EVERYONE wants peace, in Northern Ireland, in Bosnia, in Palestine, yet people continue to fight. Mankind is fragmented by religious, racial, national, cultural, class and sexual prejudices and differences.

What will heal those divisions? No religion has.

Yet we can have a united world if we bury our sectarian beliefs and allegiances. If we want peace, we can create it if we stop allowing our religious/national barriers to divide us. The time has come to stop calling ourselves Jews or Moslems, Catholics or Protestants.

Cultures and traditions are antiquated appendages of a tribalistic, isolationist past, increasingly only of curiosity value in a global economy.

Let us identify ourselves with the global society as human beings, first and last. Where then, are the divisions, where are the barriers?

Leaders are only as powerful as the support we give them. Without that support, they fall.

We must be prepared to change ourselves and discard everything that is suspect.

HARRY LINDLE, Keighley Road, Laneshawbridge, Colne.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.