Bangkok--19 Oct--eTurboNews
"Peace may be unnatural" because of the enormous amount of human endeavor needed to keep it alive. This was the message of the head of an international development agency, addressing "Development and Peace" in a keynote speech to the International Conference of the Americas, held in Punta Dana, Dominican Republic last week.
Speaking to over 1,500 delegates drawn from governments, non-governmental organizations and United Nations associations, Counterpart International president Lelei LeLaulu said development was ultimately about peace and reminded the conference of the need for "an unnatural amount of time and effort to ensure peace survives." Even more effort was needed to move peace from "survivability to sustainability" and beyond to an enduring peace, he added.
LeLaulu asked the delegates whether peace was possible when half of the world's population had to eke out at existence under intolerable conditions on US$2 a day adding, "How can you expect to live in peace when a billion people had to live on US$1 a day?" Declaring the urgent need to deal with the issues of natural resources management, he asked "How can you expect to drink in peace when a billion people have no access to safe water?"
Counterpart International, he said, looks for ways of giving people access to the tools they need to build a life of dignity and peace. Development, he declared, is all about access. "What we at Counterpart see is a lack of access to the myriad tools available for people living with disabilities to live a life of dignity and peace." Poverty, he added, is a lack of access to credit, education and information.
Referring to famine, LeLaulu noted studies by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen who lamented that where there was famine there was usually a surplus of food in another part of the country. He underscored the need to build structures to enable the hungry to access food in their own country.
Directly addressing the hundreds of youth leaders from Latin America and the Caribbean in the audience at the conference, LeLaulu urged them to make development at any level part of their life's work because "development is about peace." He urged them to actively engage in activities that improved the lives of people and reminded them of the observation, "all it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing." Noting the fragility of peace which can evaporate in hours, he urged delegates to view peace not as an "absence of war" but as "a living organism which required constant attention and nurturing - like a flower."
The event was organized by the United Nations Association of the Dominican Republic (UNA-DR), in collaboration with the Global Foundation for Democracy and Development (GFDD/FUNGLODE).
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