In English:

As the start of a new school year encroaches upon us, many children around the world will be forfeiting school and pressed into armed conflict. At the same time, many of these children are beginning to fight for their right to an education. In Colombia, where clandestine warfare has displaced an estimated 1 million people since 1980, most of them women and children, UNICEF’s program, Children’s Movement for Peace, mobilized close to 13 million people--children and adults--to commit themselves to ending violence in their country by actively working for peace and social justice.

The Children’s Movement spent almost all of 1996 campaigning for peace in a national mobilization effort coordinated by UNICEF and Redepaz. In October of that year, close to 3 million children, aged 8 to 18, came out to vote on a special referendum, exercising their human right, as articulated in the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, to have their opinions heard on issues of importance to them.

Admittedly a unique approach to education, the mobilization effort, nonetheless, taught a country more about peace than any lecture could.

For many years, it was thought that peace education meant teaching about a defined subject within a formal curriculum. UNICEF’s experience increasingly supports the idea that the best way to learn about peace is by doing--by practicing the behaviors that promote peace. In Colombia, the children did not take any formal exams on what they had learned about peace; instead they pushed it to the top of the public agenda, making peace, rather than violence, the expectation of the general population.

In October 1997, one year after the children’s vote for peace, 10 million adults followed their lead. On a special ballot, they voted "to build peace and social justice, to protect life, to reject all forms of violence and to respect the Children’s Peace Mandate." Using the ballot, Colombians demanded an end to atrocities and that international humanitarian law be respected.

However, Colombia still allows children to enlist with their parents’ permission. Also, according to a recent report by Human Rights Watch, guerillas, paramilitaries and security forces continue to use children in combat areas. At the same time, peace education is making a difference--as the next generation teaches and learns about the wiser ways of conflict resolution.