THE HAGUE, November 26, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – The Dutch government has signed a declaration of intent with a local university to train imams in what the government said was an endeavor to cut down the number of foreign imams to zero by 2008.

"Choosing imams remains the domain of the mosques, but this declaration of intent will allow (us) to propose a complete program in concert with Muslim organizations and the teaching world," justice ministry spokesman Arnoud Strijbis told Agence France-Presse (AFP) Saturday, November 26.

The Contact Group for Muslims and Government (CMO), the government's preferred partner organization, will work with Amsterdam's Inholland college to create a four-year program for imams.

Some 375,000 euros (439,000 dollars) have been allocated to the project by Immigration and Integration Minister Rita Verdonk and Education Minister Maria van der Hoeven.

Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Inholland college J. Elbers said that the four-year training program will kick off in 2006.

The Dutch debate over imam training was heightened by the November 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by 19-year-old Dutch-Moroccan Mohammad Bouyeri for a film deemed offensive by Muslims.

There are some 450 mosques in the Netherlands, 1,000 Islamic cultural centers, two Islamic universities and 42 preparatory schools, according to recent estimates.

Muslims make up one million of the Netherlands’s 16 million population. Turks represent 80 percent of the Muslim minority.

Europe’s main rights and democracy watchdog, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), expressed concern in May 2005 at the increasing Dutch intolerance towards Muslims and the "climate of fear" under which the minority was living.

Until now, almost all the imams in the country's mosques have been of Turkish or Moroccan origin but the Dutch government says it wants no foreign imams from 2008.

But CMO chairman Ayhan Tunca said the agreement is not obligatory and take into account previous agreements signed by the government and Muslim organizations.

He cited a deal between the Netherlands and Turkey, which gave Turkish mosques in the Netherlands the right to bring imams from the Turkish Ministry of Waqfs.

Since September 2005, the University of Amsterdam has been training a group of around 20 student imams who are only allowed to preach Muslims in hospitals and prisons.

Along with qualifying imams, the government plan would make everyone who has not spent eight years in the Netherlands during the period of compulsory education (from six to the age of 16) take integration classes.

The issue of imams training has recently taken central stage in several European countries.

Major Swiss Christian groups put forward a proposal to establish a government-supervised institute to educate imams on the "liberal" lifestyle in western societies, which split Muslim activists in the country down the middle.