Queen, former IRA chief mark Northern Ireland peace milestone

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Queen Elizabeth II and a former Irish Republican Army commander offered each other the hand of peace Wednesday in a long-awaited encounter symbolizing Northern Ireland’s progress in achieving reconciliation after decades of violence.

The monarch and Martin McGuinness met privately inside Belfast’s riverside Lyric Theatre during a cross-community arts event featuring many of Northern Ireland’s top musicians, poets and artists. Media were barred from seeing their first handshake, but the two shook hands again a half-hour later for a TV camera and two photographers. McGuinness and Elizabeth exchanged smiles and brief pleasantries.

McGuinness said he told the queen, in Gaelic, “Goodbye and godspeed,” and translated the phrase for her. She didn’t appear to say anything, just smiled and listened.

The event marked the latest, perhaps ultimate, moment in two decades of Northern Ireland peacemaking that have delivered a series of once-unthinkable moments of compromise.

Experts say McGuinness, 62, was the IRA’s chief of staff when the outlawed group assassinated the queen’s cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, in 1979, one of the most high-profile victims of a four-decade conflict that has claimed 3,700 lives.

The IRA formally abandoned its campaign to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom and disarmed in 2005. Two years later, McGuinness became the senior Catholic politician in a new unity government, the central objective of Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord. His coalition with Robinson has governed Northern Ireland in cooperation with Britain in surprising harmony since.

The Queen and her husband, Prince Philip, received a standing ovation as she visited the town’s Catholic cathedral, her first visit to a Catholic church in her 20 visits to Northern Ireland as queen. And in the neighboring Protestant cathedral, a veritable who’s who of Northern Ireland religious life and politics gathered to pray for continued peace. Church leaders praised the contribution of the Queen, who last year made her first tour of the Republic of Ireland to broad public support. Sinn Fein was heavily criticized for boycotting her visit.

Archbishop Alan Harper, leader of the Anglican-affiliated Church of Ireland, said in his sermon that the Queen’s tour of the Irish Republic “was an occasion of profound significance and deep emotion” that signaled an era of genuine peace “perhaps for the first time ever in the recorded history of this island.”

Religious neutrality in Iraqi Kurdistan schools

On June 11, 2012, the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) — which is responsible for the northern quarter of Iraq, an ethnically Kurdish region — declared that its schools will now be religiously neutral. This means that they will teach the great religions of the world on an equal basis but will not press any one religion upon students or even make what is taught about these religions a part of the final examinations required for graduation. This is a profound change from the previous requirement that Islam be preferred in the classroom and that students master its doctrines as a requirement of graduation. It is an astonishingly broad-mined move by the government of a region that is 94 percent Muslim, that is bordered by nations like Iran and Syria, and in which an American teacher was shot and killed just weeks ago.

Iraqi Kurdistan is now the only region in the Middle East other than Israel in which the religions of the world are taught on an equal basis in the public schools but no one religion is given preference.

“This decision is a result of our Kurdish history,” says Mariwan Naquishbandi, spokesman for the KRG’s Ministry of Religious Affairs. “Kurdish Islam is not the Islam of Saudi Arabia or Iran. We have often been made to suffer by those who were our Islamic brothers. It has made us more tolerant, more able to see the good that other religions offer to Kurdish society.”

It is an attitude that comes as a surprise to many in the West who view all Muslims as alike — equally radical and equally oppressive of other religions. The Kurds, though, are a unique people among the nations of the Middle East. They are not Arabs but are historically identified with the Medes, an ancient people closely connected to Persian heritage and culture.

Both their history and the heartrending suffering endured at Muslim hands have made the Kurds — already a people known for their hospitality — particularly welcoming of other religions. Older Kurds in Kurdistan today tell of how in 1948, when Israel became a nation and the Kurdish Jews left Kurdistan for their Holy Land, Muslim neighbors wept over the loss and frequently maintained abandoned synagogues — in some cases for decades after — in honor of their departed Jewish friends

It is an openness the Kurdish government has had to protect. When the Central Government in Baghdad insisted upon sending its teachers to start schools in the northern region of Kurdistan, the KRG refused. “The religious sectors in Baghdad are filled with religious fanatics,” says Naquishbandi. “We knew what they were trying to do. So we refused because we are trying to achieve a more democratic society.”

Naquishbandi found the KRG’s decision particularly satisfying. He has been working on this and similar reforms for years. As an example of the Kurdistan he hopes for, this intense, pleasant man with a ready laugh keeps both a Koran and a Bible on his desk. He has gained a reputation for his fairness. When he received complaints about an Arab evangelical pastor in the region, a man named Pastor Yousif Matti, Naquishbandi refused to move against the man until he had met him. After lengthy conversation with Matti, the official called those who complained and said, “I will not act against this man, but perhaps I will write something against you for condemning him.”

Over time, Matti and Naquishbandi became friends. The official eventually accepted an invitation from Matti to visit the United States. Along with his brother, a general and military judge, Naquishbandi toured parts of America, visited evangelical churches Matti was connected to and even met with Tennessee Congressman Marsha Blackburn in Nashville, where the U.S.’s largest concentration of Kurds live. “I had asked a Mullah to join us on the trip to America,” Matti says. “People in America could not believe it, but this is how Kurdistan is different. An evangelical pastor, an Islamic Mullah, and two high-ranking government officials can travel as friends to the United States. It would not be possible for some other nation in the Middle East. It is possible here.” Matti founded and runs the Classical School of the Medes, which will soon have some 2500 students from all over Kurdistan.

The KRG’s change in school policy regarding religion is a stunning break from the traditions of the region, but it is a step closer to what many Americans have hoped for in these last years. For Naquishbandi, it is simply what his society must do: “This law is going to help with tolerance between the religions. This is what Kurdistan should be.”

Arab world gets new trailblazer for women in politics

(Reuters) – Now that Algeria has the largest proportion of women lawmakers in the Arab world, workmen at the national assembly building have some urgent modifications to make. While the men’s washroom just outside the debating chamber is clearly marked with the silhouette of a man, there are so far no signs for the women’s. On the opening session of the new parliament on May 26, two of the newly elected female members had to ask for directions to the rest-room.

“Wherever I go I see a woman in front of me. Things have changed. We’re used to only seeing men,” said one local journalist as he watched the opening session of parliament.

The 146 women elected to parliament last month is up from just 31 before. Women now make up 31.6 percent of the chamber, the highest share of any Arab legislature and higher than many in the West.

The sudden leap is the result of a quota mandated by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika that many sceptics – including foreign election monitors – thought would not be enforced. Now Algeria, a Muslim energy exporter of 37 million people, is basking in its new status as a trailblazer for woman’s rights. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have both praised the large female contingent.

Algeria’s nearest Arab rival for the number of women MPs is now Tunisia, where women account for 26.7 percent of the seats in parliament, according to figures compiled by the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Algeria comes out ahead of several Western states, including Switzerland, Canada, France, Britain and the United States.

“As women, we will play a role,” Samira Kerkouche, a new member of parliament from Algiers told Reuters in the national assembly building, across the road from the capital’s Mediterranean port. “We seek change.”

Increasing the number of women in parliament suits the secularist ruling establishment of which Bouteflika is a part. In the 1990s they fought and defeated Islamist hardliners who, among other things, wanted to confine women to the home.

Women in Algeria have traditionally played a more active role in public life than in most other Arab states. Women feature among the heroes of Algeria’s war of independence from France in the 1960s.

Today, the police force prides itself on its female officers. The government has one female minister and two women deputy ministers. Algeria is one of only two Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to include women in their delegations.

Canada: New aboriginal artwork could comfort old pain

(from Abbotsford Mission Times)

The heat of the sun carried the smell of fresh-cut cedar across the grass at Mission’s Fraser River Heritage Park on Saturday.

Before the start of an unveiling ceremony, audience members seemed compelled to run their hands over the wooden figures gracing two 18-foot-tall carved house posts, fashioned by Sumas First Nation artists in a bid to heal a painful past.

Carver Raphael Silver, 30, launched the yearlong project to foster reconciliation between First Nations people and the Catholic Church, which separated aboriginal children from their families and placed them into residential schools to eradicate their culture and assimilate them into larger society.

St. Mary’s in Mission opened in 1863, the first such school in B.C.

“The whole reasoning was to facilitate bridging the gap between the church and the First Nations community, and to promote healing for the people who suffered through the residential school system and its aftermath,” said Silver.

Fraser River Heritage Park was the perfect place to erect the house posts, as it is the former site of the St. Mary’s residential school, said Silver. The artist said his deceased grandmother Irene Silver had attended the school, and despite the tragedies experienced by many others in the residential school system, had positive memories of her time at St. Mary’s.

“It was important to me to produce this work on good terms with the church,” said Silver. “For me it was to promote positive interaction and look to the future rather than holding on to the pain of the past. A lot of drug and alcohol abuse with our people is a symptom of that pain and I want [the artwork] to be a part of the process of healing.”

Silver carved the posts from a 450year-old red cedar from Powell River along with his father, Ray Silver, visiting carver Mike Epp, and apprentices Kelvin Lamson and Eli Silver. The posts feature images of salmon, salamanders and dancers that symbolize life and healing, and which are important in Sto: lo culture. Each post represents the supporting poles that would go in the sides of a traditional longhouse, while a 20-foot-long flat section will connect the two to represent the rafters.

“It’s kind of fitting that we carved these in our long house,” he said.

“