Minister Kurz Guest of Iraq: I belong to facebook generation

Follow Up (IraqiNews.com) The youngest Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz (born 27 August 1986) has been on an official visit to the Iraqi Capital Baghdad on Sunday to meet his Iraqi Counterpart, Ibrahim al-Jaafary. Kurz is an Austrian politician, who has been Austria’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Integration since 2013.[1] He is a member of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP).

Kurz was born in Vienna and brought up in the city district of Meidling, where he still lives. He entered the Bundesgymnasium und Bundesrealgymnasium Erlgasse in 1996 and after his final exam in 2004 Kurz completed the obligatory military service. In 2009 he was elected chairman of the youth branch of the Austrian People’s Party. Between 2010 and 2011 he was member of Vienna’s city council. In April 2011 Kurz was appointed to the newly created post of State Secretary for Integration (part of the Ministry of the Interior). At Austria’s general election in 2013 he was elected member of parliament. In December 2013 he became Austria’s Foreign Minister, whose portfolio was at his request widened to include Social integration. At the time of his swearing-in Kurz was Austria’s youngest government minister since the foundation of the republic and the youngest foreign minister in the European Union.أعلى النموذجأسفل النموذج

Elected to Vienna’s city council in 2010, he focused on generational fairness and ensuring pensions.

Integrating foreigners into Austrian society has been his defining project since a 2011 cabinet reshuffle brought him into the government as a state secretary, a position below minister.

Initially greeted with skepticism, he is now widely seen as a hands-on politician with concrete ideas including requiring an extra pre-school year for children with poor German skills.

Kurz, who says he still lives in the same flat in a working-class Vienna district he had before joining the government, says he will not let his new role go to his head.

“This is a big step but it doesn’t at all mean that my circle of friends or my approach to life will change. I will certainly be the same guy that I am,” said Kurz, who has been likened to Klemens von Metternich, who was 36 when he became foreign minister of the Austrian empire in 1809.

At his speech at the general debate of the 69th Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations (New York, 24-30 September 2014) he said “It is with great respect that I stand at this podium for the first time as Austrian Foreign Minister. Many eminent world leaders stood here before me and laid out their visions on international challenges and crises.” As you can tell – probably even from the last row – I look a bit younger than most of the other speakers before.

Indeed, I believe I am the only person under the age of 30 who has the privilege of speaking here this week.

So while I cannot speak from many years of experience, what I can offer is the “perspective of a young generation.” My generation is the post-Cold-War generation. The Iron Curtain collapsed 25 years ago when I was 3 years old.

For us in Europe, the years after the collapse of the Iron curtain were years filled with hope and new opportunities:

“We could travel freely, study in foreign countries and meet people from all over the world,” and “We grew up in a society where human rights were respected, where the rule of law was a given and where religious freedom was practiced,” noting “We communicate without borders on Facebook and Twitter, we have our entire lives stored on our smartphone and we consume the news online.”

Looking beyond our region, we are currently witnessing a further rise of extremism in the name of religion with a new development: foreign terrorist fighters who come from Western countries and travel to the Middle East in order to join the fight.

There is no time to lose: we must actively address what is happening in Northern Iraq where the so-called Islamic State is attempting to wipe out entire religious communities. Where children are being beheaded, mothers raped and fathers hung because of their beliefs.

In Europe, we estimate that there are thousands of foreign fighters with European passports. In our case, there are more than 140 people from Austria fighting in the name of a so called “holy war”.

We all know that these terrorist organizations operate worldwide. They get their terrorist fighters by global recruiting. They finance themselves through global networks. They buy arms and other resources on a global scale.

And they use – or rather abuse – the global communication networks to their benefit.

How is it possible that terrorist organizations have access to financial and economic resources that allow them to operate so effectively?

How is it possible that we allow terrorist organizations to abuse the right to freedom of expression by showing their barbaric acts on social media?

And how is it possible that they are able to recruit new fighters within our societies?

We all, governments and private sector, have the duty to develop preventive measures within our societies to stop the flow of foreign terrorist fighters, to cut off financial support to their organizations and to put an end to the abuse of social media networks by developing forms of voluntary self-restriction in these networks. The adoption of the Security Council resolution this week was an important first step. Now we have to implement it. /End/