Stories
The Culture of Peace News Network continued
Missions for the Culture of Peace
Travels with Lindsay in the USA
Vacations with Lindsay in the Caribbean
Vacations with Kiki in Reunion
The geometry of time
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In some ways my departure from UNESCO was unique. Françoise Rivière, who was chief of the Director-General's cabinet, made a glowing speech at my farewell party and arranged for an unprecedented briefing in the Direction Generale on June 22 in which I spoke about the potential for the culture of peace with the Assistant Directors-General of the organization. In my notes are remarks from the ADGs of Education and Social Science, as well as from Françoise and from Rene Zapata and Breda Pavlic of the Programming Unit. Already in my remarks to the ADGs I mentioned the nation-state as an impediment to the culture of peace and was chided by the ADG of Education for having said this.
Françoise Rivière (right) making her remarks at the farewell party to me along with Lindsay (left) and Bertran Mustakim, one of the secretaries who was a friend of Françoise.
I had hoped to continue working out of the UNESCO office at the UN in New York, where the new director was my friend Jay Kyazze. Jay sent a memo to the Deputy Director-General to arrange a one-dollar contract for me, but it was intercepted and blocked by Hans D'Orville, my boss at the time who was chief of programming at UNESCO.
Federico Mayor told me at one point that D'Orville's friend Drago Najman, with whom D'Orville had authored several books, was the person who set up Mayor's meeting with the Heritage Foundation when he was in Washington. D'Orville had been installed as UNESCO programme director as part of the deal when the Americans backed the candidacy of Matsuura to replace Mayor. Najman was very involved in that candidacy and the job of programming director was the reward.
On my last day at UNESCO I looked up and saw D'Orville at in the doorway of my office pointing at his watch... D'Orville had told me privately that part of his job as programming director was to get rid of me and bury my programme, i.e. the culture of peace. What he probably did not know is that for weeks prior to that I had been arriving at 5 AM each morning and used a bank of 10 photocopy machines to make six copies of about 5,000 pages of documentation of the culture of peace, copies that were later distributed to Mayor, Rivière, Enzo Fazzino who was my closest colleague, Anwarul Chowdhury at the UN in New York and Wesleyan University library archives.
I hoped to be able continue the momentum generated by the 75 million signatures on the Manifesto 2000 by means of the Culture of Peace Network (CPNN), and so for the next few years I poured most of my energies into that Internet-based news network. At first I ran it as a New England network, then over the years I expanded it to the USA, and then to the entire world. But alas, it never took off as I had hoped.
I don't think I was aware at how deeply disappointed I was at the failure of CPNN and the lack of follow-up to the culture of peace by UNESCO or the UN. And Lindsay was not especially sympathetic. These were difficult years.
I suppose on retrospect that I should have been more aware of my feelings and shared them more with Lindsay, but then she must have had her own disappointment with the failure of her coloring book initiative in Paris.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme