UN chief strongly hopes war in Ukraine will end in 2023
United Nations, Dec 20 (AP) The United Nations chief expressed strong hopes that the Ukraine war will end in 2023 and on other global hotspots condemned the Iranian government’s crackdown on demonstrators, urged all countries to fight terrorist threats from the extreme right and called on the international community to tell Israel’s new right-wing government that “there is no alternative to the two-state solution.”
In a wide-ranging end-of-year news conference on Monday, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he sees no prospect of talks to end the war in Ukraine in the immediate future and expects the already escalating military conflict to continue. But he called for everything possible to be done to halt the most devastating conflict in Europe since World War II by the end of 2023 — which he strongly hopes will happen.
On other issues, Guterres urged Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers to include all ethnic groups in the government, restore girls’ rights to education at all levels and women’s rights to work, and to stop all terrorist activity on its territory. And he reiterated the U.N.’s determination to pursue the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, saying the international community must also pursue this goal which “is fundamental for peace and security in east Asia and in the world.”
The secretary-general also had some advice for the managers of all social media platforms including Twitter: You have a responsibility to preserve freedom of the press and at the same time ensure that hate speech and extremist views, including of neo-Nazis and white supremacists, don’t find their way onto your platforms.
Looking back at 2022, Guterres said “there may be plenty of reasons for despair” — geopolitical divides that have made solving global problems difficult if not impossible, a cost-of-living crisis, growing inequalities with most of the world’s poorest countries “staring down the abyss of insolvency and default,” with debt service payments skyrocketing by 35%, the largest increase in decades.
But as the year ends, he said, “we are working to push back against despair, to fight back against disillusion and to find real solutions.”
The secretary-general pointed to the historic agreement reached early Monday on protecting the world’s lands and oceans that provides critical financing to save biodiversity in the developing world, saying, “We are finally starting to forge a peace pact with nature.”
He also cited “a measure of progress” in some conflicts.
In Ethiopia, he said, “efforts by the African Union to broker peace are a reason for hope.” In Congo, diplomatic efforts led by Angola and the East African Community have created “a framework for political dialogue” to end the crisis in the country’s mineral-rich east. In Yemen, a six-month truce “delivered real dividends for people” and even though it wasn’t renewed, “there have been no major military operations” and flights and fuel and food deliveries are continuing.
