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Musharraf sees iron curtain between West, Muslims An iron curtain is descending between the West and the Muslim world, Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf warned on Monday.
Political injustices, poverty and illiteracy are fueling religious fundamentalism and terrorism, he said in a speech while on a visit to Sweden, urging rich countries to help Muslim nations with investment and socio-economic reforms.
Most of Pakistan's 150 million people are Muslims, and a third of them live in poverty.
"A new iron curtain seems to be falling," he said. "This iron curtain somehow is dividing the Muslim world on one side and the West on the other side. This is very dangerous," he told Reuters in an interview after the speech.
"Muslim states are seen as the source of terrorism," he said, warning of new "depths of chaos and despair" and more "terrorism and an impending clash of civilizations" if the West, particularly the United States, and Muslim countries failed to eradicate the root causes of anger and resentment.
MIDDLE EAST
A solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seen as just by mainstream Muslims might end 75 percent of global terrorism, Musharraf said.
Creating a Palestinian state side by side with Israel behind the pre-1967 war borders would likely require "political coercion" from Washington, he said.
Musharraf, who took power in a bloodless military coup in 1999, is a staunch ally in Washington's war on terrorism.
Around 600 al Qaeda militants have been captured in Pakistan, he said, dismissing criticism from domestic Muslim hard-liners that his military's crackdown on suspected fundamentalist militants was done to please his U.S. masters.
"I am not doing it at the behest of the United States, but it happens to suit them also. It is in our national interest."
Musharraf last year narrowly escaped two assassination attempts by what he says were al Qaeda terrorists.
"We will not allow terrorism to exist in Pakistan. "We will root them out wherever they are," he said.
But that was not enough.
"If we are just killing terrorists, we are not achieving anything ... I call them the leaves of a tree. As long as the tree is there, the leaves will keep growing."
"If you manage to finish off one organization like al Qaeda ... you've chopped off a branch of that tree, but the tree will still grow. You must identify the root, and the root happens to be political disputes ... the root happens also to be illiteracy and poverty." |
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