The OECD initiative

The failure of the Mozambique Culture of Peace Programme undercut the development of a second possible culture of peace model for the development programmes of the OECD - the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development - following our inability to use the El Salvador model as described above. In fact, I had attended a conference in Spring 1996 in Berlin which proposed to OECD that development programmes should be redesigned in order to prevent violent conflict. The conference was at a high level, including not only the key people from OECD, but also the German ministers of Development and of Foreign Affairs - two of the key funders of OECD. Afterwards, speaking to the person responsible for further development of this approach at OECD, I was told that while El Salvador was excluded as a model for political reasons, Mozambique would be possible. However, as things went from bad to worse in Mozambique, it did not seem possible to follow through on the challenge given by the OECD.

In retrospect, our failure to provide a model to OECD was one of the greatest disappointments and missed opportunities of the Culture of Peace Programme. While unequal development was clearly one of the major causes of violence, traditional development programmes were often contributing further to this inequality instead of decreasing it. For one thing, they were often carried out in a way as to enable the wealthy to become even richer at the expense of the poor in the developing countries. And at the same time they were often designed to support the development of export agriculture and industry which made the poor countries more rather than less dependent on the wealthy countries. To change the thrust of development programmes by including those who had been in conflict could have reversed this situation. The Culture of Peace Programme was one of the few programmes with the potential to make this change, but at the key points we failed to be able to supply the results necessary to make the approach convincing.

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