Qatari Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani stressed on Saturday that the Doha Forum 2024 has gone beyond being merely a space to share perspectives to become a global platform that gathers leaders and surmounts global challenges.
Welcoming the participants during the opening of the forum, he said that in a world where events have rapidly evolved and crises have escalated in an unprecedented way, there is a sore need to return to fundamental principles by creating novel solutions for peace, stability and development.
Previous experiences have proven that adhering to the traditional approach to dealing with intractable crises will only lead to reproducing the same challenges, and perhaps exacerbating them, he warned, according to Qatar’s state news agency (QNA).
The forum, he added, is being held while the world stands at a crossroads of critical decisions, either surrendering to the cycle of violence that many regions around the world are grappling with or innovating new solutions that ensure the end of the current violence and lay a solid foundation for enduring peace and fair prosperity and guarantee stability for future generations.
“Gaza is undoubtedly a stark model of this violent cycle, an unprecedented humanitarian tragedy, but also a genocide that happens under the watch of the world which would have dangerous repercussions threatening the entire region, as demonstrated in Lebanon,” he noted.
“Nations must ask crucial questions about the effectiveness of conventional means in dealing with conflicts, as these questions become more urgent with each passing day,” Sheikh Mohammed went on to say.
Successive crises have revealed the magnitude of the gap between traditional methods and systems and the rapidly accelerating contemporary challenges, he outlined, emphasizing that the world today is in urgent need of advanced institutions for international cooperation, which go beyond traditional frameworks and rely on principles of justice and inclusivity, while benefiting from tools of the digital age.
Sheikh Mohammed emphasized that a serious and candid stance is required in the face of the changes of this era, adding that peoples of the region are living in an age of massive technological advancements.
He stressed that everything possible should be done to ensure that these technologies remain tools to drive economic development and promote peace and human welfare.
