Written contribution / Contribution écrite
by / par
Leon DAVICO (Yugoslavia)
Special Adviser to the Director-General

The ideas and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of UNESCO/Les idées et les opinions exprimées dans cet ouvrage sont celles de l'auteur et ne reflètent pas nécessairement les vues de l'UNESCO

After the Second World War the people of the world, in creating the United Nations, asked their political leaders to make certain that never again will there be another Coventry of Stalingrad, that never again there will be war.

Since that appeal there has, in fact, not been a world war. Instead, over one hundred small wars have been fought in various parts of our planet.

Personal sickly ambitions, religious and national hatred and ridiculous border disputes were at the source of these conflicts that have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
In so-called civilised countries, small but active groups of young hooligans have taken over the streets of big cities being violent for violence sake.

Racist propaganda has transformed innocent people into targets of attacks because of the colour of their skin.

And even now while we are meeting in this heroic city of Moscow to discuss the way out of this diabolic sequence intolerance - violence - war, in the middle of Europe continues the sad saga of people who have been forced by political and military adventurers into total poverty, total insecurity and back into middle ages.

You do not answer a crime with another crime, the spiral is to well known.

The answer to our question and our problem lies in education. If children are tought from the most tender age that problems cannot be solved by violence, they will enter their manhood age with greatest doubts about the usefulness of violence.

In Bosnia, during the war UNESCO has built three schools for children refugees from Moslem, Croatian and Serbian entities. The only condition put was not to teach them hatred. It is a real pleasure visiting these schools today.

Schools are to course the most important place to break away from the tradition of violence. Is there a better negative example than what happened in Colorado a month ago? But schools are not the only place where the new wind should start blowing.

Families are another natural playground for democracy.

And what about television? How many killings are being witnessed every day by hundreds of millions of children in the world? It is not enough to put a white square under the title of the film in order to indicate that it is not fir for young minds. There must be some electronic possibilities to stop such programs. But there is also something like prevention or preventive repression.

It is up to a combination of family education, school activity and media influence to put a stop to racist and nationalistic propaganda.

The advantages of peaceful solutions and dialogues must be tought and illustrated.

Every war ends with negotiations, every quarrel ends with a dialogue. So, why have wars and quarrels in the first place, and not start with the dialogue?

The Kosovo crisis that has been in our minds in the last weeks could have been avoided. There was practically a consensus for the autonomy of the province. The passions and political calculations from the outside have brought about the Rambouillet talks. But that was not a dialogue. It was a diktat for anybody familliar with European history, it was a planned fiasco. A little bit more patience and the exodus of hundreds of thousands of people could have been avoided.

Subsequently the destruction of the infrastructure of the whole country would not have taken place. The air strikes have not helped the Kosovo population and they certainly have multipled by ten or a hundred the feelings of hatred towards the attacker.

And again there will be dialogue and negotiations at the end.

The world of ours needs peace in order to go forward. The great majority of the people of the world live under difficult conditions and hundreds of millions live under the poverty line.

Every war, every major crisis brings the clock back and deepens the gap between the have's and havenot's.

We need peace, a culture of peace. Maybe not peace at any price but let that price be such as to make wars impossible.