EDUCATION: When Schooling Takes Place Amid War, Death and Terror

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Alejandro Kirk

AMMAN, Jun 18 1996 (IPS) - In Cambodia – the minister explained with Oriental serenity – there is nothing left. In its purifying fury, the Khmer Rouge regime destroyed everything: schools, libraries, texts – even the teachers and students.

Who takes charge of education in the midst of disaster? participants in the United Nations and World Bank-sponsored conference Education for All meeting this week in Jordan are asking themselves. Perhaps the clearest conclusion reached on Tuesday was the recommendation that schools be considered untouchable zones in conflicts, like hospitals.

From 1970 to 1993, Cambodians knew nothing but war, both civil and from abroad. In 1975 the Khmer Rouge guerrillas took power, putting their greatest effort into punishing their own people in the name of revolutionary purity.

Over one million were killed from 1975 to 1978, when the government of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot was expelled by Vietnamese troops, and a new stage of war began that ended in a fragile sort of peace only three years ago.

The histories of Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, Vietnam, Laos, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Palestine, Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland differ in the degree of terror and death. But all have one thing in common: generations of children educated against a backdrop of abandonment and desperation.

Perhaps if schools are treated as safe areas, conference delegates say, not only the buildings could be saved but their human charges as well.

In a workshop on education in crisis situations, independent experts, ministers and other officials from all over the world who are taking part in the conference analysed cases of natural disaster, war, and chronic situations such as poverty and under- development.

Practically two thirds of the world’s children are involved to some extent in a crisis – because a bomb fell on their school, their families were forced to flee their homes, on the way to school they stepped on a mine – or because of the all too routine scenario of having nothing to eat.

John Butt, the coordinator of the BBC’s educational programme in Afghanistan, said his project is a specific example of the media contributing to alternative solutions.

For nearly two decades, Afghanistan’s children have grown up amid war, with an educational system in complete ruin.

The BBC began to carry out educational programmes in the 1980s, while the country was under Soviet occupation. It stepped up its activities following the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1988.

“For the last 10 years, the radio has been the only source of information for the population of Afghanistan, because the educational system was completely destroyed,” said Butt.

A radio serial, complemented with a comic book, is the main educational tool used by the BBC Afghanistan project, in cooperation with the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

The programme includes “all the issues that are important to the Afghans – from the sale of their products in the market to the development of a self-sustained economy. The economic question is important because the international community has forgotten about Afghanistan since the Soviet intervention ended,” Butt added.

Cuba’s Deputy Minister of Education, Rafael Bernal, said the international community should not only be concerned with crisis situations, but also with protecting successful educational systems that are jeopardised by difficult economic situations or external threats.

Cuba, Bernal pointed out, was the first country in the world to apply Education for All, in 1960, years before the initiative was taken up by the United Nations in Jomtien, Indonesia in 1990.

But he added that the Caribbean island nation’s educational system – in spite of its recognised accomplishments and the government’s determination to maintain it – is suffering the effects of the severe crisis gripping the island since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, which was added to the economic stranglehold of the more than 30-year-old U.S. boycott.

Emily Vargas-Baron, with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), told how officials meeting by candlelight in a basement in Bosnia drew up an educational curriculum, which was sent to Slovenia to be printed, and transported by U.S. military caravans to Bosnian schools.

But not everyone – even in Bosnia – receives such support. The Amman meeting thus recommends that donor nations establish special permanent support funds for the educational systems of nations affected by crisis.

Because, as several delegates point out, there is no shortage of interest in providing arms and cash for civil wars. But funds evaporate when the killing ends and reconstruction begins – until the next war.