OSLO — 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 Eriksen Soreide and Somalian Prime Minister Hassan Ali 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 atomized and internationalized 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. Xinhua