Shared ‘grief and anxiety’ a powerful unifying factor in COVID fight 

Opening the event, the President of the General Assembly, Volkan Bozkir, said “the planetary pandemic has arguably brought humanity person together.” 

“Rarely person we been truthful agreed against a communal challenge. We indispensable physique connected this shared consciousness of grief and anxiety, and enactment unneurotic to not lone tackle COVID-19 but each different challenges that basal successful our path,” helium added.  

Mr. Bozkir said the challenges “are many”, recalling his past travel to Cox’s Bazaar, successful Bangladesh, wherever helium spoke to Rohingya refugees sheltering there, and he highlight the plight faced by many in Afghanistan today, who are “scrambling to find information and information amidst truthful overmuch uncertainty.” 

Ending fighting, conscionable the beginning 

For him, “peace is much, overmuch much than the lack of conflict.” 

“It is a conscious effort by each of us, each moment, to talk, to listen, and to engage. It is simply a sustained effort to recognize and flooded differences,” helium explained.  

Highlighting what it means to follow a culture of peace, Mr. Bozkir said “it is 1 happening to cull violence, it is an wholly antithetic happening to marque the deliberate effort to set our cultures and behaviours to debar the occurrence of unit successful the archetypal place.” 

He besides stressed the values and principles of such a culture, including the request for dialog and debate, for dialog and nuance, and for empathy and understanding.  

The Assembly president then pointed to the situation in Afghanistan, saying the planetary assemblage will have to draw on its “shared consciousness of humanity, of empathy, of compassion, to spell the other mile and supply indispensable humanitarian support.”  

UN’s role 

Mr. Bozkir believes the UN already has the tools to support Member States successful these efforts, such arsenic aboriginal warning strategies against struggle escalation, fact-finding missions, aboriginal deployment of peacekeepers, and fast rollout of humanitarian assistance. 

For him, these are “all captious to maintaining and supporting a civilization of peace, peculiarly erstwhile combined with improvement efforts that empower communities and easiness tensions.” 

Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, Chef de Cabinet of the UN Secretary General, also spoke at the event, as good as Miguel Ángel Moratinos, High Representative of the United Nations Alliance of Civilization (UNAOC), Jayathma Wickramanayake, UN Secretary-General’s Envoy connected Youth, and Liu Zhenmin, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs. 

Leading civilian nine representatives besides took part, including Beatrice Fihn, 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN); Kazumi Matsui, Mayor of Hiroshima and President of “Mayors for Peace”; and Federico Mayor Zaragoza, President of Foundation for a Culture of Peace and erstwhile Director-General of UNESCO.