all occupied territories and also the principle of self-determination and statehood for both Israelis and Palestinians."

Queen Noor expressed her hope that the delegates’ treaty will recognize "an essential but often forgotten component of this conflict ... the continued injustice towards the millions of Palestinian refugees throughout the region and elsewhere in the world." These refugees are "men, women and children who wake up every day to face the rigors of life without the most basic rights that most of us take for granted -- the right to a nationality, a passport, an identity, a state, to live in their own ancestral homeland, to travel freely, to work legally, to receive medical care and schooling, and ultimately to return to their homes or be compensated for their losses."

Regarding Jerusalem, the Queen noted that it cannot be a city of "God’s peace, if it is also a city of checkpoints with armed soldiers, of bombs on buses and in shopping malls, of humiliating travel passes, of vast inequities in social services, of destruction and confiscation of homes of lands, and of illegal revocation of residency permits for families who have lived there for hundreds of years."

On the issue of settlements, she emphasized that the treaty must provide a solution to the "hundred of illegal settlements and colonies on occupied Arab lands", which have rekindled violence. The Queen noted that "violence takes root in people who feel pushed to extremes, hopeless, and disenfranchised." She said that true security could only be achieved "in the hearts of people through confidence and trust.

The Middle East Youth Summit will feature speakers such as the chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, Egyptian undersecretary Osama el-Baz, former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, UN assistant secretary-general Vladimir Petrovsky and a satellite address by U.S. First Lady Mrs. Hillary Clinton. The result of the Youth Summit, which will be called the Declaration of Villars, will be presented to the U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in New York later this month.

Seeds of Peace is a summer camp in the United States for 12 - 14 year old children from countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa. At the camp, Arab and Israeli children interact together by participating in a variety of activities that range from team sports to theatrical plays and co-existence seminars. The children also travel to Washington where they stay for a week to meet with the President, the Vice-President, members of Congress and the Supreme Court. The program’s main goal is to introduce Arab and Israeli children to each other in the hope that their camping experience forges lasting bonds of friendship and understanding between them. Since 1993, Seeds of Peace has brought teenagers from the Middle East, Bosnia and other troubled regions to its conflict resolution and coexistence camp. The organization plans to launch a program for Greek and Turkish youth from Cyprus this summer.