Feb. 25—The Civil Rights Solidarity Movement party in Germany (Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität, BüSo) held an internet seminar on February 16, 2025 on the topic of, “Peace Through Development in Afghanistan and the Middle East.” This event took place one week before the German elections—elections which marked another stage of Germany’s descent into a catastrophe of its own making. The federal chairwoman and lead candidate of BüSo in the federal election, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, issued a statement February 23, within hours after the polls closed, saying that:

This election campaign was conducted in an unprecedented bubble, which was facilitated by most parties and the mainstream media in line with the NATO narrative. The whole world is now laughing at the complete inability of the German pro-Atlantic establishment to even come close to defending German interests. Both the Merkel government and the so-called street-light government have criminally allowed Germany to be drawn into a NATO war against Russia that has largely ruined the German economy.

The February 16 BüSo seminar offered an alternative approach which reflected the party’s “peace through development” orientation. At the outset, Zepp-LaRouche explained: “We are not just spectators in all these developments, but by proposing very concrete plans, we are already playing a very important role, something that no one else in Germany has done in this form.” Two concrete examples were then used to show how one can approach peace policy differently than how it is usually done.

Concrete Projects

First, the Ibn Sina Project for the development of Afghanistan was presented. The deputy chairman of BüSo, Stephan Ossenkopp, who was also running for the federal election on the Berlin state list and in the Berlin district of Pankow, dealt with “connectivity,” the development of modern transport infrastructure in Afghanistan, connected to the heart of Eurasia. He reported on the progress of three important railway projects in Afghanistan: the Trans-Afghan Railway, the Wakhan Corridor Railway and the Afghan Ring Railway.

Three Afghans living abroad spoke next, describing the work of the Ibn-e-Sina Research and Development Organization (ISRDO), which sees itself as a bridge between the Afghan diaspora around the world and their homeland. Daud Azimi made a passionate appeal to his fellow countrymen in the diaspora to support the reconstruction of the country.

Mirwais Popal described the situation in Afghanistan and criticized the fact that the country was abandoned after the withdrawal of the Western powers. But the people are happy that there is now peace and that no more bombs are falling. Popal thanked the Schiller Institute for its “great plan” to rebuild the country, which was the subject of a conference in Kabul in November 2023. Since then, work has been underway to implement the projects proposed and discussed there.

Abdul Fatah Raufi, who moderated the 2023 conference in Kabul, reported on the progress being made, particularly in the energy sector. After the destruction from decades of war, all sectors of the economy must be rebuilt, but unfortunately financial resources in Afghanistan are very limited.

As a second example of the new approach to peace policy, Tobias Faku of the Schiller Institute in Germany then presented Lyndon LaRouche’s Oasis Plan as a way to create the foundation for economic development and peace in Southwest Asia. He quoted former South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Dr. Naledi Pandor, who had said two days earlier at a meeting of the International Peace Coalition: “I believe we should have the spirit of [Nelson] Mandela that freedom is possible, that the Palestinian people will enjoy sovereignty, justice and freedom, and that the Oasis Plan offers an opportunity for us to think of the world in a different way.” Faku described how the amount of usable fresh water in Israel and Palestine can be doubled by building nuclear power plants for seawater desalination.

Zepp-LaRouche then closed the round of presentations. She began with an overview of the global crisis areas, and described the current “tectonic change in the world situation” based on the efforts of the Global South to overcome 500 years of colonialism. The current attempts to tackle the migration problem by locking out refugees are not a solution; rather, the collective West must cooperate with the Global South to overcome the causes of flight. To achieve this, 2-3 billion new productive jobs would have to be created worldwide:

All this is possible because we are human beings and not animals. And we can therefore consider our best cultural contributions, which every nation and every culture has produced, as the basis for a dialogue in which we support the best tendencies in each other’s cultures and make this a dialogue that will then, with absolute certainty, result in a new Renaissance for humanity.

A round of discussion followed, in which the speakers answered questions from the seminar participants who had joined the conference via the internet. It became clear that Afghans are very disappointed with the West’s behavior toward the country. The confiscation of the country’s foreign exchange reserves is making reconstruction more difficult, and now that the Taliban has eradicated most of the opium poppy cultivation in the country, infrastructure must be expanded to modernize agriculture—but the West does not support this.