Excellencies
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen
Thank you for having me here. It is really my pleasure and my privilege to be here, exchanging ideas and inspirations on how we make our world more peaceful and safer for everyone.
Many many years ago I got to know the society of Sant Egidio through my father, President Wahid, the 4th President of Indonesia, who attended many of the conferences and was an early advocate for interreligious dialogue as a way to foster peace. It wasn't without challenge as he was a leader of a huge Muslim communities, the Nahdlatul Ulama, which now enjoys around 100 millions of grassroots supporters. There were people who didn't understand his thinking and consider him to be a sell out for our religion. But with time and conviction he continued the struggle, and now, interreligious dialogue is seen as a necessity in any society, as a way to build bridges in an increasingly diverging world.
This particular conference is indeed very touching for me personally as I follow through in my father's legacy.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
In a world that is becoming increasingly interconnected, it is vital that we recognize and appreciate the diverse religious beliefs and traditions that exist among us. By fostering understanding and respect through interreligious dialogue, we can pave the way towards a harmonious coexistence in our global community.
First and foremost, interreligious dialogue serves as a means to dismantle the barriers that divide us. It encourages individuals from different faith backgrounds to come together and engage in open and honest conversations. Through these conversations, prejudices and misconceptions can be dispelled, fostering an environment of empathy and understanding. By seeking common ground and focusing on shared values, we can build bridges of understanding that transcend religious differences.
Moreover, interreligious dialogue acts as a catalyst for resolving conflicts and promoting peace. By engaging in respectful conversations, we create opportunities for reconciliation and peaceful coexistence. History has shown us the power of dialogue in resolving deep-rooted religious conflicts, fostering social cohesion, and preventing the escalation of violence. By encouraging dialogue between religious leaders, scholars, and ordinary people, we can work towards finding common solutions to the challenges we face as a global society.
Additionally, interreligious dialogue nurtures a sense of unity and cooperation among diverse religious communities. It helps us recognize that we are all interconnected and that our well-being as individuals and as a society is intertwined. By celebrating our differences and embracing our shared humanity, we can build relationships based on trust, tolerance, and mutual respect. Such relationships provide a strong foundation for collaboration in addressing global issues, including poverty, climate change, and social injustice. Only through collective action can we achieve a more peaceful and prosperous world for all.
But the question is, how do we bring this lofty goals and mechanism to a sustainable working level?
Several years a go, we at the Wahid Foundation launched an initiative called The Peace Village initiative.
Peace Village Initiative is developed as a specific program to bring interreliguous dialogue on a community level, and at the same time putting women and youth at the core of societal transformation. We started Peace Village Initiative in 2013, in a small scale, with a simple idea that grassroots women could play an important role in increasing community’s welfare and cohesion, provided they are given access to networks, skills and adequate social supports. Since then, year by year, our initiative grew, and attracted many supporters.
Peace Village has been supported by numerous entities from government, international bodies, embassies and private companies, until in 2017 we gained a significant support from UN Women that enable us to expand our program to many other villages.
Peace Village Initiative started with the idea that peace and tolerance is not a "taken-for-granted situation". Peace and tolerance are created and recreated by our society through continous action. Social conflicts occur not because of mere differences in religion, ethnicity, language or even political leaning. It is triggered by a collective feeling of being sidelined, marginalized or abandoned.
Therefore, Peace Village approaches this issue holistically. Our program employs a well-crafted method combining four vital components in building enduring peace and resilience in the community:
(1) economic empowerment,
(2) women empowerment,
(3) peace building social mechanism and
(4) sustainable environment.
We do all of these in a very localized way, respecting local cultures, and treat village traditions as our strength, and involving local religious and community leaders in many of our activities.
We start by establishing women’s groups and support them with microfinancing and entrepreneurship schemes, with training on financial literacy, business skills, marketing, production, food hygiene, labelling, packaging, and permits. We create a cooperative called Wahid Peace-Loving Cooperative (Koperasi Cinta Damai) to support women’s access to capital and to provide common and safe space for interaction among members of different religions and ethnicities. Economic empowerement serve as an entry point for a deeper intervention.
The next level of training goes beyond economic topics to educate women around peacebuilding and gender equality. This includes the nine values of President Wahid, understanding and analysing conflict and peace, and specifying their roles as peace agents.
Once the women’s groups are established and training commenced, the next phase focuses on supporting the women to develop community initiatives to foster peace and become active participants and leaders in local decision making and governance mechanisms. This includes the women collaborating with local government officials and community representatives to form a working group.
I remember, one of women from the island of Madura, who was previously unseen now become one of the most outspoken lady in the village governance meeting.
Now, in some villages, we also incorporate climate change issues into a community-level action. We know climate crisis affects all of us, but we rarely bring this issue into understandable language for grassroot communities as they are the most affected people. And, again, women become a mobilizing actor in raising communities’ awareness about sustainable environment. We introduce the idea of “green love”, in which couple getting married have to plant a tree as a symbol of the commitment for a lasting love and sustaining the environment.
Currently, Peace Village Initiative works in 30 villages across 5 provinces in Indonesia, and has been reaching millions of populations, supporting thousands of women-led community groups, and facilitating hundreds of women agents of peace. Many coleagues from different countries have visited our Peace Villages, got inspires and showed interests to replicate this program into their own contexts.
What I would like to highlight here is that we can contribute to the world peace though a very localized action. I understand that today we are facing a lot of global scale challenges: climate change, energy crisis, economic inequality, violent extremism, identity politics and many other social, economic and political crises. Although we cannot tackle all of those challenges at once, I believe we can overcome them by strengthening our resilience. And one strategic way is by empowering women and youth, until the rest will get inspired to act, and the wider movements will take place.
The audacity of peace caphappen if we dare to take concrete peaceful actions in our closest world.
Thank you.