Brothers in Christ

By the skin of their teeth, prelates of the Christian East avoid a rupture

WHENEVER two or more Orthodox Christian clerics join in celebrating the Eucharist—consecrating bread and wine in a manner that is far more elaborate, solemn and formal than is usual in today’s Christian West—it creates a special bond between them. And if one Orthodox cleric refuses to “concelebrate” with another, that is a sign of a deep, painful rift.

That helps to explain why Orthodox Christians all over the world (who may number more than 200m, if one makes generous assumptions about the religiosity of ordinary Russians and Ukrainians) looked on with fascination as two important gentlemen, one from Moscow and the other from Istanbul, came together in Kiev on July 27th to conduct their church’s most important rite. This was a powerful, if provisional, moment of reconciliation between the Patriarchs of Constantinople and Moscow, whose relations have been scratchy for most of the past decade.

It was a close-run thing: the 1,020th anniversary of the advent of Christianity among the Slavs, celebrated with enormous fanfare by Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko, might just as easily have led to a dramatic bust-up between the two institutions whose multiple disagreements have cast a shadow over Orthodox Christian affairs in places ranging from New York to Paris to Beijing.

In the end, however, rupture was avoided. A basis was also laid for better relations in future, thanks to careful diplomacy by Bartholomew I, the Patriarch of Constantinople, who is by tradition the “first among equals” in the Orthodox hierarchy.

Why were the Ukraine festivities such a pivotal moment? Mr Yushchenko, a devout believer himself, longs to see a united Ukrainian Orthodox church; some say he is envious of the role played by his counterpart in Moscow, Vladimir Putin, in ending an 80-year-old division in the Russian church. But Ukraine’s religious scene is messy. There are Greek Catholics who worship in an Orthodox way but acknowledge the pope; there are two church organisations (one founded in 1921, the other in 1992) which identify strongly with Ukrainian nationhood but remain unrecognised by other Orthodox Christians. The largest group, as measured by the number of parishes, consists of Orthodox Christians aligned with Moscow.

Mr Yushchenko gave Patriarch Bartholomew a red-carpet reception in the hope that the visitor would help bring closer his dream of a single national church, no longer tied to Russia. In the Muscovite camp, rumours were rife that Patriarch Bartholomew was about to recognise unilaterally an independent Ukrainian church, causing an almost irreparable breach between Moscow and Constantinople. In the end, Patriarch Bartholomew steered a middle course—assuring Mr Yushchenko that he too yearned for unity among believers in Ukraine, while also accepting that (at least until some other arrangement is agreed upon) Patriarch Alexy remains the legitimate Orthodox authority in that part of the world. As a Turkish citizen who heads that country’s small Christian minority, Patriarch Bartholomew is used to tightropes; and this time his footwork was exceptionally delicate.

The Economist

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I always thought religious arguments were a little silly, especially among the different branches of christianity. You all worship the same god; you all read the same bible; you all believe that christ was the son of god; all that's different are some small things about ceremony and the title of the head of your church. Why not acknowledge what you have in common instead of fighting with each other? Maybe my perspective is different because I don't believe in god at all, but there are some parallels. I acknowledge what I have in common with fellow atheists even if they believe there is a higher power that is not god, while I do not, or they believe in fate but not god, while I simply believe there is no higher power or fate whatsoever. We still don't believe in god. We still don't attend religious services. We still hold some doubts about the nature of organized religion. What matters are the similarities, not the differences. Surely the believers could agree on something similar?

Things to look forward to

Live longer, die slower

AS any amateur futurologist can tell you, the rich world is rapidly getting older. By 2050 more than a quarter of the developed world’s population will be over 65. At the moment, that group makes up about a sixth of the rich-world population, and only about 25% of them are over 80. In 2050 the octogenarians and their elders will comprise 40% of the 65-plus cohort in wealthy countries.

This greying of the prosperous parts of the world has long been foreseen, if not very well prepared for. Much less well known is the fact that well-off countries are far from alone in facing the prospect of an ageing population. Babies born today in poorish countries such as Thailand or Jamaica can reasonably expect to live into their 70s. And as more and more Indians and Chinese escape from poverty, they too will have much longer spans (see chart).

By 2050 the percentage of the Indian population over 80 will have risen fivefold, and the same segment in China will have gone up six times. Such changes happen for two reasons: people’s general health is better, meaning they wear out later, and preventable deaths of the relatively young are, in fact, prevented. As anti-retroviral treatment for HIV/AIDS becomes more common, childbirth safer and malaria more treatable, people will die at a more advanced age. By 2050 close to 80% of all deaths in the world are expected to occur in people who are older than 60.

While people of 59 or under die in any number of dramatic ways, people on the other side of 60 face three possibilities which between them carry off most of the elderly, whatever their economic circumstances. Each peaks in a different decade, and each produces a different sort of end of life.

The first is cancer: most victims function reasonably well before entering a steep decline. Cancer deaths peak at 65-plus, and more and more sufferers recover. If they do, two other clouds appear on the horizon. One of these is chronic organ failure and the other is frailty, dementia and decline. Chronic problems with an organ—usually heart disease or emphysema—bring a gradual decline punctuated by severe episodes, such as a heart attack or lung failure.

Dementia or frailty can mean a long, poor-quality end of life. As more cures are found for cancer, and sensible types give up smoking and bacon, more people will find that a slow decline is the meagre reward for their virtuous behaviour. That applies to developing countries as well as rich ones. There has never been a bigger need for cheap, effective treatment for diseases of the old, such as Alzheimer’s (see article) or for easier access to pain relief and reliable care.

The Economist
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This article has made me afraid of getting old, but dieing young doesn't sound all that appealing either. Dieing doesn't sound that appealing in general, probably because I'm young and healthy. Still, everyone deserves a dignified death, and slowly losing all control over your actions and bodily functions is not altogether very dignified. To remedy this, very old or very ill people who choose to do so should have the right to a relatively painless suicide. Everyone has the right to die as well as the right to live, and this should be a right under the law as well.

Cybernationalism

Social networks and video-sharing sites don’t always bring people closer together

“NATION shall speak peace unto nation.” Eighty years ago, Britain’s state broadcasters adopted that motto to signal their hope that modern communications would establish new bonds of friendship between people divided by culture, political boundaries and distance.

For those who still cling to that ideal, the latest trends on the internet are depressing. Of course, as anyone would expect, governments use their official websites to boast about their achievements and to argue their corner—usually rather clunkily—in disputes about territory, symbols or historical rights and wrongs.

What is much more disturbing is the way in which skilled young surfers—the very people whom the internet might have liberated from the shackles of state-sponsored ideologies—are using the wonders of electronics to stoke hatred between countries, races or religions. Sometimes these cyber-zealots seem to be acting at their governments’ behest—but often they are working on their own, determined to outdo their political masters in propagating dislike of some unspeakable foe.

Consider the response in Russia to “The Soviet Story”, a Latvian documentary that compares communism with fascism. If this film had come out five years ago, the Kremlin would have issued an angry press release and encouraged some young hoodlums to make another assault on Latvia’s embassy. Some Slavophile politicians would have made wild threats.

These days, the reaction from hardline Russian nationalists is a bit more subtle. They are using blogs to raise funds for an alternative documentary to present the Soviet communist record in a good light. Well-wishers with little cash can help in other ways, for example by helping with translation into and from Baltic languages.

Meanwhile, America’s rednecks can find lots of material on the web with which to fuel and indulge their prejudices. For example, there are “suicide-bomber” games which pit the contestant against a generic bearded Muslim; such entertainment has drawn protests both in Israel—where people say it trivialises terrorism—and from Muslim groups who say it equates their faith with violence. Border Patrol, another charming online game, invites you to shoot illegal Mexican immigrants crossing the border.

From the earliest days of the internet the new medium became a forum for nationalist spats that were sometimes relatively innocent by today’s standards. People sparred over whether Freddie Mercury, a rock singer, was Iranian, Parsi or Azeri; whether the Sea of Japan should be called the East Sea or the East Sea of Korea; and whether Israel could call hummus part of its cuisine. Sometimes such arguments moved to Wikipedia, a user-generated reference service, whose elaborate moderation rules put a limit to acrimony.

But e-arguments also led to hacking wars. Nobody is surprised to hear of Chinese assaults on American sites that promote the Tibetan cause; or of hacking contests between Serbs and Albanians, or Turks and Armenians. A darker development is the abuse of blogs, social networks, maps and video-sharing sites that make it easy to publish incendiary material and form hate groups. A study published in May by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human-rights group, found a 30% increase last year in the number of sites that foment hatred and violence; the total was around 8,000.

Social networks are particularly useful for self-organised nationalist communities that are decentralised and lack a clear structure. On Facebook alone one can join groups like “Belgium Doesn’t Exist”, “Abkhazia is not Georgia”, “Kosovo is Serbia” or “I Hate Pakistan”. Not all the news is bad; there are also groups for friendship between Greeks and Turks, or Israelis and Palestinians. But at the other extreme are niche networks, less well-known than Facebook, that unite the sort of extremists whose activities are restricted by many governments but hard to regulate when they go global. Podblanc, a sort of alternative YouTube for “white interests, white culture and white politics” offers plenty of material to keep a racist amused.
Tiny but deadly

The small size of these online communities does not mean they are unimportant. The power of a nationalist message can be amplified with blogs, online maps and text messaging; and as a campaign migrates from medium to medium, fresh layers of falsehood can be created. During the crisis that engulfed Kenya earlier this year, for example, it was often blog posts and mobile-phone messages that gave the signal for fresh attacks. Participants in recent anti-American marches in South Korea were mobilised by online petitions, forums and blogs, some of which promoted a crazy theory about Koreans having a genetic vulnerability to mad-cow disease.

In Russia, a nationalist blogger published names and contact details of students from the Caucasus attending Russia’s top universities, attaching a video-clip of dark-skinned teenagers beating up ethnic Russians. Russian nationalist blogs reposted the story—creating a nightmare for the students who were targeted.

Spreading hatred on the web has become far easier since the sharp drop in the cost of producing, storing and distributing digital content. High-quality propaganda used to require good cartoonists; now anyone can make and disseminate slick images. Whether it’s a Hungarian group organising an anti-Roma poster competition, a Russian anti-immigrant lobby publishing the location of minority neighbourhoods, or Slovak nationalists displaying a map of Europe without Hungary, the web makes it simple to spread fear and loathing.

The sheer ease of aggregation (assembling links to existing sources, videos and articles) is a boon. Take anti-cnn.com, a website built by a Chinese entrepreneur in his 20s, which aggregates cases of the Western media’s allegedly pro-Tibetan bias. As soon as it appealed for material, more than 1,000 people supplied examples. Quickly the site became a leading motor of Chinese cyber-nationalism, fuelling boycotts of brands and street protests.

And then there is history. A decade ago, a zealot seeking to prove some absurd proposition—such as the denial of the Nazi Holocaust, or the Ukrainian famine—might spend days of research in the library looking for obscure works of propaganda. Today, digital versions of these books, even those out of press for decades, are accessible in dedicated online libraries. In short, it has never been easier to propagate hatred and lies. People with better intentions might think harder about how they too can make use of the net.
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How is using the internet to spread hate different from spreading hate via pamphlets or newspapers or bullitan boards? The only real difference is it's faster and more effective. Hate is hate no matter where you find it. It's a shame, though, that people have such strong prejudices that they feel they must create entire blogs or online groups about it. In the end, though, e-hatred is just another example of how much malice people are capable of. Human nature never changes, but the technology used to connect humans does.

The Moment of Truth

In many parts of the world, the right to change one's beliefs is under threat

Illustration by Garry Neill

AS AN intellectually gifted Jewish New Yorker who had reached manhood in the mid-1950s, Marc Schleifer was relentless in his pursuit of new cultural and spiritual experiences. He dallied with Anglo-Catholicism, intrigued by the ritual but not quite able to believe the doctrine, and went through a phase of admiration for Latin American socialism. Experimenting with lifestyles as well as creeds, he tried respectability as an advertising executive, and a more bohemian life in the raffish expatriate scene of North Africa.

Returning from Morocco to his home city, he was shocked by the harsh anonymity of life in the urban West. And one day, riding the New York subway, he opened the Koran at a passage which spoke of the mystery of God: beyond human understanding, but as close as a jugular vein. Suddenly, everything fell into place. It was only a matter of time before he embraced Islam by pronouncing before witnesses that “there is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.”

Some 40 years on from that life-changing moment—not untypical of the turning points that many individuals experience—Abdallah Schleifer has won distinction as a Muslim intellectual. Last year he was one of 138 Muslim thinkers who signed an open letter to Christian leaders calling for a deeper theological dialogue. The list of signatories included (along with the muftis from Cairo, Damascus and Jakarta) several other people who had made surprising journeys. One grew up as an English nonconformist; another as a Catholic farm boy from Oregon; another in the more refined Catholic world of bourgeois Italy.

Sometimes conversion is gradual, but quite commonly things come to a head in a single instant, which can be triggered by a text, an image, a ceremony or some private realisation. A religious person would call such a moment a summons from God; a psychologist might speak of an instant when the walls between the conscious and unconscious break down, perhaps because an external stimulus—words, a picture, a rite—connects with something very deep inside. For people of an artistic bent, the catalyst is often a religious image which serves as a window into a new reality. One recurring theme in conversion stories is that cultural forms which are, on the face of it, foreign to the convert somehow feel familiar, like a homecoming. That, the convert feels, “is what I have always believed without being fully aware of it.”

Take Jennie Baker, an ethnic Chinese nurse who moved from Malaysia to England. She was an evangelical, practising but not quite satisfied with a Christianity that eschews aids to worship such as pictures, incense or elaborate rites. When she first walked into an Orthodox church, and took in the icons that occupied every inch of wall-space, everything in this “new” world made sense to her, and some teachings, like the idea that every home should have a corner for icons and prayer, resonated with her Asian heritage. Soon she and her English husband helped establish a Greek Orthodox parish in Lancashire.

Following the heart

In the West it is generally taken for granted that people have a perfect, indeed sacred, right to follow their own religious path, and indeed to invite—though never compel—other people to join them. The liberal understanding of religion lays great emphasis on the right to change belief. Earlier this year, a poll found that one in four Americans moves on from the faith of their upbringing.

America’s foundation as a refuge for Europe’s Christian dissidents has endowed it with a deep sense of the right to follow and propagate any form of religion, with no impediment, or help, from the state. In the 1980s America saw some lively debates over whether new-fangled “cults” should be distinguished from conventional forms of religion, and curbed; but in the end a purely libertarian view prevailed. The promotion of religious liberty is an axiom of American foreign policy, not just in places where freedom is obviously under threat, but even in Germany, which gets gentle scoldings for its treatment of Scientology.

But America’s religious free-for-all is very much the exception, not the rule, in human history—and increasingly rare, some would say, in the world today. In most human societies, conversion has been seen as an act whose consequences are as much social and political as spiritual; and it has been assumed that the wider community, in the form of the family, the village or the state, has every right to take an interest in the matter. The biggest reason why conversion is becoming a hot international topic is the Muslim belief that leaving Islam is at best a grave sin, at worst a crime that merits execution (see article). Another factor in a growing global controversy is the belief in some Christian circles that Christianity must retain the right to seek and receive converts, even in parts of the world where this may be viewed as a form of cultural or spiritual aggression.

A fighting matter

The idea that religion constitutes a community (where the loss or gain of even one member is a matter of deep, legitimate concern to all other members) is as old as religion itself. Christianity teaches that the recovery of a “lost sheep” causes rejoicing in heaven; for a Muslim, there is no human category more important than the umma, the worldwide community of believers.

But in most human societies the reasons why conversion causes controversy have little do with religious dogma, and much to do with power structures (within the family or the state) and politics. Conversion will never be seen as a purely individual matter when one religiously-defined community is at war or armed standoff with another. During Northern Ireland’s Troubles a move across the Catholic-Protestant divide could be life-threatening, at least in working-class Belfast—and not merely because people felt strongly about papal infallibility.

And in any situation where religion and authority (whether political, economic or personal) are bound up, changes of spiritual allegiance cause shock-waves. In the Ottoman empire, the status of Christians and Jews was at once underpinned and circumscribed by a regime that saw religion as an all-important distinction. Non-Muslims were exempt from the army, but barred from many of the highest offices, and obliged to pay extra taxes. When a village in, say, Crete or Bosnia converted en masse from Christianity to Islam, this was seen as betrayal by those who stayed Christian, in part because it reduced the population from which the Ottomans expected a given amount of tax.

In the days of British rule over the south of Ireland, it was hard for Catholics to hold land, although they were the overwhelming majority. An opportunistic conversion to the rulers’ religion was seen as “letting the side down” by those who kept the faith. Similar inter-communal tensions arose in many European countries where Jews converted to Christianity in order to enter university or public service.

In most modern societies, the elaborate discrimination which made religious allegiance into a public matter is felt to be a thing of the past. But is this so? In almost every post-Ottoman country, traces exist of the mentality that treats religion as a civic category, where entry and exit is a matter of public negotiation, not just private belief. Perhaps Lebanon, where political power is allocated along confessional lines (and boat-rocking changes of religious affiliation are virtually impossible) is the most perfectly post-Ottoman state. But there are other holdovers. In “secular” Turkey, the Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Jewish minorities have certain poorly observed rights that no other religious minority enjoys; isolated Christians, or dissident Muslims, face great social pressure to conform to standard Sunni Islam. In Greece, it is unconstitutional to proselytise; that makes life hard for Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons. In Egypt, the fact that building a Christian church requires leave from the head of state is a direct legacy of a (liberalising) Ottoman decree of 1856.

Tactical manoeuvres

But the Ottoman empire is by no means the only semi-theocratic realm whose influence is still palpable in the governance of religious affairs, including conversion. In an odd way, the Soviet Union continued the legacy of the tsars by dividing citizens into groups (including Jews or some Muslim ethnicities) where membership had big consequences but was not a matter of individual choice. In post-Soviet Russia, the prevailing Orthodox church rejects the notion of a free market in ideas. It seeks (and often gets) state preference for “traditional” faiths, defined as Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism. This implies that other forms of Christianity are “poaching” if they seek to recruit Russians.

Illustration by Garry Neill

But issues of conversion are also painful in some former territories of the British empire, which allowed its subjects to follow their own communal laws. Take India, which once aspired to be a secular state, and whose constitution calls for a uniform civil code for all citizens. That prospect is now remote, and the fact that different religious groups live by different family laws, and are treated unequally by the state and society, has created incentives for “expedient” conversion. A colourful body of jurisprudence, dating from the British Raj, concerns people who changed faith to solve a personal dilemma—like men who switched from Hinduism to Islam so as to annul their marriage and wed somebody else. In 1995, the Supreme Court tried to stop this by saying people could not dodge social obligations, or avoid bigamy charges, by changing faith. What India’s case law shows, says Marco Ventura, a religious-law professor, is the contrast between conversion in rich, liberal societies and traditional ones, where discrimination tempts people to make tactical moves.

And in many ways religious freedom is receding, not advancing, in India. Half a dozen Indian states have introduced laws that make it hard for people to leave Hinduism. These states are mostly ruled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). But last year Himachal Pradesh became the first state led by the more secular Congress party to bring in such legislation: such is the power of Hindu sentiment that even non-religious parties pander to it.

The state’s new law is billed as a “freedom of religion” measure, but it has the opposite effect: anyone wishing to switch faiths must tell the district magistrate 30 days before or risk a fine. If a person converts another “by the use of force or by inducement or by any other fraudulent means”, they can be jailed for up to two years, fined, or both. Local pastors say “inducement” could be taken to mean anything, including giving alms to the poor.

Supporters of such laws say proselytisers, or alleluia wallahs, are converting poor Hindus by force. It is true that Christian evangelism is in full swing in parts of India, especially in its eastern tribal belt, and that it enjoys some success. Officially, fewer than 3% of India’s 1.1 billion people are Christian. But some Christians say the real total may be double that. Christian converts, most of whom are born as dalits at the bottom of the Hindu caste system, often hide their new faith for fear of losing their rights to state jobs and university places kept for the lower castes.

But it is unlikely that many Hindu-to-Christian switches are forced. In states with anti-conversion laws, credible allegations of conversion under duress have very rarely been made.

Anyway, India’s arguments have more to do with politics than theology. Hindutva, the teaching that India is a Hindu nation and that Christians and Muslims are outsiders, has been a vote-winner for the BJP. Even in Himachal Pradesh, voters were unmoved by the Congress party’s attempt to ride the religious bandwagon; the BJP still won the latest elections.

The contest between theocratic politics and a notionally secular state looks even more unequal in another ex-British land, Malaysia, where freedom of choice in religion is enshrined in the federal constitution, but Islamic law is imposed with growing strictness on the Muslim majority.

Until the mid-1990s, say Malaysian civil-rights advocates like Malik Imtiaz Sarwar, the federal authorities enforced religious freedom; the National Registration Department, a federal agency, would comply when anybody asked to record a change of religion. More recently, both that agency and Malaysia’s top judges have deferred to the sharia courts, which enjoy increasing power in all 13 states of the Malaysian federation; and those courts rarely let a registered Muslim quit the fold. A recent exception was an ethnic Chinese woman who was briefly married to an Iranian; a sharia court let her re-embrace Buddhism, but only on the ground that she was never fully Muslim, so the idea of “Once a Muslim, always a Muslim” remained intact.

A more telling sign of the times was the verdict in the case of Lina Joy, a Malay convert from Islam to Christianity who asked a federal court to register the change on her ID card. By two to one the judges rejected her bid, arguing that one “cannot, at one’s whims or fancies, renounce or embrace a religion”. Too bad, then, for any Malaysians who have a moment of truth on the subway, especially if the faith to which they are called happens not to be Islam.

July 24th, 2008, The Economist

Perhaps it's because I'm an American, but I believe that religion is, should be, has to be a matter of individual choice. It's a belief, therefore your religion should change based on your actual belief system(or lack thereof). Problems arise because a religion is also seen as a community, and leaving or joining a community will always raise some questions, and sometimes provoke hostility. However, state-imposed religion is the most serious problem. When the government gets involved, religion is no longer a belief system or a community, but simply a label. A label that allows one to be placed in a category, given special privileges, assigned special restrictions, charged extra taxes, and even restricted in their job eligibility. Why is the American approach to religion the exception when it makes religious discrimination a lot more difficult? The world would be better off if all governments left religion the way it should be: as an individual choice.

The Return of Mr Nyet

An abrasive Russian veto is prompting fears at the UN of a new diplomatic logjam that recalls the bad old days

Corbis

IN THE corridors of the blue-tinted building on the East River, the shock is still palpable. Despite the recent insistence of Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary-general, that human rights and security are intertwined, Russia and China have blocked an effort to isolate and punish the despots of Zimbabwe, in a move that seems to bode ill for action by the Security Council in other places.

Especially disappointing for many Westerners was the abrupt way in which Russia vetoed sanctions against President Robert Mugabe—only a day after Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s new head of state, had joined his partners in the Group of Eight, a rich-country club, in deploring Zimbabwe’s rigged and violent elections. The G8 statement had included a warning of “financial and other measures against those individuals responsible for violence”.

For Western governments that now face the prospect of working with Mr Medvedev over global hot spots from Iran to North Korea, the Zimbabwe veto raised several hard questions. Was there a failure of judgment by the new Russian leader? Was he overruled by other people, such as his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, who is now prime minister and was given formal responsibility this week for implementing foreign policy? Did Russia’s sour mood reflect other gripes, say over America’s vocal support for Georgia, or its missile-defence deal with the Czech Republic?

Other questions: was Russia boosting its own interests in southern Africa, or just acting up? And is the UN heading for a rerun of the cold war, when Soviet leaders like Nikita Khrushchev and his envoy Andrei Gromyko (pictured above) sparred with the West over almost everything?

The Kremlin, for its part, reacted peevishly to the West’s dismay. Russian officials said there had been no change in their policy, and that the West was once again distorting their position maliciously. The G8 statement had indeed carried Russia’s signature, but it made no mention of UN sanctions. The main point, they added, was that Zimbabwe’s travails posed no threat to regional or global stability; they were outside the Security Council’s remit.

Such talk is consistent with a foreign-policy style that has altered little since Mr Medvedev took power. He may avoid Mr Putin’s belligerent tone, but there is no sign of the Kremlin becoming friendlier to the West. Just to quash any doubts, Mr Putin has stressed that Mr Medvedev is “just as much a Russian nationalist, in a positive sense, as I am.” Mr Medvedev has done his best to prove that point, repeating Mr Putin’s warnings about American unilateralism. And even if Mr Medvedev wants to repair Russia’s relations with the West, it seems unlikely that he has carved out any real power to make independent decisions, at least so far. This week, he told diplomats to be “more aggressive”.

But none of this quite explains why Russia picked a fight with the West for the sake of a country in which it has no obvious interest. One reason, say Russia-watchers, is that punishing Mr Mugabe for stealing the elections and suppressing human rights sounded a bit close to the bone.

Indeed Russia’s foreign ministry hinted at this when it said that punishing Mr Mugabe would “set a dangerous precedent, opening a way to the Security Council interfering in countries’ internal affairs over various political events, including elections.” Given the dictatorial nature of many of Russia’s friends—like Belarus—and its own spotty record on human rights and elections, it is hardly surprising that Russia was unhappy about punitive sanctions against Zimbabwe.

In this climate, Western illusions that Russia might side with America against the regime in Zimbabwe betray a basic lack of understanding of what makes Russia tick, says Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, a think-tank. These days, Russian thinking divides the world into America and its docile friends on one hand, and “sovereign” countries, like China, India and South Africa on the other. Given Russia’s aim to speak for the second camp, its veto was logical—and as Russian officials stressed, it reflected the African Union line.

But Russia’s move doesn’t indicate that it has any constructive aim in southern Africa—other than exploiting whatever vestigial ties may linger from the era when Soviet arms (like the Kalashnikov, a national symbol in Mozambique) helped to overthrow white rule.

Ties that don’t bind

Igor Sechin, one of Mr Putin’s toughest aides, was once a Soviet “interpreter” in Mozambique, when it was in the grip of Marxist fervour. But even in those days, the Soviet attitude to Africa was ambivalent; as they dished out the rifles, its envoys used to mutter racist predictions about the likely effects of black rule.

And at the height of its involvement in southern Africa, the Soviet Union was often frustrated that its largesse did not translate into influence, says Georgi Derluguian, a professor at America’s Northwestern University who worked as a Soviet adviser in Mozambique. But much more recently, a semi-official Russian foreign-policy report said Africa was still a zone of competition with the West. Western countries wanted “control over natural resources, dominance in consumer markets and decisive influence in [the region’s] economic and political evolution,” it thundered.

Compared with China, Russia’s efforts to counter the West in Africa have so far been feeble; China’s trade with Zimbabwe is ten times that of Russia. Although (or possibly, because) it has more interests at stake, China has seemed somewhat more amenable than Russia to arguments about the need to behave responsibly in Africa.

To many observers, it seems that the Kremlin’s determination to play geopolitical games on every front could end up benefiting China, which is happy to let Russia take the blame for coddling dictators. But if Russia overplays the role of spoiler-in-chief, that could easily backfire. Mainly because of their veto rights, Russians are deeply attached to the UN as the only legitimate forum for solving geopolitical problems. Anatoly Gromyko (son of Andrei and a former head of the Soviet Union’s Africa Institute) still speaks of the Security Council as the world’s “greatest organ for maintaining stability”.

But if Russia makes a habit of saying nyet to everything, in the churlish way that was a hallmark of the older Mr Gromyko, then the Security Council itself will lose effectiveness and prestige. And all its permanent members (especially the weaker ones) would then lose out too.

The Economist

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If no one is willing to negotiate, then nothing gets done. Perhaps Mr Gromyko will recognize that, but then again, perhaps not. The best way for this issue to be solved, of course, is if Russia chooses not to be a total nay-sayer. Other than that, Mr Gromyko will have to be cajoled into agreeing and this may fail. Then people on both sides get pissed off and everything is deadlocked. Not good news for those living in terror under despots, or for those living in the E.U, either.

Round the horn

Campaigners’ fear for elephants, and their own credibility

BANNING almost all cross-border trade in ivory, as the United Nations did in 1989, doesn’t seem to have achieved its stated aim, that of ending a smuggling business worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Soon the world will be able to assess the effects of a move in the other direction: a decision to let China bid at a one-off auction of legal ivory from four African countries whose elephant populations have stabilised. Hitherto Japan is the only country to have been authorised to make legal bids.

After some hard talking by Chinese officials who say they have clamped down on the black market, and campaigning by environmental groups that disagree, the decision went China’s way at a meeting in Geneva of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), a lobby group, said this condemns “the world’s elephants to slaughter” and plays “Russian roulette” with a species whose numbers in some places, at least, are unknown but might be worryingly low. The campaigners’ line is that legal sales merely abet the illegal kind, especially when the black market is way beyond officialdom’s control.

Nobody can deny that China’s black market was rampant until recently. In a report to the UN leaked by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a campaigning group, this month, Chinese officials admitted that between 1991 and 2002 they had lost sight of 121 tonnes of ivory, the equivalent of the tusks from 11,000 elephants.

Is China observing the CITES rules now? A brief visit to China in 2007 by inspectors from the CITES secretariat suggested that things had improved: they said that ivory was becoming harder to find, though they came across a shop in the city of Xi’an with ivory carvings of dubious provenance. A bigger investigation was carried out by TRAFFIC, an independent British-based group that monitors wildlife trade. After studying 10,000 shops between 2006 and 2008, it reported a progressive decline in the availability of illegal ivory. This had coincided with greater police vigilance.

The idea that China is cleaning up its act got another boost in March, when over 750kg (1,650lb) of raw ivory was seized in Guangxi Province. As CITES notes, the penalties for illegal trading include life imprisonment and death. But the EIA, which uses undercover methods to probe the trade, says things are not as good as they seem; in 2007 its researchers found a roomful of illegal ivory, including an uncut tusk, for sale in the city of Dalian. Last month they made a small find in Gansu province.

A more interesting question is how the legal sales now in prospect will affect the black market. A fresh supply of legal ivory may depress the price, and reduce the incentive to poach. TRAFFIC notes that after a legal auction in 1999, the price fell; this led to a decline in poaching over five years. For doctrinaire types, who oppose all trade in ivory, the forthcoming sale is not just a challenge to endangered animals; it could be a threat to the credibility of their best-loved arguments.

The Economist

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So China is legally allowed to buy ivory now. Good. Supply and demand rules every market, and if there's more of a supply of legal ivory, there won't be as much demand for illegal ivory. Pretty simple, really. Poaching is terrible, but legal trade is quite different. If elephant populations are stable, then why not?

Political Immunity

The rules that protected world leaders from prosecution are being rewritten

“THERE is no longer any doubt as to whether the current [Bush] administration has committed war crimes,” Antonio Taguba, a retired American general who conducted the first investigation into prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, declares in a new report on the maltreatment of detainees: “The only question that remains is…whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

APCharles Taylor: a high-flying tyrant comes down to earth

As George Bush’s presidency draws to a close, many others in his administration, including Mr Bush himself, may be asking the same. Like all heads of state and government, along with many of their senior officials, the American president enjoys wide immunity from both criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits, at home and abroad, while he remains in office. But once he goes, so does much of his protection. And though nobody expects Mr Bush to face legal problems at home, it is just possible that in some other country, a prosecutor (or a private citizen initiating a civil suit) will try to hold him to account for America’s record in Iraq and elsewhere.

Across the world, leaders are fretting about the judicial moves that might be in store for them, especially after they leave office. Italy’s newly re-elected prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is trying to rush an immunity bill through parliament to protect himself against any prosecution for financial misdeeds. Jacques Chirac, having managed to stave off prosecution while president, has now been charged in relation to a party-funding scandal during his term as mayor of Paris. And one reason why Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe is clinging to power could be his fear of being hauled before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

Traditionally, government leaders have enjoyed two types of legal protection when abroad: functional immunity, shielding them for life from prosecution in the domestic courts of other countries for acts carried out as part of their official duties; and personal immunity, protecting them from prosecution in foreign courts for all acts while in office—“irrespective of their gravity”, as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in 2002—but only for as long as they stay in power.

But a growing school of thought is challenging the idea that important folk should be deemed “more equal than others” before the law. The argument that some crimes merit no immunity is almost a century old. Provision was made in the 1919 Versailles Treaty for the defeated German emperor to be tried for “a supreme offence against international morality”. In 1945 the Nuremberg tribunals likewise refused to absolve Nazi leaders of responsibility for war crimes and other atrocities.

But it was not until the past decade that leaders who once saw themselves as untouchable really began to worry. The charters of the ICC and the various international ad hoc tribunals set up to try genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity all explicitly rule out immunity for anyone. The emerging idea that high office can never provide an absolute defence for such crimes was reinforced by the House of Lords’ ruling in 1999 that Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s ex-dictator, could be prosecuted for torture. Some crimes were so heinous, the law lords said, that they could not be considered part of a head of state’s official functions—though this is still disputed.

A few months later, Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian despot, became the first serving head of state to be indicted for war crimes. Charles Taylor was the next. Indicted in 2003 while still president of Liberia, he is now on trial in The Hague. Several former heads of state have also found themselves in the dock on war-crimes charges. They include Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, executed in 2006; Chad’s Hissène Habré, facing trial before a special court in Senegal; and Khieu Samphan, former Khmer Rouge president, now awaiting trial by a UN-backed court in Cambodia.

A third serving head of state may soon be indicted. On July 14th the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, is due to announce plans to charge further Sudanese government officials over the continuing atrocities in Darfur. It is just possible that President Omar al-Bashir will be among them. He has refused to hand over Ahmad Harun, his minister for humanitarian affairs, indicted by the court a year ago.

But the ICC, set up under the 1998 Rome Statute, does not have unlimited jurisdiction. It can only prosecute international crimes involving at least one country that has signed up to the court. Although 106 countries have joined that list, America has not; nor has Zimbabwe. This means that Mr Mugabe could not be prosecuted by the ICC unless there was a referral to the court by the Security Council, as happened with Sudan, which is not a party either. It is not clear that recent events in Zimbabwe, however awful, amount to a “crime against humanity”, defined by the ICC’s statute as a “widespread or systematic attack” on civilians. But if the court did take up the case, Mr Mugabe would be equally vulnerable, in or out of office, given the lack of immunity for such crimes.

Theory and practice

There is no technical reason why the ICC should not try to go after Mr Bush, in the unlikely event that it found America was guilty of atrocities in Afghanistan (which is a party to the court, while Iraq is not.)

However, there is another way that the leaders of countries that have stayed out of the ICC could be prosecuted, despite their head-of-state immunity. That is by means of the principle known as universal jurisdiction. This allows states to prosecute international crimes such as genocide, torture and crimes against humanity in their own domestic courts, even when they have no link with the perpetrator, victims or site of the crime.

The scope of universal jurisdiction is disputed. Some say that the principle falls under treaty, not customary, law and is hence restricted in application to states that are party to the relevant treaty; so Britain could not bring action for torture under universal jurisdiction against Mr Mugabe, because Zimbabwe is not a party to the UN Convention Against Torture. Others say so many states have signed accords like the Geneva Conventions and the torture pact that they now amount to customary law.

The idea of “universal jurisdiction” is certainly gathering steam. It is already in use in at least eight European countries, with Spain, Belgium and Britain to the fore. Although the 2002 ICJ ruling on political immunity means that serving heads of state and senior government officials cannot be hauled before the domestic courts of other countries, this can happen after they leave office. Universal jurisdiction was invoked in Britain’s Pinochet case. Mr Habré would probably not be on trial in Senegal if Belgium had not invoked the “universal” principle against him.

Human-rights groups in France and Germany have sought to bring proceedings under universal jurisdiction against Donald Rumsfeld, America’s ex-defence secretary, citing atrocities in Iraq. Spanish prosecutors have invoked the principle to try pursuing several former Latin American dictators for crimes against humanity, though without success.

All this activity has encouraged countries to pursue miscreant ex-leaders in their own courts, where international immunity laws do not apply. Each country is free to determine what immunity, if any, it grants to its heads of state, government ministers and legislators. Its scope varies widely, as does the ease with which it can be lifted. But the past decade has seen a flurry of domestic prosecutions against past leaders, whether for human-rights abuses or financial crimes. In Uruguay, Suriname, Thailand, Peru and Bangladesh, ex-heads of state or government are either in the dock or awaiting trial; meanwhile Israel’s prime minister is under investigation (for fraud). The once-cosy blanket of immunity is starting to look rather threadbare.

The Economist

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What's to be disputed about holding people responsible for their crimes? Holding a position of power doesn't justify or excuse criminal acts, therefore it should not keep anyone from facing the consequences of said acts. I definitely agree that heads of state should not have total immunity. Actually, I think they shouldn't be granted any immunity at all. Each person should be responsible for their actions, regardless of their current (or former) station in life. Actually, I didn't know that automatic immunity for heads of state existed. Universal jurisdiction sounds like a very good way to hold people accountable. It's something all countries should implement.

The Marathon's Not Over

In some parts of the world, family planning is still a distant dream

THREE decades ago, many pundits were saying that an ever-rising population could lead to global disaster. They argued that ecological catastrophe, resource wars and other tragedies were inevitable unless radical measures were taken to defuse the coming “population bomb”. Happily, a mixture of technological innovation, economic dynamism and successful population-control strategies have helped defuse that bomb, or at least delay its detonation.

As the United Nations commemorated World Population Day this week, there was reason for cheer. Population experts have been busy revising their long-term scenarios downward to account for falling fertility not only in wealthy Europe and Japan but also in poor countries like Bangladesh and Kenya. Stan Bernstein of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) even insists that “this is one of the great development success stories of the last 40 to 50 years,” pointing out that the active use of family-planning techniques in developing countries has shot up from 10% to 12% in the early 1960s to over 60% today.

That is impressive, but there is a second, less happy population story. Even as the world in general has been getting a grip on the population problem, things still look bleak for the poorest people in the world. Mona Byrkit of CARE, a charity, calls this the “huge unfinished business” of the population-control movement.

In a report released this week, experts at the World Bank show that 35 countries (31 of them in sub-Saharan Africa) are lagging badly, with sky-high fertility rates and limited access to family-planning tools. In contrast with the relative success that many post-Soviet countries have had in increasing access to contraceptives, the agency’s investigators have shown how African women are too often forced to turn to poorly executed abortion as “contraception of last resort”—sometimes with fatal results (see chart above).

What particularly troubles Sadia Chowdhury, one of the report’s authors, is what the agency calls “unmet need for contraception”: the difference between how many children a woman in, say, an African village wants to have and the number she actually ends up bearing. Even allowing for all cultural and economic factors that might prompt such women to produce more children than their sisters in wealthy countries, there seems to be a huge gap (see chart below).

Why does this happen? Money is not the main reason. In most developing countries, contraception is in theory available to the indigent either free or at nominal cost through state agencies. The trouble is that these bureaucracies are often inefficient, understaffed and incapable of working properly in rural areas.

Politics clearly plays a role. One factor, says CARE’s Ms Byrkit, is the social conservatism of the Bush administration, which makes it hard for those receiving American funding (for HIV/AIDS, for example) even to work with charities providing abortion counselling. Another problem is flagging political momentum. The very success of many parts of the world in limiting population has sapped donors’ enthusiasm. The UNFPA’s Mr Bernstein likens this to the first finishers of a marathon declaring the race over before the rest of the runners cross the finish line.

If bad politics leads to terrible results, the reverse may also hold good. Ms Chowdhury points to the success of her native Bangladesh; she says political will and female empowerment can make all the difference even in a poor country. And there are some other positive signs on the political front. The UN has recently, and not before time, decided that population control should be one of its much-vaunted Millennium Development Goals.

July 10th, 2008, The Economist

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How can contraception be more effectively distributed to poorer developing countries? Changing negative perceptions about condoms and abortion both in the donor and benefiting countries would surely help. No woman should have to end up with more children than she is willing to have. This, even more than the issue of overpopulation, is the most important reason for making sure everyone has access to a family planning center, no matter where they live.

The discreet charms of international go-betweens

FOR two months, Kenya, East Africa’s most prosperous and supposedly stable country, hovered on the brink of self-immolation as two warring political factions ripped the country apart after a disputed election at the end of 2007. Kofi Annan, the former secretary-general of the United Nations, was brought in to try to resolve the conflict between the ruling party, which was accused of rigging its presidential victory, and the opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM). As ethnic violence raged nearby, negotiators from the two sides would sometimes almost come to blows themselves as Mr Annan tried to find common ground between them.

But when deadlock loomed, both sides’ negotiating teams were smuggled off to a secret location in a game park for two days, with just Mr Annan and his secretariat, including a team from a little-known group called the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (CHD). There, with no distractions from the media and far from the political circus in the capital, Nairobi, came the vital breakthrough. The main outlines of a deal between the two sides were talked through in an atmosphere of relative calm; a new national unity government, comprising both the ruling party and the ODM, was inaugurated a few weeks later.

Originally, Mr Annan had flown into Nairobi with just two people from the CHD, a Swiss-based organisation of mediators. During his six weeks or so of mediating he drew on the considerable resources of the UN, but he also made constant use of his CHD backup.

They provided him with tactical advice on the mediation process, such as when to take the negotiators on “retreat” and how to involve the media. And they also drafted agreements as the two sides spoke during the negotiations, so that at the end of a day an agreed statement could be issued immediately to the press. This gave the mediation the vital momentum that Mr Annan wanted.

The Kenyan talks provide a good example of the sort of skills that a new kind of international mediator can bring to the age-old work of conflict resolution. For as the nature of the world’s conflicts has changed in the past decade or so, so the demand for a new type of mediator has grown too.

The CHD, for instance, founded by just four people only nine years ago, now has a staff of over 70. The UN has traditionally provided a forum for the discussion and resolution of international disputes. However as Kreddha, a Dutch-based mediation group, argues: “There are no equivalent mechanisms for intrastate dispute resolution...despite the fact that most violent conflicts today are not international but intrastate in character.” The new mediators provide the new mechanisms.

Many of these contemporary conflicts involve insurgents, secessionists or even “resource-warriors”, like those in the oil-rich Niger Delta of Nigeria, who clash with governments. Rival politicians can be brought into open conflict by elections, such as in Kenya, or now Zimbabwe.

The new kinds of disputes involve non-traditional parties such as international mining or oil companies pitched against indigenous people, as well as national governments tackling more established terrorist groups. One study has shown that over the past 15 years military victories have resolved only 7.5% of conflicts, while negotiations have prevailed in 92% of cases; “the challenge is thus not being a skilful warrior but a skilful negotiator.”

The UN might, at best, offer some bureaucratic and political clout, but it is also big, cumbersome and leaky. In its place, the new mediators operate on a much smaller scale and offer discretion, secrecy and flexibility. Mr Annan used the CHD in Kenya because it has no political agenda, so could be relied upon not to leak material in order to influence the talks one way or another. These mediators are ideal for getting involved in highly charged disputes between governments, for instance, and indigenous “terrorist” groups; they can set up back-channels, of the sort that proved vital in bringing about the eventual peace deal between the British government and the Irish Republican Army.

Thus the CHD provided a first conduit between the rebel Free Aceh Movement and the Indonesian government, as the Indonesians refused to use the UN because of anger over its role in East Timor. In Nepal, the CHD established the first links between the government and the Maoist insurgents in 2000. Here a key factor was “plausible deniability”, as was trust. Andrew Marshall, who sought out the first Maoist interlocutors, says that “neither side wanted their own people and cadres to know they were talking to the other side”, so the leaders of both the government and the rebels invested their trust in the third party, CHD, to keep the talks secret. Eventually, several countries got involved and this year the Maoists prevailed in elections.

The CHD also acted as a back-channel between the Spanish government and the Basque separatist movement ETA leading up to a ceasefire in 2006; it is currently trying to bring together the Darfur rebel groups in Sudan as one negotiating body. Kreddha has been involved in mediation work in the Niger Delta, and in New Caledonia between a mining corporation, Goro Nickel, and an indigenous environmental organisation called Rheebu Nuu. Such disputes are often called “resource conflicts”, and require specialist mediators with a knowledge of international law. Another new organisation called Conflicts Forum, founded by a former British intelligence officer, Alastair Crooke, attempts to serve as an interlocutor between militant Islamist groups, such as Hamas and Hizbullah, and the West.

Some mediation work can be instantly glamorous and hugely fulfilling, as in Kenya, but most of it is attritional; often it is pretty boring. Negotiations can drag on for years, but here again the small mediators can add a lot of value. Foreign politicians from America and Britain, for example, may bring a lot of pressure to bear on a dispute for a short amount of time, but inevitably they come and go according to the whims and demands of domestic politics. Professional mediators can stick with a conflict for years, thus building up a level of trust and knowledge that cannot easily be replicated. Much of a mediator’s work lies in getting the logistics right; trusted third-party interlocutors are needed simply to arrange meetings and book hotel rooms which will not be bugged by the other side.

In the case of CHD, it can also get visas and facilitate travel for “terrorists” taking part in talks in neutral venues like Switzerland or Norway. Both are strong financial backers of the centre, and neither is a member of the EU; they are thus outside the conventions restricting travel for those on some terrorist watch lists. Small countries backing small mediators can make a big difference; the betting now is on Mr Annan and his team trying to repeat their Kenya trick in beleaguered Zimbabwe.

The Economist

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Now that sounds like a good, challenging, rewarding, fulfilling career. Sad that the use of secret ambassadors is neccesary for groups who don't want anyone to know they're in negotiations with the other side, but at least the talks are occuring. A group like the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, which has no political intrests and which no one has ever heard of, has the potential to do some major good during international crises. In fact, it already has, which is impressive. Now that's what I want to do when I grow up.

Not a sword, but peace

In some cases, only the religious have the patience to be reconcilers

WHEN George Bush visited Rome last year, he wanted to see everybody who mattered in world affairs: Pope Benedict, the leaders of Italy—and members of the Sant’Egidio community.

AFPTumbling barriers: George Carey and Yasser Arafat

Started by a high-school student in 1968, this Roman Catholic fellowship now has 60,000 members in 70 countries. Its founding ideals were prayer, mission and solidarity with the poor. But it has also become the leading player in a crowded sector, that of faith-based peacemaking.

Helping warring parties (who may or may not profess a religion) to come together is not quite the same as inter-faith dialogue, though the two things can overlap. Faith-based mediation often involves putting to work in hard secular places the virtues that at least some religious people possess (discretion, modesty, empathy, a non-judgmental cast of mind, an ability to overcome cultural barriers).

Since the early 1990s, Sant’Egidio mediators have helped broker deals in places like Mozambique, Guatemala, Kosovo and, most recently, Côte d’Ivoire. Africa and Latin America are the main fields that Christian peacemakers plough. What many world leaders want to know is whether such groups bring anything unique to the business of reconciliation.

According to Mario Giro, Sant’Egidio’s head of international affairs: “What really makes the difference is neutrality, impartiality…and the ability to bring in outside powers as guarantors of an eventual deal.” He feels faith-based bodies know more about the grassroots reality of a situation because of their contacts with local religious figures, be they priests, imams or missionaries. “And all the more so if they are involved in inter-religious dialogue.”

Sant’Egidio’s mediators are not the only faith-based go-betweens to have done well. Vatican diplomats have mediated between governments and rebels in several African nations, notably Burundi, where the Holy See’s man, Michael Courtney, was killed in 2003 at a time when he was deeply involved in peace work.

The Netherlands Institute of International Relations found 27 Christian, Muslim and multi-faith peace groups to look at for a study issued in 2005. Their strengths, it reported, included “long-term commitment, long-term presence on the ground, moral and spiritual authority, and a niche to mobilise others for peace”. But there were weaknesses, such as “a lack of focus on results and a possible lack of professionalism”. A further risk, the institute said, was that the impulse to proselytise would obstruct the search for peace.

Peacemaking by Christian evangelicals in south Sudan seems to have been mired at times by an unhappy mix of missionary work and mediation. That is a qualification to the view, set out in a 2001 report from the Congressionally-funded United States Institute of Peace, that “faith-based organisations have a special role to play in zones of religious conflict.” In the Middle East, any progress has stemmed from secular initiatives. But that, says Sharon Rosen, could be a reason why progress is so scant.

The trick in all peacemaking is to find new commonalities, says Ms Rosen, an adviser to Search for Common Ground, a non-government body dedicated to conflict resolution and prevention. Its Jerusalem offices will soon host the secretariat of a Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, set up last year: members include the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, representatives of the sharia court of Palestine and the Christian patriarchates. One aim is to build mutual respect in a way that will assist more conventional peacemaking by diplomats and politicians. “I do not believe that inter-faith dialogue will bring about peace in the Middle East,” says Ms Rosen. “But I do believe that it is essential if peace is to be brought about. To ignore religion is a very grave mistake and I think the Oslo accords made that mistake.”

Her husband, Rabbi David Rosen, co-signed an ambitious effort to correct that error: the Alexandria declaration of January 2002, in which rabbis, muftis and top Christians, including George Carey, then Archbishop of Canterbury, agreed that the “holy land” was too sacred to be sullied by blood. Perhaps the best thing about such idealistic initiatives is that they create human networks of trust that come into play (often secretly) in crises—such as the siege of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity in May 2002. The right sort of religious peace-broking is really vital if the dispute itself has to do with religion.

The Economist

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Now that's something that makes sense. If people are having a religious argument, who better to resolve it than someone who actually understands the roots of the theology? With non-religious issues it's a little less practical, due to some religions' obsession with converting people to the 'one true faith'. If you're trying to get people to stop fighting with each other, trying to make them switch religions at the same time is most likely not going to get very much done.