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UNICEF congratulates 1998 Nobel Peace Prize winners

"It is important also," Ms. Bellamy said, "to congratulate the Nobel Committee for helping to focus world attention on the Colombia Children's Movement for Peace, whose nomination was a recognition of the incredible potential of children as peace-makers in today's world."

"The presence of the Children's Movement as a serious contender among this year's Nobel nominees is a signal to all nations in conflict," Ms. Bellamy said. "In many conflict situations where adults have failed to make peace, it will take the growing involvement of children and young people to turn the tide."

Ms. Bellamy said that Colombia's young peace-makers exemplify the ideals of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the world's most widely ratified human rights accord. "The Convention stresses that children should be brought up to affirm peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality and solidarity. The children of Colombia, faced with intolerable violence, have done this in no uncertain terms and achieved remarkable results."

UNICEF Colombia has been closely involved with the Colombia children's movement since its inception.

In October 1996, the Children's Movement for Peace helped mobilise children living in the most violent municipalities of Colombia to vote in a special election – known as the Children's Mandate for Peace and Rights. The children were asked to choose which of their rights were most important to themselves and their communities.

At first it was thought no more than 300,000 children would vote – but the Movement grew so quickly that more than 2.7 million children aged 7 to 18 years turned up at the polls, about a third of the age-group population nationwide. The turn-out in many of the most violent municipalities was above 90 per cent.

The children voted overwhelmingly in favour of the right to survival and the right to peace. The result sent shock-waves through the nation.

A year later, over ten million adult Colombians (compared with just over four million who had voted in the previous 1994 presidential election) turned out at the polls to support a peace referendum that included backing for the Children's Mandate, condemned the atrocities of the war and pledged their personal commitment to help make peace.

As a result, peace became the main issue on which the 1998 presidential elections were fought and became the priority of the new administration of Andres Pastrana.

Despite continuing violence the two main guerrilla groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army ( ELN), have recognised the significance of the two Mandates and are moving towards peace talks in November.

Having pushed peace to the center of national politics, the Children's Movement is today more active at the community level, where it is helping to lay a long-term foundation for peace. Hundreds of organisations, community groups, municipalities and others have responded to the demands for the right to survival and the right to peace expressed in the Children's Mandate – and now see children as real partners in that effort.

The children most closely involved with the Children's Movement for Peace are highly articulate and talk powerfully about the situation in their country. Many of them have personal experience of violence.

Juan Elias Uribe is now 16 years old. At the age of 14 he was a founding member of the Movement but in the midst of his early activities for peace, his father was assassinated. Juan Elias realised he could not take the usual course of most Colombians, and seek revenge on his father's killers through violence. He had to choose peace.

"At first, when my father was murdered, I thought that all the work I was doing for peace was worth nothing because it had not saved him. Yet my father had always wanted me to work for peace and I did not want other children to have this same nightmare. In the end, my father's death pushed me harder. I think that now I have a more realistic attitude towards peace."

Farlis Calle, 17, now attends university in Bogota but her home is with her parents and three sisters in a small wooden house in Apartado in north-west Colombia, not far from the Caribbean coast. Farlis describes the impact of violence in her community. In 1996, when she was 15, she became the first "child mayor" after she and some other students discovered that they had a constitutional right to form a local government of children. They formed the Children's Movement for Peace in Apartado through which hundreds of children have become involved in community service activities. Farlis knows that there are dangers in working for peace in Colombia but feels she has no choice.

"I never speak out against any particular group. If I did then I know I could become a target. All the children in the peace movement know that they must be careful about what they say. This is not difficult. When you live with fear, silence is natural. We describe the violence but we do not know who is responsible for these terrible events."

Mayerly Sanchez, 14, lives in a poor community south of Bogota. The problems she lives with are born out of urban violence, between gangs and within families. She organised a meeting of parents and children to discuss violence in the home. Her experience taught her about the power of children's voices to influence adult behaviour.

"Children have a special gift for convincing people about the truth of what is happening. People never used to care about the war unless they were directly affected by it, but when children talk about pain and sorrow we make adults feel the pain as if it was their own. Children are the seeds of the new Colombia. We are the seeds that will stop the war."

UNICEF was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965.

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