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That first morning in the plane travelling east from Paris on my first UNSESCO assignment, I rubbed my eyes as I wondered how I came to be there. I had a UN Laissez-passer or international passport, international money in the form of UNESCO coupons valid for any country, to buy educational equipment, and I myself had become an international civil servant. I seemed to be witnessing the opening of a new era of worldwide cooperation. UNESCO itself, the united Nations Education, Science and Culture Organisation had sent me a letter out of the blue, like the proverbial letter on the breakfast table, to ask whether I would let my name go forward. Awkward as it was for us considering our six children, I regarded this as call-up papers, which a pacifist cannot refuse, especially after the easy life I had enjoyed during the war. Ruth never fully shared my view. 'Two wrongs don't make a right' she said, referring to the splitting of our family.
With both the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Labour phoning to know whether there was anything they could do to secure my release, it was clear that something very unusual was happening. This was no ordinary job I was being offered, this was a mission. Would I join the UNESCO Mission to the Philippines? My parent's friend Professor Gilbert Murray, the internationalist, had been heavily involved in UNESCO's predecessor, the Committee for Intellectual Cooperation and he would have used a word of that kind which implied service and the selflessness of a real profession. From my work camp experience I knew that

idealistic plans are not always appreciated by the people who have already been on the job. The Canadian official at UNESCO in Paris was in doubt about the nature of our work. It was a project worked out between the officials of the country and the UNESCO officials.
The Canadian was very glad to hear from me in one of my early letters in response to her question, that I fitted the situation so well that I might exclaim, 'I was born and bred in a briar bush,' a quotation from the Uncle Remus Stories, about Brer Fox. In the story Brer Rabbit was caught by Brer Fox, with a sticky tar baby and thrown into a briar bush as a punishment. I was thinking in particular of my remaining in UNESCO House in Bayambang where our work was centred, instead of returning on Fridays with the others to the fleshpots of Manila, the capital city, which lies a hundred miles to the south.
I belonged to a team of six:

Urban Fleege from the USA Chief of Mission and Primary Education
An Australian for agriculture
A Dane for Secondary Education
A New Zealander for Science
An Indian for Adult Education
Myself for Teacher Training

Looking back on the work fifty years later it is easy to perceive that we might have given more help to each other. We were all supposed to be strengthening the community education, which was adopted as the educational policy after the USA granted independence to the Philippines. I should have persuaded the Australian to provide more help over school gardening. Urban Fleege was committed even to the advanced forms of community education and felt quite at home with the many senior officials, who had studied in the USA, the country where community schools first took shape. The Indian was likewise fully committed and we sometimes organised courses for teachers together.
My brief, I gathered in Paris, was to devise a very practical system of teacher training, which would enable teachers to cope with the very practical work of community schools. This never happened, I never found any official who was interested in anything

I wrote or said in this respect. What I was able to do was to write articles in praise of the Filipino Community Schools and to give help over English teaching, in my spare time. This may sound like failure, certainly my experience in the English teachers colleges was never tapped and my proposals for child studies to be included, as part of teacher training, was never accepted. This is remarkable considering the country is English speaking throughout, especially among teachers, so there was no question of misunderstanding. There are fifty to eighty different languages, depending on who’s doing the counting – a new language was discovered while I was there in the hills I could see from my window.
They said that they preferred English-English and would I make some tapes for them. That was a delicate question, with many Americans involved. The English specialist Fe Manza worked me hard. I shall never forget reading Forsaken Merman by Mathew Arnold, to a very large group of English teachers until so many were in tears that I had to stop. Nor shall I forget the group of younger teachers, on another occasion, sitting on the beach at sunset who appeared to enter into my own enjoyment of every poem I chose to read. A rumour had circulated that my home was near Stratford-upon-Avon, and that was enough to ensure that I was treated with great respect throughout the whole province of Pangasinan, thanks to the work of Fe Manza, in regard to Shakespeare.
In my week of briefing in Paris I had gathered that I should expect surprises. That seemed to be true of every aspect of life and not just education. A roadside notice proclaimed 'We have spare parts for your car, we've no spare parts for you. Drive carefully.' When the Filipino’s say they are moving house, they mean exactly what they say. I met a man astride the ridge of his thatched roof urging on a team of neighbours carrying his bamboo house on long poles from one village to another.
Coming home at dusk one evening I found a crowd of some two hundred people, watching in wonder the flames among a spout of water where a new artesian well was about to be made. I came away with some of the gas in a bottle; it turned out to be ordinary marsh gas. To the crowd, burning 'water' was a miracle, which pleased the vendors of the nuts and fruit, who had lost no

time in setting up their stalls. I did not stay long because we were supposed to be in by 5.00 pm for our own safety. Up in Mountain Province next to Pangasinan (the people of the salt country), two Americans took a wrong turn and never came back. When Krishnamurti and I passed that way and we came to that turning he said, 'No we won't go that way. You can never be sure.' On the mountain slopes facing us I counted a sequence of ninety-six terraces holding up strips of precious soil, some of which seemed to be as high as they were wide.
The Philippines are made up of seven thousand islands, many of which have coral reefs. I spent some time there with a snorkel living in what seemed to be paradise itself. The Principal of the College to which I was loosely attached said that as a boy he had often gone to fetch guano from an island cave. The odd thing was that every bag of bird manure he filled had a bowlful of human teeth in it. A story must develop from there, but I never heard it.
The most important day of the year was festival day and as the floats went by, there was Princess Elizabeth of Britain, represented and her consort the UNESCO expert from England. What sort of teasing was that? How could that be made to further community education?
When asked how the Americans came to be so popular, in what had been their colony until independence in 1946, the reply came without hesitation: 'We found that American soldiers are different from other soldiers; they have candies in their pockets and their pockets seem to leak when small boys are near.' Is this an idea for peacekeepers? It's the best ammunition that I have ever heard mentioned.
In this startling environment it is little wonder that the schools were also startling in their innovations. The first lesson I happened to witness was a lesson in hospitality. It was the beginning of the autumn term and the children of what had previously been the youngest class were preparing to entertain the newcomers with songs and dance. 'Where will they sit?' asked the teacher, 'Where will our guests sit?' The reply soon came 'They can sit on our chairs, we'll sit on the floor.' The teacher looked pleased and accepted the suggestion and continued with other arrangements to ensure that the newcomers felt themselves to be welcome.

In Filipino schools the Home Economics building is not only very large and well equipped but it is used to entertain visitors to the neighbourhood. I found them so hospitable and they expressed their pleasure so strongly that I almost seemed to be doing them a favour. Later I found that teachers were hesitant to invite me because English people there had such strong colour prejudices that it was awkward to invite them. I, of course, was delighted to be amongst them, and when one evening I was attending a very late event in a remote village I was invited by a family to stay the night. I watched in wonder as the entire family gradually retired to bed on the same huge mat, which was unrolled a little further as each family member became ready for sleep. The children made no fuss at all and the matt filled almost the whole of their tiny hut. I felt that this was such a beautiful act of friendliness and hospitality, and carried out with such shyness, I found it very moving. A place was kept for me at the end of their bed mat.
My first proper school visit was a very memorable day. I was put on a large dugout canoe and taken down river, a long way down river, it having been explained to me that the only alternative was to walk and I had missed the cool temperatures of early morning. I introduced myself to the headmaster who was expecting me. 'Yes, I'd like to show you round' he said. Being used to such visits, I assumed he meant the classrooms. When he turned his back on the school buildings and made for the great gateway out of the school grounds, I was puzzled but hesitated to ask where we were going. I might well have guessed that we were going to see the work of the school in the surrounding community. First we stopped by a new rectangular fishpond, which had been made with some help from the oldest children. It was setting an example to all the neighbours of one way to provide their families with a supply of protein. Tilapia, the new wonder fish, which came originally from Mozambique, was being introduced into many countries through UN technical assistants. At first mistakes were made, the water was not sufficiently cooled by shade, for example, and the fish bred before they had reached a reasonable size. Sometimes the water was too shallow, but the fishponds had spread throughout the province.
Further on, pegs had been pushed into the ground by older school children to mark the edges of the new road. It was intended

to encourage farmers to take their surplus produce to market with the help of horse-drawn carts. I began to wonder whether we had been located in this particular province because it had an exceptional Director of Education but later I found that the enthusiasm for new work of community education was widespread. It may have formed a part of the response to winning independence. All schools and colleges were requested or invited to take part and the list of projects, which I saw in operation as I travelled in the course of my work was astonishing. I knew by this time that the Community Education of which I had dreamed of in England was widespread in the Philippines. This cross between a Cambridgeshire Village College and work-camp, this education in democratic citizenship on the principle of learning by doing, this formative interpretation of Ivan Illich's book Deschooling Society is capable of ensuring that the urgent environmental problems can now be faced by the world. The schools in their new form could save the human race from disaster.
It is hard for me to exaggerate the effect the schools had on me. I ceased being a cautious academic and became an enthusiastic believer in this particular development in social education, which gives the school the prime place in dealing with social problems by planning a visionary utopian future. People speak of dreams coming true, but it was more than that, it constituted a response to the pessimism produced by the war, a reward of hope, an association of hope not just for my generation but for the generation of my children. One morning I awoke and planned that, with the help of the Rowntree Charitable Trust, some pilot community schools might be established in England. UNESCO, wishing in its early days to confirm its leadership in education, would promote community education wherever there was a response. As I reflected on them, I found that I could repeat the words of Keats:

…Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific – and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

My feeling of surprise increased on closer acquaintance with the Philippines, instead of fading away as might be expected. The Community Schools undoubtedly deserve more attention than they have received. It is difficult to describe them without a warning that the example of only one school can be misleading, because the essential principle is that each school's work should be based on a compromise between the 'felt needs' and the so-called 'real needs' of its community. The real needs being those for which wise outsiders might be able to establish and win the approval of the local inhabitants, either using books or by their visits. In whatever was undertaken this distinction produced profitable discussions. I took my training to become a wise outsider very seriously both by writing and by reading as my diary letters show. Many of the projects were well woven into the learning of ordinary school skills such as the three R's. Reading and writing about matters of interest and importance to the children have often been shown to improve results in their literacy skills. See Appendix 2 for a letter home at that time.
Before reaching an account of the work of Philippine Community Schools, it is desirable to write something about the surveys made in each of the villages before the projects were chosen. Sometimes the teachers took on the task, especially if the children were younger or in the early days when the idea was new. They had to be very careful not to impose their own ideas and thus risk losing the willing support of parents or children. They had to learn the difficulties of drawing democratic initiatives from people who had been accustomed to powerlessness and obedience to heavy-handed officials. The surveys were indeed the first step in community education. Sometimes the teachers contrived to obtain parental involvement through questions taken to the homes by the children, sometimes in those days, owing to the absence of television and the scarcity of radio sets, it was very easy to call meetings at the school and many schools had parent-teacher associations.
The respect in which teachers were held was an advantage in that their wishes tended to be accepted but a drawback in that it hampered the expression by parents of counteracting views. On the other hand the recent acquisition of political independence created an atmosphere in which changes were expected, and sometimes

very ambitious programmes of work were agreed risking disappointment later. One of the rules developed was to plan for at least one early or short-term project suited to providing the essential experience of success. Later it might become possible to undertake something requiring more patience, more time, more skilled work and more funds. Occasionally surveying by the schools was used to provide the local or even national government with the statistics needed to measure the success of a campaign. Rough measures of literacy were provided in this way. Along with many other countries in the 'South', they considered they were very poor. One day when I was on my way to a school the driver of a caratella commented, 'We are a very poor country,' meaning that the people, had little or no money, but when I disagreed with him saying 'I think your country is very rich.' He looked puzzled, so I added 'Rich in sunshine, and smiles and children. In England we are very poor, in this respect.' And anyone having visited England or lived there for any length of time will know how dull a climate we have and how dour the general populace in the streets seems. He brightened and looked happy at this comparison. The quality of life is hard to measure. For the most part life is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.
A country such as the Philippines should be urged to reject the materialism and over-consumption of the West and pride itself on setting an example of how to live better on less, a lesson which the West will need more and more as sources of energy become exhausted and expensive. The UN might be planning already how to provide this technical assistance in reverse. Such evidence could be supported by the fate of those who win large prizes in the national lottery who often lose more in real friendship than they gain in financial security. Unfortunately this is seldom reported to the controllers of the media who stand to profit by over-consumption and the advertising which inevitably accompanies it.
One of the difficulties is that surveys of material welfare are more easily made than surveys of smiles and friendship, though I have attempted both! But that sign in the Philippine island of Leyte showing the projects planned for the future is worth repeating:

A cemented church. Reformation, a strengthening of religious and perhaps spiritual life.

An artesian well. Providing cleaner water.
Basketry. Industrial arts may form a main money earner.
Poultry and Duckery (The Filipinos are good at adding to the English language).
Learning farming skills.
A barrio string band. For recreation.

The spread of projects accords very closely with the usual, not to say official section of Philippine Community Education which are listed as:

Health
Food production
Industrial arts
Recreation and culture
Moral and spiritual

Moral education often meant campaigning for the prompt payment of taxes, which is usually a hard task, though a source of funds for carrying out other projects. Industrial arts leading to a money income for the members of the community was likewise hard to teach. It was significant that during my visit the Technical Colleges throughout the country were making a survey in their areas, of unused raw materials, of under-used or teachable skills, which could be matched with potential markets at home or abroad.
As an example of their work I bought myself a tie embroidered in colour, which is so striking that I have seldom worn it for fear of attracting too much attention! The country has highly skilled needlewomen, as their national costume indicates, sufficient to attract consumers among tourists, but the quality of the spinning and weaving of the cotton cloth was not in keeping with the embroidery of that tie.
In one particular village a visiting official spotted a number of palm trees of a species noted for the hardwearing quality of its leaves. He easily persuaded the villagers that they could weave hats if only they knew how to do it. Eventually a teacher was found who agreed to go to Manila to take a course. On his return he taught some of the older children what he had learned and they in turn taught their parents. When I visited, school had just finished and

it seemed as though everyone was weaving palm leaves into hats, young and old, men and women, all had shared in turning the village into a kind of disorganised hat-making factory. I kept one of those hats for a long time; in fact until it wore out, feeling it had something to do with the Mad Hatter's tea party in Alice in Wonderland.
Soon regular lorry loads of hats were leaving the village for sale in Manila, and temporarily their financial problems were solved and they had funds for their projects. Whether they had the foresight to plant more of the palm trees I never heard. In every society it is difficult to persuade people to look into the future and care for their children in a practical way. When I think of the few pesos these people were earning for their hard, and by now, skilled work, I cannot bring myself to spend money going there just to satisfy my curiosity by revisiting some of these places and people. The population has doubled and nearly trebled in the past fifty years if official estimates are accurate, so there is no shortage of customers, but the villagers may have been replaced by factory workers, despite the drawbacks of commercial industrialisation.
In another area the schools demonstrated their flexibility in adapting to new situations. Many projects are long term but when a plague of giant snails got out of hand instead of turning to a firm for pesticide, the requirement was attached to school attendance that every child must turn up at school with a Giant Snail, dead or alive. Failing that, they were sent home to find one. The snails could not withstand so many enemies. This treatment could not be applied to a plague of rats in Cotobatu, part of Mindanao where many of those who had accepted land were forced to become rat refugees. Among the scientists with their many proposals for looking for predators no one was successful at the time of my visit, no Pied Piper was discovered. How much it was discussed in Community Schools I never heard, but it was certainly worthy of their attention, as with any other social problem, from atom bombs to lack of smiles.
The spread of ideas was remarkable. An Agricultural school, which I visited, had applied the principle of combining theory with practice by providing enough plots of land for the students to grow their own food. They spent half of each day on their plots and did

not regard it as a device of the tight-fisted Mr. Squeers, a character from Charles Dickens, but a sensible arrangement, which imposed no hardship on their parents.
The imagination, which is required for finding good projects to undertake, spilled over into the methods used to carry them out to a conclusion. In the province of Laguna, which is near the capital Manila, on the island of Luzon there was an enterprising superintendent. He found that many teachers hesitated to take their classes out to study the environment, so he standardised a system in which the school caretaker regularly took the blackboard and fixed it among the group of houses to be used on that particular day for a particular purpose. On the day I was watching, the subject was sanitary-toilets. After listening to the teacher explaining the need for sanitary toilets to reduce disease and increase cleanliness, the pupils were presented with a list of good points to notice when inspecting the toilets. Then the class was divided into small groups and allotted certain houses to visit to ask their questions. When pupils returned to their class, they helped to compile the statistics on the board, of the number of houses reaching a satisfactory standard, in each of the 'good points.’ It is easy to see what social pressure was brought to bear, but the local inhabitants did not seem to resent the inspection, or else they absented themselves. For the most part the adults came to join the lesson and then went home to receive their young inspectors. In the Philippines it was not unusual for an adult to join classes to improve their arithmetic or English for the sake of the work they wished to do. Their presence in the classrooms set a good example to the children and raised the prestige of the subjects and the teachers.
The question of setting a good example arose in a separate context. I had been attending and speaking at a Saturday course for teachers and laypersons. At one stage, a small discussion group working under the shade of a particular tree, sent a teacher across the grass to talk to me. He told me that one report described the difficulty caused by a lawyer, the most highly educated person in the community, who had refused to cooperate with the community by fencing his property against straying animals. At this point in the discussion, an illiterate rice farmer intervened and said: 'You've got everything the wrong way round. He should be one of

your leaders, not an unwilling follower. You should be planning to make him one of your officers.' So this is what they did. It is clear that this humble farmer had found an answer to Chaucer's well-known question: 'If golde rusteth, what shall iren do?'
In concluding these impressions of the remarkable Philippine Community Schools it is natural to ask what they do that is relevant to a search for peace in England. The signs of the times are more difficult to read and digest than might be expected. The combination of factors beginning with the breakdown of family is widely accepted but seldom considered in its import for children. First of all they grow up and often copy their parents failures and already the schools feel the impact of having a third of their pupils suffering from broken homes.
To this the English schools have not responded by building smaller schools to enhance the possibility of warm teacher-pupil relationships and pupil-pupil relationships. In former times there were aunts and uncles to make good the defects of the nuclear family. In Geneva the frequent and transitory comings and goings of the United Nations Officials bring extra stress upon its workers, making living extra difficult. The UN's home magazine carried an extremely persuasive article on the theme that if one does not have three friends so close that they can be phoned for help at 3.00 am in the morning, one is at risk of mental breakdown.
In selecting teachers the education authorities again make mistakes by unintentionally favouring individual candidates who have come from one-child families. It is common for more than a third of the student teachers to come from such families. These are generally people who have missed the pleasures of a shared childhood in which they automatically acquire the skills of sharing the limelight and so they resemble the so-called Little Emperors of China. To make matters worse secondary teachers and possibly primary teachers are not local people who can share with their pupils the warm pride in the schools environment. Roots in an area are an asset which is not often fully appreciated though both people and places are capable of forming a part of healthy homesickness, a form of loyalty, the very ground and basis for friendship with others who have much in common. It is worth repeating Aristotle's wise words 'How shall I learn, unless it be from my friend?'

Without a development of loyalty and trust, selfishness will grow apace including crime, violence and other social problems and the first step for many schools especially Community Schools should be to foster a sense of community. It is made more difficult by the size of modern schools and towns. The USA is showing the way in dealing with it, by being the first to set up community schools.
Professor Johan Galtung has written a remarkable article suggesting that social chaos, caused by alienation and lack of guiding values (anomie), may prove to become a more serious problem than the threat of nuclear weapons. The Community School is the best response to this growing crisis, providing the chance of a well-designed social education. After one of my periods with UNESCO, I wrote a book with this message, but failed to get it published, now the crisis has deepened.
It was many years later that I fully recognised the importance of 'parish patriotism' of having roots in a place and community for which one can feel homesick.
The anarchism that follows anomie and alienation is a powerful threat to peace. The ultimate form of individualism is when every person is for himself and family ties are broken, loyalty to others is disregarded, chaos reigns as each one struggles alone for the necessities of life. Before extreme individualism is reached, questions should be asked: what kinds of social education will have been squeezed out of the curriculum? Already the prevalence of civil wars as opposed to international wars is widely recognised. The social confusion of former Yugoslavia is a warning of what the future may bring elsewhere.
An American missionary invited me to take charge of the United Nations Studies programme of an international student work camp. After some hesitation, I accepted it in place of local leave of absence in the hope that it would throw some light on the value of such experiences for members and leaders of the Community School movement. At the last moment an earthquake shook the northern coast of Mindanao, the largest of the islands in the south, where we were needed to help re-build schools. We transferred our plans despite the difficulties of working where security could not be guaranteed.

Mr Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the former Secretary-General of the UN wrote in the introduction to his 1992 An Agenda for Peace: 'Preventative diplomacy, peace-making and peace-keeping – to which I have added a closely related concept, post-conflict peace building.' He devoted two of his forty-eight pages to it (32 & 33) 'I have in mind, for example, projects that bring States together to develop agriculture, to improve transportation or utilise resources such as water or electricity that they need to share, or joint programmes through which barriers between nations are brought down by means of freer travel, cultural exchanges and mutually beneficial youth and educational projects.' This is the nearest he got to recommending international student work-camps which have helped an influential group of young people to shed their prejudices and hostility and open themselves to friendships which cross national frontiers, by sharing some practical work together at a very impressionable age.
I failed to persuade the Philippine Government of the value to them of the work-camp idea. It is a country with a record of non-violent resistance of which it can rightly be proud but the Catholics’ bad relationship with the Muslims has lasted too long, which suggests that some outside help could be useful. It will soon be fifty years since my visit, and the trouble has continued ever since that time as well as before it. Violence is widespread and not confined to dealing with the other side. The Governor of the province told me that, when he was talking with a Datu as the Moslem chieftains are called, and another Datu opened the door, they pulled out revolvers and shot each other dead. The Governor seemed to be only just recovering from the shock.
The American missionary was determined to miss no opportunity. Somehow he arranged for a whole crowd of Moros from their side of the invisible frontier to come to put on an afternoon's entertainment. They arrived on a lorry with all drums beating, it was not very clear whether this was an ordinary announcement or a threat. The work-campers were fascinated. I asked to take a photo of a man in a purple robe with a babe on his arm and a sword in his belt. I didn't get permission until first one, then two, then three, of his wives were lined up beside him. When I enquired how it was that a man with three wives should be looking after the baby, I was

told 'The women, all of them have to work in the fields so the babies get attached to the father.' We were told that the Moros’ entertainment was a gesture of peace and sympathy. A disaster brings neighbours together in a way nothing else can; one hopes that forthcoming environmental disasters may have this effect worldwide, but there is no evidence that Governments realise that more will have to be spent on the environment and less on conventional defence. The results of the earthquake were more obvious and directly visible, it seems that there may be a need for schools to prepare pupils for facing future problems. An example might be using vivid details such used when writing home about the earthquakes. See Appendix 3.
Although the conflict between Moros and Christians was one of my earliest connections with conflict management and I was almost too new to the skills to be able to learn much, I was aware that I was learning from the camp leader Paul Dotson. He was always optimistic about what could be achieved and friendly to those he encountered. In particular he involved people in entertaining each other and after slightly grim encounters turned to laughter, it was clear that progress was being made. The question arises: for whom was he paving the way? Was it other Americans, Presbyterians, work-campers or the new conflict managers? Even when little is achieved in the short run, it is possible to prepare the way for those who follow.
I felt this in my own case, during the year in the Philippines that I was a representative of UNESCO and through UNESCO of the UN and if I could be friendly and enthusiastic I was preparing the way. I was completely baffled in Iran when a student commented to my counterpart 'Now we have seen how Mr. Gillett works, we can understand how the British Empire held together for so long.' My loyalty to UNESCO and the UN had been overlooked.
From the little virtues such as punctuality to major ones such as friendliness and a wider concern for other people, the technical assistance official can set a good example and establish an appreciation of his organisation or institution for which he is working, even in countries where he or she does not speak the local language. As was the case provided by my unexpected journey to Mindanao, questions about conflict often arise and offer an opportunity to

provide help with a major concern of UNESCO. UNESCO seeks peace in unusual ways, through science, education, and culture. Already much was being done in the Philippines about peace education in schools. United Nations Day on October 24th was widely celebrated. At one of the schools, where I was invited to speak on United Nations Day, the teacher had ordered a dress for the occasion, which had UN symbols embroidered all over it. The heavily illustrated history textbooks in use in the Philippines, however, had fighting or corpses in almost every picture and had little space for any useful information about the UN. I expect the contents in these books have since improved.
It was unfortunate that sovereign states were too jealous of UNESCO to allow it to operate its own radio stations, especially in trouble spots or areas such as the Balkans. They have been urgently needed to counter hatred and war propaganda. Some very interesting radio programmes were broadcast for Afghanistan, in the midst of its past troubles in the nineteen eighties. The funding came from a variety of sources including the BBC, and the programme was presented in the form of a soap opera, which continued to include some elementary teaching about health and agriculture but to a small extent, so as to keep the audience keen on the entertainment. A site chosen was in Pakistan for reasons of security. A survey confirmed that listeners were numerous and a reasonable number were taking the advice. It was planned to incorporate some peace education for this warlike, war torn country. The young nun who was to advocate bringing the violence to an end was barely introduced when the project was abandoned for no clear reason. It may have been due to the victory of Taliban.
Other attempts also have been unsuccessful such as the radio programme funded by George Soros from a steamer in the Adriatic to former Yugoslavia and the provision of radio equipment to Uganda, which was used for war propaganda instead of peace!
No doubt the programmers in Afghanistan intended to make use of the biography of Badshah Khan, Non-violent Soldier of Islam: A Man to Match His Mountains . He was also known as the North West Frontier Gandhi. He exploded three myths: That non-violence depends on gentle people, also that non-violence does not work against ruthless oppression, and that it has no place in Islam.

He achieved this by converting the notorious, trigger happy men in the area of the Khyber Pass to become a non-violent army, having laid down their arms and being brave enough to die for the sake of freedom. It was calculated that some 100,000 took the pledge; the British officers with their Indian troops were baffled by such willing victims. Never before or since have so many soldiers fought without weapons. This was a new way to freedom and peace. The story should be made known to all those who were fighting in Afghanistan. It was when I was staying in Kabul, on my way home in 1958 that I inquired about their Independence Day celebrations. 'Independence from whom?' I asked. 'From the British of course.' He continued, 'The British garrison outside Kabul was killed off, all except the one man who was sent away with the news.' Badshah Khan had taught that all men are brothers, according to the Koran. 'How can a man kill his brother? It is better to die and go straight to heaven.' The Afghanis never accepted this part of their religious teaching any more than Christians have accepted their similar teaching. The radio can be used more widely in conflict situations, for spreading accurate and relevant news. The absence of such news is the crux of the difficulties in such a conflict, I concluded.