It’s a big honour and a great pleasure to welcome you to the installation of Omar Moufakkir as a Tourism for Peace lector at the CHN. I would also like to extend a special welcome to Omar and the members of his family who are attending this event. A warm welcome also to everyone who took part in the Tourism for Peace seminar today.

I am proud of the fact that the CHN is able to highlight this important event with the installation of its eighth lector.

Omar, with Tourism for Peace, you are touching a central theme in the CHN. As a value-oriented university, we definitely play a peace-oriented role in society and communities. We fulfil that role by giving students from different countries - as well as in different countries - the opportunity to interact with one another. By doing so, they learn to respect one another and accept the differences in their cultural backgrounds and values. I am currently attending a board of governors meeting of our South African campussite aiming to create a bridge between Western and African cultures.

You are going to conduct research in the field of Tourism and the associated service industries. Whenever people travel to other countries and cultures, they are confronted with people who think differently, feel differently and live differently; all of which contributes to a sense of respect to their own perspectives and their own ways of life. How can Tourism be targeted to contribute directly to this, instead of merely being an economic factor?

We are looking forward to use the knowledge you will provide us with to help us apply this vision of tourism (which truly contributes to secure Peace) to create a systematic approach to this subject in education. Preferably from the very first year of our Bachelor’s programme, all the way through to the Master’s and with a solid linkage to the industry. After all, that is our assignment, as well as yours: to create an active link between research, education and industry.