Speech of Staf Nimmegeers, First Vice President of the Senate of  the Kingdom of Belgium

Dear Mr. President, Dear Representantatives of religions from all over the world, Dear Colleagues, Members of Parliament, In the first place, I have the honour to convey to His Excellency MrAbykayev the warmest congratulations of the Speaker of the Belgian Senate, Mrs.Anne-Marie Lizin. Mrs.Lizin is convinced that the type of dialogue, the Kazakh Senate is fostering through the meetings in the framework of this Congress, can achieve fundamental goals for the world seen as one huge community of human beings who confront the same hopes, cravings, fears and sorrows.

Representing my President of the Senate, I want to stress that my statement in this assembly is essentially political and not religious, although I also serve as a priest in the Catholic Church.

When I read the agenda of this Congress, I felt immediately attracted by this topic of enlightening and stressing the role of religious leaders in strengthening international security.

Indeed, over the five last years, different events and their interpretation by leading politicians and influential media convinced many people of the opposite: religions are more and more experienced as a mayor trigger of intolerance, hatred and as a result, as a trigger of aggression, murder and bewildered terrorism.

A French saying states that "les gens heureux n'ont pas d'histoire": happy people don't live eventful lives. I would like to transpose this to our subject today: people, who practice religion in a peaceful and tolerant way, don't attract public attention.

And yet, experience teaches all religious leaders that these quiet groups undoubtedly form an overwhelming majority, compared to the fringes tempted by violent intolerance. In my perception, one of the urgent improvements consists in making peace-loving, tolerant believers of the different religions visible. I suggest religious leaders create active cells in their religious communities who get in touch with their homologues of other religions to solemnly proclaim their common will to promote peace and understanding.

In Belgium, such cells are already active in main cities with multiform population. This type of concentration is highly appreciated by politicians as it has been proving its usefulness.

Too often, religious leaders take important stands inside their communities. In my view, it is important to widen the approach our Kazakh hosts have chosen here: standing up together, proclaiming constructive goals in gathering as many religions as possible.

This will be fruitful on one condition: you need to meet this practice on every level of our societies, not only on the highest level of leaders themselves, but also in an approach at the smallest scale of our communities. I hope we can bring the people I would call the first workers in religion to meet each other in villages and small towns and to experience how close the needs and cravings of all human beings are very close. At that stage, religious leaders could instigate a different spirit from the youngest age on.

And that is where a second field of action is perceptible: education of generations to come.

In many countries we see a deep respect for the specificities of each community, and, specifically, each religious community. This is clearly highly praiseworthy. But in most of the countries it generated "ghettoization" and cruel lack of knowledge of the other communities, their way of life and their basic values.

This situation generates fear, and fear is an inevitably lead to tension and often violence. Through all the communities, we can break this terrible spell from the moment we take a strong commitment to promote mutual knowledge from early childhood on.

In my belief, respect for all communities does not show in separating carefully the children in schools, different for every religion, in my approach, respect shows in creating schools where children of each religion feel welcome and respected. In those schools, it would be sensible to teach about all religions, and especially about the basic values present at the roots of every religion.

In this model of education, an equilibrated course on philosophy would be a very useful complement to this study of religions.

Religion itself, in its practice, would be banned out of those schools. There would be other places where children would be trained in religious practice, and those places should not be called schools.

I would be healthy that governments all over the world would restore schools in their fundamental function: provide young people with knowledge and skills to make them the best possible citizens in our societies. Religions have their incomparable effect on other aspects of the human being and I'm convinced all parties concerned would win when the functions would be clearer.

Schools could then be real meeting places where mutual knowledge, common experiences, friendship and social networks would have fair chances to grow. That's the fertile soil we could build real multicultural societies on.

This approach that could be called "bottom up", needs a "top down" complement. Indeed, it takes one or two generations to change basically the attitudes of communities through education. In the meantime, all over the world worshippers need strong messages from their religious leaders in condemning every violence induced by misinterpretation of religious principles.

In my experience, these official protest messages are still too isolated.

Finally, it is the duty of religious leaders to draw attention of authorities and public opinion to the situation of the poorest population groups. Religious leaders have to co-operate closely with officials to improve living and working circumstances of those disadvantaged sections of the population. Indeed, when those basic features are badly neglected, a new fertile soil for violence triggered by wrongly interpreted religion spreads.

There again, it would impress more people if those messages would be uttered in an documentary way: different high level religions leaders signing common open letters in leading newspapers, appearing together on the TV-screens, dropping common messages on the Internet. This would undoubtedly boost the credibility of their assumed will to coexist in peace, and more than this, it would destroy the presumed religious arguments of lots of terrorists and malevolent powers on our planet.

I hope to have opened some down-to-earth paths for religious leaders aware of their responsibilities in this complex world where people badly need strong and visible beacons for their spiritual well being and their social and political development.