President John Dramani Mahama has reaffirmed Ghana’s commitment to Palestine Statehood and a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict at the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA80) in New York
Delivering his address at the UNGA80 Session in New York on Thursday, September 25, President Mahama said the denial of visas to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian delegation to the UNGA80 Meeting was a bad precedent that should be deeply worrying to all member nations of the United Nations.
He said Ghana recognized the state of Palestine in 1988 and supported a two-state solution to the conflict since then.
“And I say, contrary to the claims of some, a two-state solution would not be a reward for Hamas,” President Mahama said.
He noted that it would rather be a retreat for the hundreds of thousands of innocent women and children and people who were facing collective punishment and forced starvation for no reason other than the fact that they are Palestinian.
He said for nearly two years and for the fear of reprisals, UN Member States at the General Assembly Meeting had been playing hide-and-seek with language to find the right words to help them avoid or excuse what they all know was taking place in Gaza.
“But here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter what you call it. If it looks like a duck, it swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck. Well, then it must be a duck,” President Mahama said.
“The crimes in Gaza must stop. The crimes in Gaza must stop.”
President Mahama also drew particular attention to the conflict in Sudan, which the world body described as the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
“12 million people have had to flee their homes. And when we speak of migration, we refer to the 12 million new Sudanese refugees, whom we as a global community should be willing to assist in much the same way that many member nations readily assisted new refugees coming out of Ukraine,” he said.
“Let’s dispense with the euphemisms and dog-whistles and speak frankly. It is not a mystery that when leaders of Western nations complain of their migration problems, they are often referring to immigrants from the global south,” he said.
President Mahama asked that but many of those immigrants were climate refugees; adding that interestingly, the global north emits 75 per cent more greenhouse gases than the global south.
He said, however, the effects of climate change were more severe in the global south because they lacked the resources to address them effectively.
“And so when the desert encroaches on our villages and towns and they become unlivable, we are forced to flee.”
He said Warsan Shire, a Somali-British poet born in Kenya to Somalian refugee parents, was London’s first Youth Poet Laureate.
“She writes in her poem titled “Home”. You have to understand that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land, No one burns their palms under trains beneath carriages,
No one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled means something more than journey,” he said.
“We cannot normalise cruelty. We cannot normalise hatred. We cannot normalise xenophobia and racism. If we are going to tell a story, let’s not tell it slant. Let’s tell all the truth.”
Source: GNA
Source: ghanabusinessnews.com
