IRAN: Seyed Mohamed Khatami made his last public appearance abroad as president of Iran at Unesco yesterday, where he delivered a speech on his favourite subject, "the dialogue between civilisations".
The director general of the UN organisation for education, science and culture, Koichiro Matsuura, said the world owed President Khatami a great debt for originating the idea in the late 1990s. The dialogue between civilisations was "a legacy to the international community which will long remain attached to [ Khatami's] name."
When Mr Khatami came to office in 1997, he was viewed at home and abroad as a reformer. But the overwhelming weight of the conservative clergy in Iran meant those hopes were disappointed.
Mr Khatami's appeal for a "dialogue between civilisations" was a rejection of the US academic Samuel Huntington's belief in an inevitable "clash of civilisations" between Islam and Christianity.
Following the Iranian president's speech to the UN in New York in September 2000, 2001 was officially declared the year of dialogue between civilisations. As Mr Khatami sadly noted yesterday, "The coincidence between the declaration by the UN and the reprehensible catastrophe that occurred on September 11th should alert us all . . . to the urgency of dialogue between civilisations."
Hundreds of CRS riot police surrounding the building were a reminder that suicide bombers have so far had a greater impact than advocates of dialogue.
Under the Iranian constitution, Mr Khatami cannot seek a third term in the June 17th presidential election. "I have decided to dedicate myself entirely to this question, which seems to me to be of crucial importance," he said, announcing his intention to found a non-governmental organisation devoted to inter-civilisational dialogue.
More philosopher than king, a gentle intellectual who studied Kant and Hegel in Germany, not a power-broker, Mr Khatami asked: "What would remain of life without painting, music, sculpture, theatre, poetry, without all that mankind has left us of beauty, culture and thought?"
Then he added: "Ignorance of history, of cultures and civilisations is our principal common enemy."
In what appeared to be a reference to the United States, Mr Khatami said: "Politics without ethics or aesthetics, however zealous, cannot claim to defend human rights . . . As long as politics remains outside morality and is not permeated with culture, as long as it is the smell of petrol that guides it, human rights are not defended."
In a different kind of dialogue, Mr Khatami called on President Jacques Chirac at the Élysée, where he attempted to reassure the French president that Iran is not building nuclear weapons. On Monday he visited the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna for the same purpose.
Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika was the other main speaker at the Unesco conference. Unlike Mr Khatami, Mr Bouteflika was invited to lunch at the Élysée, so that he and Mr Chirac could put the finishing touches to a treaty of friendship between France and Algeria.
In his condemnation of Western ethnocentricity and double standards, genocides against the indigenous peoples of America and Australia, colonialism and "humanitarian intervention", Mr Bouteflika's speech was reminiscent of Algeria's 1970s heyday, when he served as Houari Boumedienne's loquacious foreign minister, and Algeria was a beacon for liberation movements.
Unfortunately, Mr Bouteflika admitted, Samuel Huntington's belief in the clash of civilisations "found a resonance in the Islamic world, with small groups who, by practising terrorism against civilian populations, give the impression that the threat of a 'green menace' brandished by the ideologists of the Apocalypse is real."
Despite efforts to promote dialogue, Mr Bouteflika lamented, "the ideology of the 'clash' has gained ground, invalidating the political strategy of some states, as shown by the notion of the Greater Middle East, which . . . covers exactly the territorial space of Muslim civilisation."
The Greater Middle East is President Bush's concept, and Mr Bouteflika - though on excellent terms with Washington - accused it of "hardening and manipulating civilisational differences between the West and the Muslim world, in the style of the phantasmagorical myth of the crusade."