Dear friends,
I come from Syria, a country that has been ravaged by a devastating war for over thirteen years. Since I was five years old, I have lived in war, first in Lebanon and then in Syria. Today, after the fall of the regime in 2024,
I would like to share with you a conviction born from this long, painful experience: there is no peace without justice, and there will never be justice as long as the world continues to produce and sell weapons as if they were bread.
In Syria, we learned that wars don’t arise solely from internal conflicts —that’s not true—but from the greed of those who fuel them from afar. Every bomb, every missile, every weapon that destroyed a home, a hospital, or a school in Syria was manufactured somewhere in the world, often in countries that today talk of peace.
The war was a huge economic business: the more shooting, the more someone made money . While millions of Syrians fled, international arms markets grew. This is the great hypocrisy of our time: talking about human rights while funding the industries that trample them.
Today in Syria, as in so many other places around the world, peace cannot be born simply from a signature or a political agreement. It can only arise from a journey of justice: truth for the victims, freedom for prisoners, equality between communities, fair access to resources, respect for the dignity of every person.
Justice means listening to the pain of families who have lost everything. Justice means giving voice to women, young people, and minorities, and recognizing their role in building the future. Justice means breaking the silence on those who armed and supported the war for their own gain.
Syria needs schools, not military camps. It needs hospitals, not checkpoints. It needs reconciliation, forgiveness, not revenge.
I’ll tell you a funny but significant story. When I arrived in Perugia to participate in the Assembly, they came to pick me up from the station. The first woman I met, also a participant, was Israeli, and Jewish! I was shocked. It was the first time in my life I’d met an Israeli. We’ve been enemies for decades… And then I met Palestinians, Lebanese… there have been wars between us… At a certain point, I asked myself: have I, Robert, from the depths of my being forgiven those who have hurt me?
We can no longer delude ourselves: as long as we continue to build weapons, we will use weapons. Every factory that produces instruments of death is a collective failure of humanity.
Today, while billions of dollars are invested in rearmament, there are 250 million children worldwide who are out of school. In Syria, half of the hospitals are not functioning and millions of people live without drinking water. Is that right? Can we really call ourselves civilized if we choose to finance war instead of life?
Weapons do not bring security. They only bring fear and destruction. True security comes from bread, work, education, justice, and mutual trust.
As civil society, as NGOs, as citizens of the world, we have a duty: to break the cycle of war . This means denouncing the economic complicities that fuel conflict; investing in peace education and cooperation between peoples; creating economies of solidarity, not exploitation; defending human dignity, not the interests of arms.
Our job is not just to deliver aid, but to change the way the world thinks about peace .
Our Syrian association, Seeds of Hope, and our Italian association, AMU-Azione per un Mondo Unito , support 28 development and capacity-building projects, including a preschool for children with disabilities in the devastated city of Homs. At this school, we offer education, therapy, and psychological support. After several years, many children manage to integrate into public schools.
A six-year-old girl, when I asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, replied: ” I want to be a teacher, to love and help children like me, just as you did for me.” This phrase is more important than any political speech. It tells us that peace comes only when we choose to love instead of hate, to build instead of destroy, to educate instead of arming.
Today, here at the UN People’s Assembly, I ask you to make that little girl’s voice your own. To say with courage: no more wars, no more weapons. Let’s stop the madness of global rearmament. We cannot save the world with fear, but only with brotherhood. And brotherhood is built with justice, not with force.
Stopping wars and rearmament is not a utopian dream: it is the very condition for being able to live as human beings.
Robert Chelhod