SPEECH AT LONDON CONFERENCE

A JOURNEY TOWARDS PEACE ~ 158 ~ international meeting, so that I may share my views with this learned audience. We started our journey of peace from Switzerland, where we successfully identified the basic problems faced by the world of today. The joint declaration issued at the Swiss City of Zug called for the building of a better world, based on moral and spiritual values. For this to become a reality, peace had first to be established, for without peace no constructive work could be effectively carried out. It was emphasized that the beginning of the peace process would necessarily entail the elimination of nuclear weapons, without which no progress could be made. One aspect of the deliberations in Switzerland was that the importance of ideology for stemming violence was stressed. Violence always begins in the mind, so we have to uproot it from the mind itself. We have to find an ideology of peace with which to confront the ideology of violence. Otherwise there will be no end to violence. The horrendous events in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, are adequate proof of this point. They