As she wanders the rows of battered desks cluttering her drab classroom in the N'Tanouan primary school complex at the heart of Abidjan's squalid Abobo district, N'Dri urges each of the 50 children to stand up and reveal their ethnic background.

Some do so in whispers and others in ringing tones but the end result, to rousing handclaps, is a group yell proclaiming their friendship.

"We could not do this with their parents," she says. "But maybe when they see their children playing together they will be able to do the same."

The getting-to-know-you exercise is part of a curriculum developed by the UN children's agency UNICEF to help teachers in conflict-torn areas incorporate themes of peace and tolerance into their daily lesson plans.

"We have a hard enough time trying to teach these kids how to read," said Yedioro Coulibaly as he tried to calm down his classroom of 100 boisterous eight- and nine-year-olds to working on a spelling lesson.

"But in this neighborhood, teaching them peace is probably more important."

Abobo is an appropriate pilot site for the 650,000-dollar program, for it has been a flashpoint for violence since a September 2002 bid to oust President Laurent Gbagbo turned into civil war.

A warren of slums whose inhabitants are mostly from northern Ivory Coast, which remains in rebel hands, or migrants from Burkina Faso and Mali, Abobo has been choked by waves of xenophobic violence for 19 months. Recent bloody clashes with security forces have sent tensions soaring.

Security and defense forces stormed the crowded district in search of suspected insurgents in the days following an anti-government protest on March 25, hounding "certain community groups" in killings that were "mostly unprovoked and unnecessary," a UN inquiry team concluded in a report leaked this week.

Under orders from "the highest state authorities" 120 people died in what the UN team called "the indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians and the committing of massive human rights violations."

Tounanga Toure says none of the families of his 60 students, aged 10 and 11, had been spared in the violence.

"Abobo, it is tough here, man. Anytime something happens, you know it is in Abobo that there will be the most problems," he says.

Since a training session earlier this year, Toure has woven themes of peace and reconciliation into the standard French or social studies lessons set by the ministry of education, which worked closely with UNICEF to tailor the curriculum to Ivory Coast's specific needs.

The program was developed by UNICEF in the early 1990s and has been used across Africa from Burundi and Rwanda to the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as in Ivory Coast's west African neighbors Liberia and Sierra Leone, both of which have recently emerged from more than a decade of war.

In subjects from reading to history and geography, as well as through art, music and drama, the curriculum offers age-specific activities to help focus students' minds on the classroom and not on the confrontations raging outside.

While a lack of funds has so far prevented UNICEF from diffusing the curriculum from beyond the pilot level of 230 schools in five districts, officials are optimistic that by October, the program will be in schools around Ivory Coast including in the zones under rebel control.

Some of the early results have been dramatic, says N'Tanouan's principal David Ladde.

"We used to call the children by their ethnicities -- we would say 'You, little Baoule, come here'. Now we don't. We use their names," Ladde says.

"We are learning how to explain that Ivory Coast is a melding of different people, that with just one ethnicity you cannot form a nation."

WAR.WIRE