President Admits that Indonesia Lacks Credibility

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on Thursday acknowledged his country lacked credibility as it seeks billions of dollars in foreign aid to battle climate change.

He said Indonesia suffered a “trust deficit” in the international community that was hampering its ability to win backing for initiatives such as a moratorium on deforestation and cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

“This is the reason for reform. We can turn the trust deficit into a trust surplus. Let’s be sure that the institutions in this country are credible,” he said in his opening remarks to a weekly cabinet meeting.

Indonesia is one of the top emitters of climate-warming gases blamed for rising global temperatures, largely through deforestation due to illegal logging and clearing for palm oil plantations.

Yudhoyono shocked environmentalists and palm planters alike last month when he announced a two-year moratorium on deforestation from 2011 in exchange for a billion dollars in aid from Norway.

But no one knows how the moratorium will be enforced in a country where experts say illegal logging is rampant and the government’s figures about deforestation rates and forest cover are seen as wildly inaccurate.

“All institutions in this country must be credible so that there are no obstacles when we seek cooperation with friendly countries and the international community,” Yudhoyono said, referring to the pact with Norway.

“I ask [ministers] not to be discouraged, not to be angry, that frankly the international community does not fully trust the institutions in many developing countries including ours ....”

Norway will offer aid from 2014 but only as long as Indonesia has made verifiable progress in halting deforestation.

The verifiability of such initiatives is crucial to broader UN-backed efforts to link developed-world climate change funds to forest conservation in developing countries like Indonesia.

“If there is no reduced deforestation, we will not pay. If there is reduced deforestation, we will pay,” Norwegian Prime Minister Stoltenberg told a press conference in Oslo as the moratorium was announced last month.

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates deforestation is responsible for 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Agence France-Presse

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Study Finds German young devout Muslims more prone to violence

A study conducted by the German authorities has found that the more devout young Muslims become, the more prone to violence they get. The study says the phenomenon is not due to Islam itself, but to the way it is taught.

The willingness to commit violent crimes grows among young Muslim immigrants in Germany the more religious they become, according to a joint survey by the German interior ministry and the Institute for Criminology Research of Lower Saxony (KFN).

By comparison, the study found that just the opposite was true for Christian immigrants. The willingness to commit violent crimes, such as armed robbery or assault and battery, among young Catholics and Protestants decreases with religious fervor, the KFN study revealed.

The study said the reason for this difference had to do with the very different image of masculinity. Muslim devotion promotes the acceptance of macho behavior, said Christian Pfeiffer, the director of the Lower Saxony research institute and one of the authors of the study. Muslim devotion breeds macho behavior, says Pfeiffer

Pfeiffer said that in their religion, and in the family at home, young Muslim immigrants are frequently exposed to a more conservative world view and lay claim to a variety of male privileges.

The problem with imams

In an effort to explain their results, the study's authors draw on the findings of Rauf Ceylan, a religious education expert and himself of Turkish extraction, who points to the number of non-German imams, or Muslim priests, preaching and teaching in Germany.

Ceylan maintains that these foreign imams are generally only in Germany temporarily, speak no German and have little contact with German culture. Most of them, he says, call for a return to a more conservative Islam and retreat into the practitioner's original ethnic culture. For them, male dominance is normal and their teachings demand the same from Muslim youths, Ceylan says.

Christian Pfeiffer, from the KFN, also points out that the phenomenon is not due to Islam itself, but to the way it is taught.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere has called for the study's results to be put on the agenda of the next Islam conference.

Different levels of integration

The KFN study interviewed a total of 45,000 14-16 year-olds in 61 cities across Germany between 2007 and 2008. Of these, 10,000 had an immigrant background.

It found that the best adjusted and most integrated immigrants came from non-religious families. More than 41 percent of these were looking to get a high school diploma, nearly 63 percent had German friends and 66 percent viewed themselves as German.

The figures among young Muslims were strikingly different: only 16 percent were pursuing a high school diploma, 28 percent had German friends and about 22 percent considered themselves German.

Author: Gregg Benzow (dpa/AP/AFP)
Editor: Andreas Illmer

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