HELSINKI, 12/09/06 - Religious leaders of the five great religious movements in Europe and Asia will hold a summit in Amsterdam in 2008 to strengthen mutual dialogue and understanding. The meeting is primarily intended to strengthen the links between Christianity and Islam, said Foreign Minister Ben Bot yesterday at the European and Asian countries summit in the Finnish capital of Helsinki.

It is not yet decided where in Amsterdam and on what date the dialogue will take place. Expectations are that some hundreds of participants will come to the Dutch capital. A number of representatives of social organisations and governments as well as leading business people will participate in the inter-religious dialogue.

Bot says the meeting is mainly aimed at strengthening links between Christianity and Islam in Europe and Asia. "We naturally have no problems now with Hindus, Buddhists or representatives of the Jewish religion. It is a matter of a very small extreme minority of Islam, who return to orthodoxy, causing problems. Islam is however a very broad religion, 99 percent involving very good people. We must also bring this out somehow," according to Bot.

A similar summit took place this year in Cyprus, with 250 participants. Next year, it is the turn of the Chinese capital of Peking. Bot had already offered Amsterdam as organiser of the 2008 summit at the beginning of this year, after a visit to Qatar and Saudi Arabia prompted by the crisis over the cartoons about Islam in the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten.

Bot believes a broad dialogue can encourage "more understanding for one another, to clear the religious differences out of the way." In connection with this, the foreign ministry is also already supporting the Freevoice project with a contribution of 150,000 euros. This project provides for the training of journalists from Islamic countries among others, to arrive at more mutual understanding.