Maputo — Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano was the main speaker on Monday in two round tables at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos, dealing with conflict resolution, and the crisis of world fresh water supplies.
Chissano appealed to the international community to devote adequate resources to preventing conflicts, and to solving those that arise, and to ensuring that each human being has access to clean drinking water.
In the first of these discussions, Chissano said that peaceful resolution of conflicts should be the preferred way to maintain peace. He stressed that a key element in conflict resolution is to understand the genesis or fundamental cause of the conflict, and to deal with these underlying factors.
What was fundamental, he argued, was that there should be an interest and determination from the parties involved to achieve a genuine reconciliation. He thought it important to consolidate a "culture of peace", and bring people to learn how to forgive - even if the wounds opened during the confrontation cannot be eliminated.
He drew from his own experience of how the war of destabilisation in Mozambique was brought to an end. He stressed that what had ensured that peace in Mozambique lasted was precisely the implantation of a culture of peace, and the awareness that only by living in harmony could everyone be a winner.
He stressed the importance of the parties to a conflict accepting that the most important thing is to safeguard the interests of the majority of the population - and not their own interests as belligerents. This meant they had to be prepared to make compromises in a spirit of "give and take". He warned that, in order to restore peace, it is sometimes necessary that one or other party agrees to lose face - a sacrifice worth making in order to save innocent lives.
As for the growing water crisis, Chissano called for the adoption of measures to ensure that every human being has access to clean water. The international community, he stressed, must also study how to save water, rather than waste it. Just like other natural resources, he noted, mankind has been treating the world's water supply as if it were inexhaustible, wasting it, and polluting it with toxic products.
The result is that water sources that were once used by large numbers of people have become poisonous and undrinkable.
During his stay in Davos, Chissano participated in other debates, notably on the HIV/AIDS threat to Africa. Participants discussed how the epidemic is at its worst in sub-Saharan Africa, where poverty does not allow governments to import in sufficient quantity the anti-retroviral drugs that prolong the lives of people infected with HIV.
Chissano, who was accompanied to Davos by the Minister of Higher Education, Science and Technology, Lidia Brito, and by Deputy Finance Minister, Manuel Chang, left Switzerland on Monday night to return to Maputo.
