UNITED NATIONS, April 24 (Xinhua) -- President of the 72nd session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Miroslav Lajcak has urged a global diplomacy dedicated to preventing conflicts.
The senior Slovak diplomat said this when speaking of the ongoing two-day UN high-level meeting on building and sustaining peace.
"Diplomats should be focused on preventing conflicts," he said.
"There are too many conflicts around and we as the international community usually react to the conflict after they break out, not before. That is why we want to use this high-level meeting to speak about the prevention of conflicts," Lajcak told Xinhua on Monday.
It is a very important topic to prevent conflicts, he added, so as to save human lives and reduce economic losses.
First of all, diplomacy is about preventing conflicts, he noted. "Conflicts don't happen overnight. There are signals."
There should be enough political will to prevent them from happening, he said while praising the African country Gambia as a good example for stifling potential conflicts through diplomacy in a very difficult situation.
Lajcak meanwhile stressed the central role of the United Nations in its multilateral efforts to maintain peace.
"The United Nations is the home of multilateralism. This is the place where we should discuss our problems, our issues, our different views before we find ourselves in conflict," he said.
On the UN meeting, he said, "I really hope that the high-level event will send a strong signal and will change the way we look at peace."
"My expectation is to strengthen multilateralism, to strengthen the rules-based system, to strengthen the world that is based on the same rules for everyone, for big and for small, because that is the only way we can prevent conflicts," he noted.
