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The Mozambique Project Under Noel's guidance I met with leaders of non-governmental organizations representing women's organizations, musicians, radio and print journalists, veterans organizations, social scientists, writers, in a dizzying round of discussions and dreams. The country was full of bright people anxious to get their country back on a revolutionary track - a peaceful one. And at the same time, there seemed to be a commitment on the part of international donors to fund their reconstruction. Quickly, with Noel we put together a set of ten projects each priced at one or two million dollars, which would support the plans of the non-governmental organizations and link their development workers together as a network of peace promoters trained in conflict resolution, especially based on African traditions. The peace promoter idea, aborted in El Salvador, might still be possible in Mozambique. When we showed the proposals to the representative of the European Union in Mozambique, he said its biggest problem was that the budget was too small. Make it a larger programme and he was sure it would receive their support. In addition to my excellent teachers in the National Commission, I had long discussions with people from two other sources in Mozambique, the churches and the revolutionaries. Through the Mennonites, I met a wonderful African minister in the Methodist Church, an Albino Black man named Jamisse Taimo, who, in turn, introduced me into the circle around him in the Movimento da Paz (Peace Movement) of Mozambique, including the great painter Malangatana and his friend from Cameroon working for the UN, Jean Victor Nkolo. And through my revolutionary contacts in Europe I met with a veteran of the Mozambican Revolution who had not lost his optimism or been corrupted but was still working at a grass roots level to develop revolutionary consciousness in the countryside. The analyses from all of these sources coincided: there was a great potential for a culture of peace as an essential part of a rejuvenated revolutionary Mozambique. In the summer of 1994, Noel took part in a seminar organized in Mombasa, Kenya, under the direction of John Paul Lederach of the Mennonites and Hizkias Assefa of the Christian Nairobi Peace Initiative. As mentioned above in the context of El Salvador, Lederach and the Mennonites have pioneered in the "elicitive method" of training peace promoters. And Hizkias, whom I was to meet in Paris at our First Consultative Meeting for the Culture of Peace and again at the Second International Forum for the Culture of Peace in the Philippines in 1995, works in the same tradition. The seminar, organized by the international NGO International Alert, brought together Africans from both sides of armed conflicts in a dozen or so African countries and enabled them to search for common goals that would enable them to overcome the conflicts that divided them. Noel, like the other participants, was inspired. The methodology of the Mennonites linked well with his own African traditions of reconciliation and peace-making. He found common ground with other African participants, including even a high level representative from RENAMO in Mozambique. Returning from the seminar, Noel told me he would devote his life to the culture of peace and to training peace promoters. We hired him as our first National Professional Officer for the Culture of Peace. Never mind that it took the UNESCO bureaucracy over a full year to give him a contract after the Director-General had ordered it. Noel was patient and eventually the contract came through. When things are working well, it is possible to put up with a certain level of bureaucratic impediments. But the Mozambique Culture of Peace Programme was never to be realized. As in El Salvador, there were three factors which conspired to destroy it: government opposition; lack of funding, and bureaucracy. |