GENEVA — Sierra Leone’s president told the opening of the Geneva Peace Forum on Monday that the world spends too much repairing the damage of wars and too little stopping them, and proposed a “Geneva Commitment to Prevention.”
Julius Maada Bio, speaking at the Geneva International Conference Centre under the forum’s motto “Choose Peace,” urged governments to dedicate a progressively higher share of international assistance to conflict prevention and to set up transparent reporting that tracks early warnings and what was done about them, CGTN reported.
The forum runs from October 12 to 15, builds on twelve years of Geneva Peace Week in a new format and is organised by the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform with support from the Swiss government, the Canton of Geneva and the City of Geneva, according to a Swiss federal press release. Bio took part in a discussion on the case for setting standards in peace mediation with Switzerland’s State Secretary Alexandre Fasel and Qatar’s Minister of State Mohamed Al-Khulaifi.
Bio drew on his country’s history, CGTN reported. Sierra Leone declared “Di wor don don,” the war is over, in January 2002, and he said the lesson of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Special Court was that recovery needs both justice and reconciliation. A country that once received peacekeepers now contributes them and sits on the UN Security Council, he said. He named Sudan, the Sahel, eastern Congo, the Middle East and Ukraine as reminders of a reactive system, and said the warning signs, inequality, exclusion and broken trust, are ignored until they turn to violence.
Drawing on his time chairing the ECOWAS heads of state authority, he argued for regionally owned, internationally supported frameworks and for sustained dialogue with Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger to preserve shared markets. “Because the greatest victory of peace is not the war we end,” he said. “It is the war we never allow to begin.”
The Qatari minister, whom the Swiss release lists among the speakers, puts a Gulf mediator at the same table. TEH reported in September that Qatar held the Hamas card and the US base card at the UN General Assembly but played neither.
What the reports do not give is a number. Bio asked for a higher share of assistance without naming one, did not describe how the reporting mechanism would work, and no government is reported to have signed the commitment.
