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Your Excellencies,
Mr. Chairman,
My congratulations
on your election and my thanks for the welcome
and the hospitality. My appreciation also to
President Aliyev for his address.
It’s a great
pleasure to be here and many thanks to the
government and people of Azerbaijan.
On our agenda, Mr.
Chairman, we have an enormous number of items.
It shows how
complex our work is at the moment
Many of our members
are facing very serious problems and very
delicate situations especially our brothers in
Iraq and Palestine.
So if we are going
to understand all the problems well, it is vital
for us to keep up-to- date. The problem is we
cannot always get the information ourselves.
So, I found our
Secretariat’s detailed report extremely useful.
They have given us a good, clear background as
well as this, there’s nothing better than
hearing from colleagues directly.
And that is why
this meeting is very important.
It gives us a good
opportunity to get our colleagues’ personal
views and their ideas and their hopes for
the future.
This is crucial.
After all, we do
not just represent our own countries. Meetings
like this remind us we are here for all
our people and it does a lot to show us
how to help each other.
The other thing I
would like to say on this, Chairman, is a very
general point. In all these matters, we rely on
dialogue and negotiation, of course. But we
know that this is often very hard especially
when one of the sides know they are the weaker
party.
So I would like to
say how much we appreciate the efforts many of
our fellow members are making. On our part we
will do all we can to support fellow members in
the international meetings we attend. At the
same time, however we
recognise
that moral support is never enough. Practical
cooperation is needed and this is what I would
like to concentrate on here, Chairman.
I would like to
mention briefly where we are placing our own
efforts at the moment. These concern practical
assistance.
In this respect, I
think the O.I.C. can point to positive results
over the past year. The tone was set by our
friends in Yemen last year and was strengthened
at December’s Summit in Mecca.
So, my thanks
to Saudi Arabia and our Summit Chairman and to
the eminent persons group and the Muslim
scholars and intellectuals for the Action
Programme
we now have. It certainly helps us
to focus on where we think we can do something
to help.
With this in mind,
I would also like to mention our colleagues in
Malaysia. They have done an excellent job in
one very important part of the
programme.
This is to find ways to help ordinary people.
We like the
approach they have taken. It is in line with
what we are all trying to do in other
international bodies like APEC and the
Commonwealth and our own regional Association,
ASEAN.
The
Secretariat’s report calls it “capacity
building”. But, for us what it amounts to is
very simple, helping people to help themselves
so that they can handle day-to-day life and work
in the modern world successfully.
At the same time,
it encourages them to see that the O.I.C. means
something real to them in their own lives and I
think that is very important indeed.
So, thanks to
Malaysia’s strong leadership. This part of the
Action
Programme
is working well.
Overall, we have
been very pleased to support it in whatever way
we can and we are very happy to continue
helping.
Basically, it
involves fairly modest
programmes
that are flexible, “do-able” and aimed at
ordinary people.
It seems to us that
this is what our people want to see. They want
to feel that the O.I.C. is not just trying to
solve very important global problems but
that it’s also aware of their own
personal needs. In other words, it’s having a
local, grass-roots impact.
Just to end,
Chairman, the meeting we hosted earlier
this year on the pilot projects was very
encouraging. It showed that the
programmes
are aimed at people who will benefit directly
like farmers, fishermen, small businesses and so
on.
I agree, Chairman,
that we still have an enormous number of
political problems and we obviously have to do
all we can to help solve them.
But, I hope we can
also stress the positive progress made this
year. The action
programme
has only been underway for six months.
But, as far as we
are concerned, it has got off to a good start
and I would like to assure you, Mr. Chairman, we
will be very happy to do whatever we can to
support projects such as those I have mentioned.
In other words,
Chairman, I hope we can work with others to try
to make the action
programme
not just a good
programme on
paper but also something that involves real
action in the field.
Thank you.
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