Vietnam welcomes measures to promote culture of peace

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Vietnam commends measures undertaken over the past time within the UN framework of promoting the culture of peace and facilitating interreligious and intercultural dialogue in many parts of the world.

Vietnamese representative to the UN, Ambassador Le Luong Minh made the statement at the second General Assembly High-level Dialogue on Interreligious and Intercultural Understanding and Cooperation for Peace in New York on November 13.

The Vietnamese representative affirmed that “peace is the premise for the solution of problems such as hunger, malnutrition and poverty, racial and religious discriminations affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people in many countries and societies and a whole array of global issues facing mankind such as climate change, environmental degradation, and HIV/AIDS.”

“Peace can not be sustainable without solution of these burning problems. Interreligious and intercultural understanding and cooperation thus can only be promoted if it is based on the shared desire to contribute to strengthening this organic relationship between peace and development and the solution of problems affecting people of all faiths,” Mr Minh said.

Ambassador Minh noted that in their thousand-year long history, the Vietnamese people “have never failed to foster interreligious and intercultural dialogue, understanding, cooperation and harmony for the preservation of national independence, sovereignty and peace.”

“Interreligious and intercultural hostilities are foreign to our tradition,” he affirmed, stressing that the country has adopted a series of laws and policies that aim at protecting the nation’s diverse cultural values and guaranteeing the people’s freedom to religion and belief.

He emphasised that, “for the promotion of interreligious and intercultural understanding and cooperation for peace, it is the duty of all Member States to ensure that such attempts to abuse religious freedom that we all cherish in sabotage of our shared peace is foreign in our cultures.”