When Tharwa was still an
unofficial NGO in Syria run under the auspices of a publishing house, DarEmar,
it was known as the Tharwa Project and it had its own mission statement that
was quite ambitious for its scope and message at the time, for a Syrian
organization.
The Tharwa Project Mission
Statement
The Tharwa Project is an
independent initiative that seeks to provide a forum for identifying the
aspirations and addressing the concerns of the various ethnic and religious
minorities inhabiting the Arab World. In this, the Project seeks to foster
better relations and establish a free channel for communication and dialogue
between minority groups and the majority population in each Arab country and
across the Arab World.
Moreover, the Project seeks to
reintroduce a much needed measure of sobriety, objectivity and balance into the
highly politicized and often emotional discourse related to the issue of Middle
Eastern minority groups, especially those inhabiting the Arab World, and which
has infiltrated even into the most respected academic circles.
The founders of the Tharwa
Project do not intend to endorse any separatist claims or accountability
issues. Rather, they simply want to provide a free forum for the discussion of
various issues pertaining to minority rights within the context of the
fifty-plus years old Arab nationalist experiment.
Special focus will be put on the
often complex, and occasionally paradoxical, relation between democratization
and minority rights. There will also be attempts at assessing the potential
impact of such issues as the Arab-Israeli Conflict, the Barcelona Process, the
rise of Islamic extremism and the recent US military interventionism in the
region on the free discussion of minority issues in the Arab World.
Unsurprisingly, there will be
occasions when minority issues will be discussed in the more inclusive context
of the Greater Middle East, if not the Islamic World, and not only the Arab
World, in order to gain a more clear perspective with regard to the situation
of specific minorities, such as the Kurds, the Berber, the Christians and the
Shia. Nonetheless, the focus, at least in the initial stages of the Project,
will be put on the minorities of the Arab World, especially those of the “Arab
Mashreq” (including the Arab Gulf States, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine,
Iraq and Egypt) where discussion of minority rights has often been neglected.
We will also dabble from time to
time with the no less important issue of the cultural contributions that
minority groups make to the cultural and intellectual life of the Arab World.
In due course of time, we plan to
commission special studies, polls and analyses that can help shed more lights
on the living conditions of minorities in the Arab World, which could in turn
help the various decision-makers involved in addressing some of the relevant
problems and concerns much more effectively than has traditionally been the
case.
Still, and no matter how
ambitious the Tharwa Project happens to be, we understand that it only
represents tentative and modest steps on the long path towards resolving the
various problematic issues related to minority rights in the Arab world. The
Tharwa Project only seeks to make some important contributions in this regard.
The Tharwa Project is currently
being funded through a grant made by Pax Christi Nederland, a branch of an
international organization that seeks to foster greater understanding and
harmony among the peoples of the Middle East. The Project has been
envisioned and is being implemented by DarEmar, a Syrian organization dedicated
to raising the standards of civic awareness in the Arab World.