New Forum Kicks Into High Gear at the U.N.

UNITED NATIONS — When Secretary-General Ban takes office at the United Nations on January 1, he will find a new forum where rhetoric reigns and sentiments that America and Israel take issue with top the agenda.

The forum, the Alliance of Civilizations, kicked into high gear yesterday with calls for the secretary-general to name a "high representative" to lead it and for all members of the General Assembly to join it.

One of the leading forces behind the initiative, Prime Minister Zapatero of Spain, said yesterday that the alliance has nothing to do with a previous U.N.-sponsored initiative, the Dialogue Among Civilizations.

"The alliance is the alliance," Mr. Zapatero told The New York Sun at a press conference. After Turkey and Spain announced the formation of the new alliance, in 2005, the Dialogue Among Civilizations was dissolved, the prime minister said.

The current group "has nothing to do with Iran," he said. But a former president of Iran, Mohammed Khatemi, who initiated the Dialogue Among Civilizations in the mid-1990s, is one of the driving forces in a group of 19 people chosen by the outgoing U.N. secretary-general, Kofi Annan, to steer the alliance negotiations. No Israeli or American officials were among those chosen.

Mr. Ban will now be called upon to name a "high representative" to lead the alliance. One of the people initially considered for the post was Mr. Annan himself. Currently, the United Nations' point man for the initiative is Mr. Annan's former chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, a Pakistani diplomat whom the Volcker Commission accused of shredding papers related to the oil-for-food scandal.

Meeting in Turkey last month, the alliance steering group published a report saying that while the dispute between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs is not "the overt cause of all tensions between Muslim and Western societies," it "has taken on a symbolic value that colors cross cultural and political relations" that are "well beyond its limited geographic scope."

Mr. Zapatero and Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey visited the General Assembly yesterday, holding separate press conferences; they later attended a classical music concert conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

As Prime Minister Blair, in the Middle East yesterday, threw his support behind a call by the Palestinian Arab leader, Mahmoud Abbas, for new elections, Mr. Erdogan said such a move would be "very negative." The main problem is that Hamas's victory in the Palestinian Arab elections earlier this year was "not taken into consideration," he said.

In its report last month, the alliance's steering group also said the September 11 attacks "were presented as one of the justifications for the invasion of Iraq, whose link with them has never been demonstrated, feeding a perception among Muslim societies of unjust aggression stemming from the West."

Both American and Israeli officials said yesterday that they supported the lofty goals the group is attempting to promote.

But America takes issue "with any portrayal of the conflict as one between Muslims and the West," a spokesman for the American mission to the United Nations, Benjamin Chang, said. It is rather a conflict between "extremists and the West," he said, stressing that Americans "encourage moderate voices within Islam."

An Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Carmon, said that while Turkey and Spain should be congratulated for launching the initiative, their highlighting of the Israeli-Palestinian Arab dispute is overstated. "There is a deadly clash between moderates and extremists," he said. "And Iran is leading the extremist camp. Allowing it to become a leader in this group is wrong."