Sustainable Peace is a concept being discussed by the UNO since the term appeared in 2015. Yet to attain sustainable peace, we need a world community in which countries renounce the imperialist, intrusive approach, cease invading people and sponsoring wars and coups, concentrating instead on development.
In the 2015 Review of the UN Peacekeeping Architecture, the UN Security Council and General Assembly referred to sustainable peace as a "goal and a process" to build a "common vision of society", which aimed to prevent conflict from starting, from continuing and from recurring.
Taking a look at the world around us today, and in the last twenty years, we find numerous flashpoints - Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, we saw an attempted coup in Venezuela and an actual coup in Ukraine, in all of which the West basically got it wrong and supported the wrong side for the wrong reasons.
In Kosovo they sided with Albanian KLA terrorists perpetrating atrocities against the Serbian authorities, in Afghanistan they failed miserably to beat a handful of poorly equipped Taliban fighters and ended up paying them not to attack after following the Afghan link to 9/11 but ignoring the more glaring Saudi one; in Iraq a sovereign nation was destroyed for no reason whatsoever, based upon lies and outside the auspices of the UNO; in Libya the West sided with terrorists again on its own lists of outlawed terrorist groups, in Syria the West got it fundamentally wrong from day one and today sees its foreign policy credibility as a result of these failures in shreds.
Kosovo is a haven for drugs, weapons and human organs traffickers, Afghanistan is still at war and the Taliban are gaining ground, Iraq is in chaos, still feeling the tremendous social effects of the atrocity, Libya has collapsed as a state, the African country with the highest Human Development Index divided into factions and still struggling to form any form of Government. Venezuela resisted the coup but is feeling the pressure of Washington-based social terrorist measures and in Syria, the West has scaled back its covert operations to support their terrorists forces after they were routed by the Syrian Arab Army which now controls 85% of the country. But at what cost?
Perhaps after so many failures, after trying it on time and time and time and time again, the West will mind its own business, look inwards at its own problems and stop invading sovereign nations, dictating who should be their leaders (to divert resources outwards) and interfering where they are not wanted. This would be a first step towards sustainable peace because those the western media continue to chide, namely Russia, Iran and now the DPR Korea, invaded nobody.
Secondly, and this now includes the entire international community, after so many years of collective government and after so many leaders stepping into positions of power, nobody has been able yet, among the thousands of leaders and members of government worldwide over the last few decades, to stop illegal trafficking of weapons. This is because when sides are taken, if one side is armed the other has to follow suit and again, if the West stopped interfering, there would not be sides to take. It is not Russia's fault. The Soviet Union freed countries from imperialist tyranny and set up affordable public services and utilities. The trouble, as a rule, always comes from the same side, the West. And thirdly, how about going after those who make a living out of trafficking these weapons?
The authorities must know where they are. They are not shorn-off shotguns or home-made pistols, they are weapons of war. Light and heavy machine guns, RPGs, grenades, munitions. They do not just appear, they are manufactured in weapons factories, are registered, are bought and sold, money changing hands and accounts and bills of lading on ships being registered. No weapons, no war.
And fourthly and finally, for sustainable peace you need to attack the root causes of conflict. For this, according to UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, there needs to be "a broader vision of prevention" which runs through inclusive ownership, through national leadership, which means good governance and through measures which engage the needs of all members of society.
After disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of combating forces, bringing warring factions into the political arena and onto the decision-making stage, the bottom line rests with education and this includes a responsible media. Only today, in a major western news outlet, there was mention of Russia being the enemy of the United Kingdom, no doubt a claim repeated in the USA and Australia day after day and while it is nonsense, as the propagandists say, if you repeat a lie enough times, people believe it as the truth.
For sustainable peace to be achieved, we need a credible leadership. Russia has it, China has it...but does the West?
Photo: By Johntb17 at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10550882
Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
Pravda.Ru
Twitter: @TimothyBHinchey
timothy.hinchey@gmail.com
*Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey has worked as a correspondent, journalist, deputy editor, editor, chief editor, director, project manager, executive director, partner and owner of printed and online daily, weekly, monthly and yearly publications, TV stations and media groups printed, aired and distributed in Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Portugal, Mozambique and São Tomé and Principe Isles; the Russian Foreign Ministry publication Dialog and the Cuban Foreign Ministry Official Publications. He has spent the last two decades in humanitarian projects, connecting communities, working to document and catalog disappearing languages, cultures, traditions, working to network with the LGBT communities helping to set up shelters for abused or frightened victims and as Media Partner with UN Women, working to foster the UN Women project to fight against gender violence and to strive for an end to sexism, racism and homophobia. A Vegan, he is also a Media Partner of Humane Society International, fighting for animal rights. He is Director and Chief Editor of the Portuguese version of Pravda.Ru.