REGIONAL OFFICE / GEORGIA
Promoting Tolerance Programme 2008 Started in Tbilissi

The Southern Caucasus has a long history of cultural, ethnic and religious tolerance. Unfortunately, since several years it has to overcome heavy conflicts.

Tbilissi

For Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom (FNF) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which since 1992 have been working together on a program for democracy establishment and tolerance promotion with young leaders from politics and civil society in Eastern Europe and its neighbour regions, was a special challenge, to guide together the group of participants this year for the first meeting in Tbilissi, the capital of Georgia.

The twelve participants discussed with alumni from earlier programmes and the organizers about the civil and minority rights in their homelands and possible ways for a political solution of ethnic, cultural and religious conflicts.

Although it was clearly stated that the concrete situation in the representated countries may be quite different, the results from the working groups showed that there are important supranational basic conditions for a peaceful co-existence, i.e. all legal and political basic conditions as well as the tolerance of the individual citizen in the every day social contacts.

On the podium left to right: Ketevan Tsikhelashvili, Rabbi Andrew Baker, Ulrich Niemann

The special symbolic character of this initiative is demonstarted by the fact that a German and a Jewish organization co-operate, in order to make a contribution for the establishment of democratic and tolerant civil society in the region.

The second part of the program, a study visit to the USA in November, aims to make the participants familiar with the American experience of the peaceful and independent co-existence of minorities.

Ulrich Niemann/Stoyanka Manolcheva