2000 UNESCO PRIZE FOR PEACE
EDUCATION PRESENTED TO TOH SWEE-HIN
Paris, December 12 (No.
2000-138) - Professor and researcher Toh Swee-Hin of the University of
Alberta, Canada, received this year’s UNESCO Prize for Peace Education in a
ceremony at Organization Headquarters yesterday evening.
Mr Toh, who is of Malaysian origin
with Australian nationality, has spent his life pioneering and promoting peace
education internationally, and particularly in the island of Mindanao,
Philippines, site of long-standing armed, social and cultural conflicts. As
Director of the Centre for International Education and Development from 1994 to
1999, he integrated peace education into several bilateral educational
development projects in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.
The decision of the UNESCO
prize’s international jury, said UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura in
his introductory speech, recognises Mr Toh’s “outstanding efforts to promote
the ideals of peace and non-violence and his active involvement in the cause of
peace through the education of all the different social partners”.
Accepting the prize’s
statuette created by Catalan sculptor Fenosa, Mr Toh reflected on his
experiences of the “critically transformative process” of peace education in
both Northern and Southern hemispheres, experiences which “suggest that one of
the greatest challenges…is the awakening of compassion and solidarity among
North citizens for marginalised peoples and societies world-wide.”
Honourable Mentions for
outstanding work in peace education were also awarded during the ceremony to
author and psychologist Pierre Weil (France), Rector of the Université
Holistique Internationale de Brasilia, UNIPAIX, and promoter of its original
transdisciplinary approach; to the Middle East Children Association - a
non-profit organisation founded jointly by Israeli and Palestinian educators to
help turn the peace process into reality - through its founders and directors
the Israeli Adima Shapiro and the Palestinian Ghassan Abdullah; and, in
abstentia, to Christiana Ayoka Mary Thorpe (Sierra Leone), a champion of
literacy for women, who as Under-Secretary and Secretary of State for Education
introduced radical reforms in her country’s educational system.
As he accepted the Honourable
Mention, Mr Weil encouraged the audience to sing a verse of a new version of the
French national anthem, the Marseillaise of Peace, which replaces
sanguinary sentiments with exhortations to “sing, dance [...] vibrate in
unison.”
Ms Shapiro and Mr Abdullah
spoke in their respective languages, thanking UNESCO for this encouragement at a
particularly difficult time. “We pledge before you that we will continue,”
said Mr Abdullah, “making every effort to bridge the gulf, to build confidence
and to seek release from harmful stereotypes.”
A written message from Ms.
Thorpe, describing the success of a peace education community training programme
in war-ravaged Sierra Leone, was made available to participants.
The US$25,000 Prize for Peace
Education, created in 1980 through a donation from the Japan Shipbuilding
Industry Foundation (now the Nippon Foundation), recognises activities which, in
the spirit of UNESCO’s Constitution and the United Nations Charter, increase
public awareness and mobilise opinion in the cause of peace. Previous winners
include the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Paulo
Freire, Brother Roger of Taizé, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Mother Teresa of
Calcutta, Prayudh Payutto, Chiara Lubich and the Association of the Mothers of
the Plaza de Mayo.
This year’s prize-giving was
followed by a projection of Layla Nabulsi’s play Wanoulélé que s’est-il-passé?
about one mother’s experience of the massacres in Rwanda.
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