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A Project for South Africa We never initiated a culture of peace programme in South Africa. This was particularly unfortunate because the potential was so great. As described in the monograph on the culture of peace that wrote for UNESCO in 1995, the South African peace accords of September 1991 had established an unprecedented network of national and local peace committees engaged in conflict resolution and reconciliation. At its peak there were 11 regional committees and over one hundred local peace committees, with an annual budget of almost $12 million which enabled the hiring of full-time staff for regional offices. Here was most comprehensive basis ever established for a network of peace promoters! I was urged to get involved in 1994 by Reg Austin, the head of the legal department of the Commonwealth Secretariat and the man who had headed up the United Nations assistance programme for the South African elections which took place in April 1994. I requested to be sent on mission to South Africa at the end off 1994 with the goal of preparing a proposal for the international community to fund the South African peace structures as a permanent independent system of peace promoters for the country. It was obvious that the new South African government would have to use its scarce resources to satisfy the immediate promises such as housing that it had made to voters during the election, and that it could not afford to fund the peace structures on a continuing basis. On the other hand, these peace structures, had they been funded independently, could have contributed to all of the programs such as those for housing by facilitating the participation of all despite the conflicts that divided them. But the CPP director refused to accept my mission proposal. Instead, he took the mission itself and used it as a junket to take his wife and see some old friends living in South Africa. There was never even a mission report on the trip he took, let alone any serious attempt to develop a culture of peace programme in the country. Such a programme was finally proposed to CPP by the new UNESCO representative to South Africa in the fall of 1996, but by that point I had been given other responsibilities and there was little enthusiasm by the CPP Director to follow it up himself - after all, he has already been there on mission and done nothing in this regard. |