El Salvador

The first stage of the Culture of Peace Programme was a series of national programmes in countries emerging from armed conflict - especially two where the United Nations had peacekeeping operations, El Salvador and Mozambique. The principle was to engage the parties in conflict (the FMLN and the Government in El Salvador, FRELIMO and RENAMO in Mozambique) in a process whereby they would plan and implement together human development projects that would be of benefit to each. The idea was to transform conflict into cooperation by working for common goals.

In the summer of 1993, I took part along with other UNESCO representatives in workshops of representatives of the Government of El Salvador and the FMLN to plan human development projects. A series of 23 such projects were elaborated and then submitted to funding agencies. At that time, the UN peacekeeping forces had established an atmosphere of peace in the country for the first time in a generation. It was a time of hope. I tried to capture it in the form of a poem:

The earth is pregnant with prophecy,
And change is blowing in the wind:
Enemy sitting with enemy,
Armies disbanding,
Walls crumbling.

The old ways of war are dying.
What will we do without them?
Who will show us a new way of living?

Listen. I hear voices.
A song comes from the men with dark eyes
      in the hot mists around the green volcano.
Look. Words appear on the walls:
      "Hoy, defendemos el voto
      Mañana el poder popular."

Women carrying baskets of fruit on their heads
      will teach us how to walk.
Children quietly learning Nahuatl
      will teach us how to talk.
A people united will teach us new words:
      "concertación y participación".

Abandoning our factories of rockets and rifles,
Renouncing violence as the last resort,
Redefining power as cooperation,
We will learn from the women and children
      the language of a Culture of Peace.

As we undertook the culture of peace programme in El Salvador three levels of contradictions arose: 1) bureaucratic problems; 2) governmental opposition; and 3) lack of funding support by the international community. The countries who had emerged from war were now committed to peace and reconciliation in their rhetoric, but when it was tested in practice, the rhetoric often concealed a continuing resistance to the peace process. And while the international community was committed on paper to peace-building as well as military peacekeeping, and they would even make paper commitments in donors meetings, when it came to actually funding the projects that had been agreed to by the former warring parties, the promises often evaporated. On a day-to-day level, the most obvious problems were primarily bureaucratic in nature, but when we were able to get past them and get to the point of implementation, we often ran into the more fundamental problems of governmental opposition and lack of international funding.

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