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Prince Hassan celebrates 64th birthday todayAMMAN, Mar 20, 2011 (Jordan Times - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- HRH Prince Hassan celebrates his 64th birthday today. Over the past year the Prince persevered in advancing initiatives that he has fought for during most of his life -- ideas that a new pan-Arab context has not only vindicated, but has rendered more important. Prince Hassan's work, as evident on his website, has always fallen into four related categories: peace in Palestine, the need for Arab unity, the importance of human dignity, and adherence between the faiths. In Chile, in September, Prince Hassan presented the work of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies, and supported their call for a worldwide "inter-religious code of conduct." He spoke of the need for a "camino de ideas", or a "route of ideas", to reawaken in contemporary form the spice and silk routes of the past, and to bypass the oil routes of today. As chairman of the Higher Council for Science and Technology, Prince Hassan also called for "science diplomacy"; for the Arab world to invest more heavily in research and development, and for meritocracy to replace a system based around "not what people know but whom they know". These comments were repeated to a youth conference held on behalf of the Alexandria Library, of which Prince Hassan is a board member, and the Arab Thought Forum, of which he is chairman and founder, in December of last year. Since 2009, his Highness has devoted much work to the concept of "WANA", or "West-Asia-North-Africa", founding a forum by that name to address macro-economic and political issues within the context of the individual, and on an empirical basis. Prince Hassan believes that rebirth in the Arab world cannot come without ideas, individuals and institutions. At the launch of the Strategic Foresight Group's "Blue Peace Report" in January, he repeated calls for the creation of a supranational community for water and energy for the human environment, pointing out that a bilateral approach to shared resources is both unsustainable and destabilising. Prince Hassan has for several years also called for a semi-permanent conference for peace based within the region, and modelled upon the three baskets of the Helsinki process -- cooperation in security, economy and humanitarian issues. In 1987, at the 36th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Prince Hassan proposed the establishment of a new international humanitarian order, observing that "our mutual ability to affect each other's lives, for better or for worse, has never had the scope and immediacy that it has today". He looks toward the beginnings of a national conversation, and an end to the "vacuum of hope". To see more of the Jordan Times or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.jordantimes.com. Copyright (c) 2011, Jordan Times, Amman Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For more information about the content services offered by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services (MCT), visit www.mctinfoservices.com. |