Third Round of Youth Symposium for Peace & Tolerance │Badakhshan – Afghanistan
The third round of the Youth Symposium for Peace and Tolerance, entitled Challenges for Educating and Promoting the Values of Democracy and Human Rights in the country, was held by the Afghanistan Economic and Legal Studies Organization (AELSO) in Faizabad, Badakhshan on January 4, 2021. In this symposium, university lecturers, journalists, civil society activists, human rights activists, local elders, religious scholars, and dozens of local youths eagerly participated and shared their thoughts and ideas on the topic.
At the beginning of the symposium, Salahuddin Qarizadah, AELSO’s provincial representative in Badakhshan province, addressed the participants and talked about the academic goals and ground level activities of the organization for promoting the values that our society desperately needs.
Qarizadah said: “By launching seminars, conferences, discourses, media programs, and publishing new scholarly books as well as articles, AELSO has made great strides toward educating and promoting the values of peace, human rights, good governance, rule of law, tolerance, and other free society values in the country, and has intellectually empowered large number of youths with these values.”
After that, Abdul Samad Nazari, Lecturer at Badakhshan University and one of the Keynote speakers of the symposium, speaking on the challenges toward educating and promoting the values of democracy and human rights in the country, said: “Human rights mean respect for human beings and human dignity, regardless of religion, sect, ethnicity, language, race, etc. But unfortunately in Afghanistan, we respect someone who is in our religion, or speaks our language, or thinks like us, or who somehow benefits us. The concept of human rights is respecting and honoring human beings only as human beings, because all mighty Allah has honored them and bestowed them with the dignity.”
Nazari added:
“Lack of necessary awareness in the society, confrontation between tradition and modernity, abuse from religion, war and insecurity, poverty, lack of rule of law and meritocracy in the country, are major challenges toward educating and promoting the values of democracy and human rights in the country.
Abdul Basir Haqjo, Chairman of the Badakhshan High Council of Journalists, Associate Professor Dr. Abdul Qadir Buran, Cultural Activist and Former President of Badakhshan University, and Abdul Mosavir Nouri, University lecturer, also discussed about the
challenges toward educating and promoting human rights and democratic values in the country, and stressed that in order to better promote the values of human rights in the country, the educational system in the country should be standardized, efficient and up-to-date, and the society should collectively work for disseminating the necessary awareness in the society.
The symposium ended by wishing for an Afghanistan enriched with the values of peace, tolerance, human rights, and democracy in the country, and the distribution of certificates to participants of the program.
