Remarks to Munich Security Conference
António Guterres. Sec. General
Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is indeed a great pleasure for me to be back in Munich now in this new capacity.
We live in a dangerous world. We are witnessing a multiplication of new conflicts, old conflicts seem never to die – be it in Afghanistan or Somalia – and these conflicts are becoming more and more interlinked and linked to a new threat of global terrorism. If one looks from Nigeria to Mali to Libya, Israel-Palestine, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, it is clear that all these crises are connected to each other. Fighters moving from one place to another and sometimes going back to countries of origin, namely here in Germany, representing a huge threat to our common global security.
Now, many of these conflicts were borne of the fragility of states. In the beginning, they were internal conflicts, sometimes asymmetric, normally with huge violations of international humanitarian law and huge suffering, displacement of populations, but then other states become involved – either as parties to the conflict or supporters of the parties to the conflict. They internationalize, [become] interlinked, more strongly, and the truth is that they have been developing in a world where power relations became unclear.
I lived the Cold War, the bipolar world. I lived as Prime Minister [during] the period of a unipolar world. Now, yet we are not in a multipolar world, we are in a kind of chaotic situation, probably leading to a multipolar world. But in these chaotic situations with unclear power relations, impunity and unpredictability have been the name of the game. And it is in this context that I believe that we need and, I’ve said it several times, a surge in diplomacy for peace. Members States will have to assume the leading role, but I presume the Secretary-General of the United Nations can, using his good offices, be an added value in that surge, acting as a catalyst, sometimes a convener, but always as a bridge-builder and an honest broker. And trying to make countries understand, especially those that are involved as parties to a conflict or as supporters of the parties to a conflict, that independently of their differences, their contradictions, their different perspectives, the truth is that the danger for them and the danger for us all, let’s say Syria, for instance not only the suffering of the Syrian people, not only the destabilization of the region, Iraq, refugees in Jordan and Lebanon – but the threat feeding global terrorism, the threat to us all is such and the threat to the countries involved is such that I believe the intelligent thing to is to come together and put an end to this kind of conflict.
Read more: https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2017-02-18/secretary-general%E2%80%99s-munich-remarks
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