UNESCO Celebrates 60 Years of Promoting Peace

Wars are underway and human dignity is threatened by poverty, underdevelopment, terror and slavery in many places, as German President Horst Köhler stressed at the UNESCO General Assembly to celebrate the organization's 60th anniversary in Paris. Still, the way people think has changed, Köhler said.

"We have worldwide organizations such as UNESCO that stand for the protection of human dignity and that strengthen the foundations for the co-existence of different cultures," Köhler said. "And we have a global public that takes an interest in the fates of individuals and cultures that suffer from violence, wrongs, intolerance and poverty."

Cultural values are the foundation for UNESCO's work. "Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed," the preamble of its constitution reads.

The organization has a history of initiating global literacy campaigns that dates back to 1948. Then, it demanded that its member states introduce mandatory primary school attendance for all children. Now, the organization is in the midst of its decade-long campaign, "Education for All," which, since 2003, has aimed to increase literacy worldwide.

In 2000, UNESCO's member states set eight education objectives they intended to realize worldwide by 2015. They included providing access to free and good-quality primary schooling for all boys and girls, reducing the ranks of the illiterate by half and ensuring that men and women would enjoy equal rights to education.

Targeting illiteracy

A UNESCO monitoring report on global education levels published in London last week showed that, in many countries, primary school education is the main sticking point and that immense efforts are necessary to lower the number of illiterate adults.

But the problem of illiteracy can't be ignored until the primary school initiatives start bearing fruit, said Nicholas Burnett, director of the monitoring report.

"This approach is problematic, because it ignores the 771 million adults in the world who cannot read or write. That's one-fifth of the world's adult population," Burnett said. "Implicitly that says we don't care about one-fifth of the world's adult population, so that is, to us, an unacceptable approach."

But Burnett said there had been progress, too. China is one of the success stories. The number of illiterate people there dropped by almost 100 million in recent years.

Building bridges between peoples

Among the public, however, UNESCO's best-known institution is the list of World Heritage sites. When the organization threatened to take Cologne's cathedral off the list because property developers were planning to erect skyscrapers that would have obscured views of the building, Germans were appalled.

"If the cathedral is struck from the World Heritage list -- which I personally can hardly imagine -- it will be a big disgrace for the city of Cologne, but also for Germany," said the city's director of development and planning, Bernd Streitberger.

Buildings such as the Cologne cathedral or India's Taj Mahal aren't the only sort of sites on the list of more than 700 locations. Natural phenomena, such as the Great Barrier Reef, are also protected as World Heritage sites.

The Old Bridge of Mostar in Bosnia-Herzogovina had already been put on the list when it was destroyed during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. It was rebuilt and reopened in 2004 in a ceremony presided over by UNESCO General-Director Koichiro Matsuura.

Matsuura described the bridge as a symbol for bridges built between people, UNESCO's real job.

"The building of bridges between peoples and communities is never done," Matsuura said. "We may physically restore a destroyed bridge but the real task is not over then. The real task is to build a lasting peace. Let the Old Bridge at Mostar become a symbol everywhere of that enduring challenge."