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Mozambique: Bureaucratic Problems The Director-General of UNESCO had appointed a Portuguese man as head of the office in Mozambique. He is someone that I had brought into the initial intersectoral working group that established in the Spring of 1993 at UNESCO headquarters, and who went with me on my first mission to Mozambique in the fall of 1993. There was something sympathetic about him; he was said by some at UNESCO to be a "man of action" and someone who had been a socialist at the time of the Portuguese revolution. But once installed as head of the UNESCO office in Maputo, Mozambique, he became a tyrant. He refused to allow Noel to use a computer or to make telephone calls or go to meetings without explicit permission. Noel was not allowed to come to the Internal Consultation for National Programmes in Paris. The Director mocked the culture of peace and told Noel that he was a fool being manipulated by the "American", i.e. me. In the face of the successful project that Noel directed with FRELIMO and RENAMO parliamentarians on the mission visiting parliamentarians in South Africa and Malawi, the Director tried to block dissemination of the report. Noel had to send it to me surreptitiously so that it could be submitted to the Director-General. And when Noel managed to get a culture of peace project going in Tete Province, the Director took Noel's name off the reports and "culture of peace" out of the text and substituted his own name and "education sector" (his own bureaucratic "furrow") instead. Instead of following up on the many funding possibilities for the culture off peace proposals from bilateral donor agencies (which I had seen on my brief missions in Maputo), the head of the office sought for funds for other projects. For example, instead of working with Noel to obtain funding for the training and networking of peace promoters, he sought money to pay a company to install machines that would give people voter information. Although the representative from the European Union had previously told me that they would fund a culture of peace programme, the head of the office - though claiming the representative from the EU to be a close friend - did nothing to follow this up for the culture of peace. Finally, when both the Director of the Maputo office and Noel came to UNESCO headquarters in Paris for the General Conference in November 1995, I demanded a meeting with me and the CPP Director. Noel presented a workplan that he had worked out with me which would make possible the development of the National Culture of Peace Programme in Mozambique. The meeting ended disastrously when the Maputo director told us it was none of our business how he ran his office. And the CPP Director would do nothing to challenge this (even though Noel was on our payroll and the Director-General had specifically sent the director there to promote the culture of peace). Why? Evidently because the CPP Director Leslie was an old drinking buddy of this guy and didn't want to challenge his old friend or rock the boat. Noel went back to Mozambique disheartened and with little hope. He and I were even forbidden to talk by telephone while he was in the office and we could only talk from his home in the evenings or weekends. Things went from bad to worse for the Mozambique programme. As the government situation and the economy deteriorated, relations in the UNESCO office deteriorated as well. When Oxfam asked Noel to help lead a conference in South Africa on conflict resolution, the office director refused him permission to go, and only allowed it after Noel demanded vacation time instead. And later when Janet Mondlane, widow of the great Mozambican revolutionary Edouard Mondlane, on behalf of LINK, the consortium of Mozambican non-governmental organizations, asked Noel to chair a major meeting on conflict resolution, he was again refused permission to go, and this time, worn down, he did not even try. [Note added in 1999: Eventually, at the demand of President Chissano, the UNESCO Director-General was obliged to recall the UNESCO representative from Mozambique. Chissano told Mayor, "Either Tiburcio leaves Mozambique or Mozambique leaves UNESCO."] |