UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday that more mediation is needed as the world is “dangerous” and the situation is “deteriorating.”

“As a matter of fact the number of countries with violent conflicts is the highest in the last 30 years,” Guterres told a joint press conference with Norwegian Foreign Minister Ine Soreide and Somalian Prime Minister Hassan Khaire on the margins of the Oslo Forum.

“At the same time, taking as a reference 2005, when we had the lowest number of people being killed in battle, we have now tenfold that level, which means that the situation is indeed deteriorating in the world,” he said.

The UN chief noted that there are very strong reasons to do everything to prevent conflict and to do everything to solve conflict.

“To prevent is not enough because conflicts are there, they need to be solved, and so mediation becomes an absolutely fundamental instrument in our action,” Guterres said.

More than 100 of the world’s prominent armed conflict mediators, peace process actors, high-level decision-makers and eminent thinkers would gather on Tuesday and Wednesday at the Oslo Forum for informal discussions to reflect on current peacemaking trends and challenges.

The overarching theme of the 2018 forum is “The End of Big Peace? Opportunities for Mediation”.

Participants would explore the challenges posed to peacemakers by the increasingly atomised and internationalised nature of ongoing conflicts.

“Indeed, we live in a dangerous world where we see a multiplication of new conflicts, old conflicts that seem never to die, and conflicts becoming more and more interlinked and more linked to what is now a new threat of global terrorism,” Guterres said.

NAN reports that UN peacekeeping was initially developed during the Cold War as a means of resolving conflicts between states by deploying unarmed or lightly armed military personnel from a number of countries, under UN command, to areas where warring parties were in need of a neutral party to observe the peace process.

The first peacekeeping mission was launched in 1948.

This mission, the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), was sent to the newly created State of Israel, where a conflict between the Israelis and the Arab states over the creation of Israel had just reached a ceasefire.

The UNTSO remains in operation to this day, although the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has certainly not abated.

Almost a year later, the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan was authorised to monitor relations between the two nations, which were split off from each other following the United Kingdom’s decolonization of the Indian subcontinent.

As the Korean War ended with the Korean Armistice Agreement in 1953,UN forces remained along the south side of demilitarized zone until 1967, when American and South Korean forces took over.

As of Feb. 29, 2016, 124 countries  are contributing a total of 105,314 personnel in Peacekeeping Operations, with Ethiopia leading the tally  with 8,324, followed by India (7,695) and Bangladesh (7,525).

In June 2013, Pakistan contributed the highest number overall with 8,186 personnel, followed by India (7,878), Bangladesh (7,799), Ethiopia (6,502), Rwanda (4,686), Nigeria (4,684), Nepal (4,495), Jordan (3,374), Ghana (2,859), and Egypt (2,750). (Xinhua/NAN)

– Jun. 19, 2018 @ 15:25 GMT |