Mr. President, Your Holiness, Your Graces, religious, political and scientific eminencies of our region,
I thank you all for being here in Athens so that we can discuss the need to protect and support the development of the religious and cultural communities in the Middle East. A special thanks to the heads of the churches, and in particular the Ecumenical Patriarch, a pioneer in green and religious diplomacy.
I thank the President of the Republic, Prokopis Pavlopoulos, a constant supporter of our foreign policy. And I thank Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who will be addressing the dinner.
The Middle East and North Africa are linked to Greece by millennia of common history. Our cultures have impacted each other, and the religious doctrines of the west were to a great extent born in this region.
If we are proud today of the impact of Greek culture and science on the west, similar to that of the Chinese on the east, this is due to its having been preserved and propagated by the Arabs and to the spread of culture associated with Islam.
The Mediterranean is not just a geographical basin of strong geopolitical interests. Above all it is a region producing history, traditions, culture and science through an ongoing interaction among the various religions, institutional systems, interpersonal relations.
These regions, through the millennia, met with and assimilated the most various of principles, ideas, programmes and social schemata. But at the same time they had a very positive unique quality: They implemented, to a degree, visions and ideas that are today considered deeply democratic. Often, of course, with great difficulties and reversals. Ideas and visions that make up western modernity.
In these regions we are talking about and about which we will be talking over these two days, forms of cultural and religious plurality were realized. The most disparate cultural and religious currents coexisted, even peacefully. Currents of Islam, Christian churches, older faiths constituted multicultural and multi-religious communities in certain regions.
Today, these are being destroyed by extremists invoking religious imperatives. The extremists do not consider themselves to be mediators between the sins and virtues of man towards God, which would allow for various choices. In fact, they consider themselves to be the exclusive messenger of God to humankind; unique and with the right to decide who lives and who dies.
The sense that they are the masters and not the servants of God’s message – masters of the rest of humankind, and not their supporters – explains their barbaric and fundamentally anti-religious action. They are destroying cultural and religious communities, the wealth of the Middle East and the southern side of the Mediterranean.
Allow me to remind everyone of the coexistence of the Orthodox Patriarchates of the East in regions where the majority of the population is Muslim. I would like to underscore the assistance of the Egyptian state for the Sinai Monastery, regarding which there is a text granting rights from the prophet Mohammed, certified by his palm print.
The extremists are perpetrating crimes against the individual and against humanity, violating rights and values, rules of peaceful life and coexistence. They are destroying monuments, history. But history will respond to this lack of respect.
Today we are being called upon to contribute to the defence of human rights, above all the right to life, but also social rights and the freedom of millions of people. Their right to remain at the hearths of their culture, to choose the doctrine and current of faith they desire.
The war in Iraq and Afghanistan has been going on for over 13 years, with long-time consequences in Pakistan. Already four years of war in Syria. The younger generations see the wars as a permanent phenomenon; a dead end. These wars push the younger generations to flee as refugees. Whole regions have been deserted. The identity of the Middle East is changing, with unknown consequences. The cradle of great civilizations is being lost.
Defence of the right to cultural and religious plurality is a fight against war, in favor of finding a political solution in Syria and in the Middle East overall. In favor of the creation of a state of Palestine and guaranteeing the security of the state of Israel.
The defence of the right to life of day-to-day people, to culture and their faith, requires, specifically, the defence of major reconstruction projects throughout the region.
Economic assistance must be increased, multiplied, for international organizations – the UN in particular – in order to hold future refugees, initially, in their camps and then relocate them to their homes. Moreover, all together we need to ensure that the strictest penalties are imposed on trafficking systems and their patrons.
The peoples of the Mediterranean are proud peoples. This is the case, first of all, for the millions of Syrians currently abandoning their homeland. We know that none of them would have wanted to leave the country if they hadn’t been forced to do so by violence and war.
Greece is currently promoting a multidimensional foreign policy. It supports a political solution to the Syrian crisis. It is seeking and promoting the EU’s shaping a special strategy with characteristics of a long-term partnership with Jordan and Libya.
Greece stresses in the organs of the EU and the UN that, for us, the cornerstone of developments in the region is security and stability in the region overall, but especially in Egypt. No one can be allowed to open the floodgates and, for reasons of some obsession, allow the further destabilization of the regions and states I just referred to.
Within the framework of such political stability, a just solution on the Cyprus issue will be a major contribution, without occupation forces, without perpetuating the anachronistic regime of guarantees. With the Turkish Cypriots feeling that Cyprus is their home, where they can and want to raise their children, to dream and aspire to a better future. With the Greek Cypriots living in security and calm.
As I explained in a timely manner internationally, tectonic shifts are taking place in our region. Within the Ukraine-Libya-Syria triangle – and Iraq – Greece is producing stability and security in the region, and it is doing so in spite of its years-long economic crisis. The Greece that understands the concerns of the peoples in the region; peoples to whom we are linked by longstanding friendship.
This is a friendship founded on our historical ties with these peoples, and my country thus has the potential to act as a willing mediator between parties with differing views and even parties who don’t trust one another.
We have the knowledge, the means and the methods to help anyone who feels the need for such an honest friend. We maintain friendly relations with all the sides in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, and we are always ready to help, far from publicity.
We are also helping – and we can do this even more systematically – anyone who wants an honest friend and supporter in the European Union. A friend who does not have second thoughts or other interests; a friend linked by our common history.
The uprooting of millions of people by war and fanaticism and extreme authoritarianism is creating a huge migration and refugee wave. Whoever reflects on this needs to remember that in every religion – in its own special way – there are people of God who migrate, prophets who immigrate to spread the message of God, the saints who set off upon the earth. All of them, regardless of religion and culture, have defended the value of human life as the highest good.
With regard to the refugees – as our President rightly underscored – what is most important at this time is the defence of human values, and we are proud, as Greeks, that, despite the deep crisis our country is going through, our people, simple everyday people on the Greek islands and in other regions, have shown their humanity, their values, acting in a manner that corresponds to our culture and the religious values we believe in.
They have shown that they are not willing to yield to neo-nationalism, to inarticulate anti-humanist shrieks, to political sloganizing. Our people want clear-headedness and seriousness.
In confronting the modern refugee phenomenon, a major role is played by the good cooperation we have with our neighbours, including Bulgaria and Turkey. Cooperation based on international law and not bargains. And of course cooperation certainly doesn’t mean joint patrols: Anyone who thinks they can talk without respect for the sovereign rights of our country or any country is mistaken.
I also want to take this opportunity to thank the churches, and the Diocese of Athens and All Greece in particular, for the aid they are providing for the migrants and refugees, as they have done creatively all these years for vulnerable social groups.
For all of the above reasons, we argue that Greece is a country that is a crossroads of cultures and religions, a bridge between three continents, prepared to mediate. We argue for the need for interreligious and intercultural dialogue and its support by scientists and institutions.
Our message, and the message of this Conference, is the peaceful coexistence of different doctrines, outlooks and convictions. The effort to impose one view over another, the dominance of a doctrine, has not only destroyed the region where such a regime has been imposed, but has also caused and is causing suffering in much wider regions.
The eradication of pluralism in the regions our Conference is looking at is having negative repercussions throughout the world. The study of globalization teaches us this. Human culture is often a product of personalities, but it is certainly always the result of collective processes, including religions, that promote panhuman ideals.
Values that we – people like me, people like all of those active in the field of foreign policy – need to transform into political and, by extension, social reality.
Finally, I want to say that Greece supports and promotes the creation of an international observatory, with the assistance of any of you who want to help, so that, together, we can contribute to a dialogue – a dialogue as effective as possible – on the potentialities in the region, to recording and observing the crimes against humanity and its memory, so that we can deter new crimes against religions and cultures.
Thank you very much for coming to Athens, and may our proceedings be successful.
Thank you.
October 19, 2015