Gulf cultural cooperation achieves outstanding success

An outstanding success has been achieved in the field of cultural cooperation between the GCC countries despite its recency, (Kuwait's) National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters (NCCAL) Secretary General Ali Al-Youha said on Sunday.  This came in a statement by Al-Youha to KUNA on sidelines of his participation at the preparatory meeting for the GCC Culture Ministers meeting, which is hosted by Riyadh on Wednesday.  The Kuwaiti delegation will be headed by Minister of Information and Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah Al-Mubarak Al-Sabah.  Al-Youha said what contributed to achieving these accomplishments are common interests and great response from all the GCC countries to the cultural development plan, stressing that "all indicators bode well for further achievements on the cultural level in the Gulf states." On the cultural similarities between the GCC countries, Al-Youha explained that cultural heritage can be considered to be the same in some aspects and different in others. Furthermore, he said that the culture of the Gulf is rich and diverse, pointing out that the GCC countries have realized importance of highlighting it outside their geographical borders as they will be discussing several cultural projects at the meeting with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the European Union (EU), Russia, China and the Paris-based Arab World Institute. In addition, he said that the main aim of this meeting is to reflect the Gulf states' cultures to these countries in order to succeed in changing the stereotyped image of them as oil producing countries only, while they bear rich cultures as well as ancient civilizations, which date back to pre-history. During the meeting, several issues on the subject of cultural strategy and its development between the GCC countries will be discussed, especially that its execution program has been adopted to proceed for the upcoming years until 2016, NCCAL Secretary General added. Al-Youha concluded by saying that the program has a variety of cultural activities in the fields of art, photography, poetry, storytelling, music and others, noting that each GCC member state is obliged to implement its share of this program.