Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: The participants of a workshop on Tuesday urged the government to devise a comprehensive Counter Violent Extremism (CVE) policy to root out all violent extremism in the country.

There is a dire need to evolve a CVEs policy to ensure bringing community and all religious leaders together with law enforcement, teachers and people from all other walks of life aimed to deter the people from joint extremists groups, they said that during the three days long workshop entitled “Strengthening the Capacity of CVE stakeholders in Pakistan” organized by Individual and Pakistan.

The main objective of the workshop was to engage civil society organizations, youth and government representatives to counter violence and extremism.

They said that building community resilience, media engagement, promotion of culture, educational reforms, rehabilitation and militants should be included in CVE.

The participants also said that the workshop has provided us with an opportunity to meet people belonging to different religions and sects and we discussed different conflicts in our communities. This is an example of working together for peace building and to promote a peaceful coexistence, they further said.

Another participant was of the view “This capacity building workshop on strengthening the capacity of CVE’s key stakeholders in Pakistan has been a wonderful experience for me as I have learnt about the community based participatory research, methodologies and methods to collect information from participants about the issue. It has also encouraged me to work together with people of different religions and communities, he said.

The participants highly appreciated and lauded the efforts of the trainers and Individual and Pakistan and demanded such workshops should also be held in the future. Farhan Khalid, Sundas Syeda, Mushoud Ali and Anam Basit moderated the event on behalf of Individual and Pakistan in Lahore and the moderators at the event in Gujrat were Farhan Khalid and Anam Basit.