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Provincial Youth Conference on Peace, Harmony and role of Youth at Karachi
an article by Javed Hussain, Executive Director, Sindh Community Foundation
Sindh Community Foundation in collaboration with
Toyota Foundation organized a provincial youth peace
conference at Marriot Hotel, Karachi. More than
100 youth activists from 18 districts of Sindh and
civil society leaders attended the conference.
![](http://cpnn-world.org/upload/400w/p1257zx400w.jpg)
click on photo to enlarge
Speakers included Punhal Saryo, Zulfiqar Halepoto,
Javed Soz , Satar Zangejo , Azra Memon, Jabbar
Bhatti. They spoke at the occasion on various
issues of peace and harmony.
Before the speakers youth activists from different
districts of Sindh Shakeel Ahmad, Azar Niaz, Hina
Soomro, Paras Soomro, Hasan Rajput and other, were
provided space to share their views on peace and
harmony and their role of make peaceful
environment and region specially in upcoming
elections.
It was also discussed that violence is very common
in Pakistani society so the values of inter-
religious and interethnic and inter-community
harmony are needed to overcome deteriorating anarchy
and chaos in the society.
Speakers were concerned that the behavior of young
people and overall society regarding their
attachment with political parties is creating
distance among different ethnic and religious
groups. The participants from the tribal conflict
hit zone in Sindh also shared very bad experience
and state of the tribal conflict in different
areas and it was also shared that the young people
mostly are involved in such conflict to fight with
other tribal so the economic and social
development of young people and area is in hurdle
specially in north Sindh.
It was empathized that youth can play very active
role to reduce the extremism and violent behavior
because they are much vulnerable to those.
Participants were also afraid of violent behavior
in elections as most of voter and agents of the
political parties are young people with the age of
20-29 years. They emphasized that respect is
prime paradigm to make the election free from
violence and peaceful . Peace campaign and non-
violent actions and values must be incorporated in
the curriculum and grass root level behavioral
change actions towards nonviolent must be
implemented.
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DISCUSSION
Question(s) related to this article:
How should elections be organiized in a true democracy?,
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Latest reader comment:
CPNN receives more and more articles from Africa about initiatives that contest the European model of "winner-takes-all" elections, and demand that elections should only be part of a broader democratic process that seeks consensus and compromise.
This fits with the pre-colonial systems of justice in Africa, when there was no monotheism and no single supreme god, no single supreme law, no single "truth" provided by divine intervention, but rather a compromise among many different "gods," perspectives and "truths" arrived at through a process of mediation, for example, the "palabra."
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