Stories
Midterm Report on Culture of Peace - 2005
Youth Report on Culture of Peace - 2006
A trilogy of books for a new strategy
Struggling with the United Nations
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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
After I left UNESCO, I was invited to visit in 2002 with Federico Mayor at the headquarters of the Fundación Cultura de Paz that he had established in Madrid. He invited me to continue the collaboration that we had for the culture of peace when he was my boss at UNESCO, and, of course, I accepted. That time in Madrid, as always, he had very little time for me, but had me go to lunch instead with the beautiful Anaisabel Prera who was still, at that time, an officer of his Fundación. However, Mayor drove us to lunch in his big black limousine. Unlike when he was still at UNESCO, there was no longer a chauffer and he had to drive the car himself. I can still remember the wild ride and how I was afraid we would have an accident before getting to the restaurant.
Federico Mayor speaking at a forum in 2008,
alongside former President Khatami of Iran
Mayor hoped to raise funds to continue the work of the culture of peace which, in the meantime, had been "buried" by UNESCO under the programming responsibilities of D'Orville. Although he was not able to obtain the funding that he had hoped from the Spanish government or from major capitalist donors, he did get some financing from Catalunya, and in 2005 he gave me some funds to coordinate the report from civil society to the United Nations for the midterm of the International Culture of Peace Decade. And a year later, having been named by the Spanish government to head up their new UN initiative with Turkey called the Alliance of Civilizations, he obtained funding from them for me to coordinate a report from youth organizations around the world as the basis for a UN Global Youth Solidarity Fund.
After 2006, however, he could no longer obtain funds, and our relationship started to sour as an indirect result of that. He became very vulnerable to anyone who promised money, and along came a group of Middle Eastern businessmen who promised him money to open an office in São Paulo. I told Mayor this should not be done unless there was the agreement of our partners in that city. However, the businessman simply came to a meeting in São Paulo where I was speaking in April 2008 at the invitation of Lia Diskin and announced that he was setting up the office, and that a letter had already gone to Brazilian President Lula in that regard. When I told Lia Diskin about this, she exploded. "What do you know about this man?" she demanded. "How do you know he doesn't want the office as a front for one of the many drugs, guns and money laundering operations that are plaguing Brazil at this time?" I certainly had no answer for her question and I was sure that Mayor also did not know. There in Lia's office with Kiki and Alicia Cabezudo, at first I said that this was simply typical of Mayor. "In that case," said Lia, "I cannot work with you anymore since you work with a man that cannot be trusted!" Alicia and I telephoned from her office to Mayor in Spain and told him to cancel the plans for an office or else we would lose our most valuable partner and partners in Brazil. A month later, at my own expense, I went to Madrid to confront Mayor face to face and make sure that the operation was cancelled. As had always been the case at UNESCO, he was very unhappy that I brought him "bad news," but I gave him no choice but to cancel the proposed office.
After that, our relationship went from bad to worse. He had promised to fund an end-of-decade report and I had set up partnerships and worked out an elaborate grant request. But he could not get the money and as time dragged on, I began to tell him that it was becoming too late to do the report. Meanwhile, for the Suzanne Mubarek Youth Peace Congress in Sharm El Sheikh, Mayor agreed that we should order and distribute Arab language versions of the 2005 midterm report and 2006 youth report on the culture of peace. Mohsen Youssef from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina paid for this from his own pocket. Mayor reimbursed him for only half of the expenses and said he would pay the other half later. Year after year passed and Mayor kept responding to reminders by saying that he would pay "when he got the money" but the money never came. As a result we could no longer continue the valuable partnership with the Bibliotheca.
We had an agreement between the Fundación and the Diputacio of Barcelona for a project of culture of peace measurement in cities of that region, but it was managed so badly by the Fundación and their reputation had suffered so greatly, that it was never possible to launch the cooperation and the project was eventually cancelled.
I went again to Madrid at the end of 2008 to talk with Mayor about all this, and although he agreed to see me, he spent almost the entire meeting on the telephone with other people. Evidently, if I could not bring him good news, he could not give me "the time of day."
In 2009, even such a simple thing as getting letters from Mayor to support the youth initiative that did the final report despite lack of funding turned out to be a very difficult exercise.
Finally, however, at the end of 2010, when we had done the World Civil Society report without his involvement, Mayor wanted to take credit for it, so he agreed to print copies for distribution during the end-of-decade debate at the UN General Assembly. His assistant Manuel Manonelles wrote a brief introduction for him to the printed version and brought copies to New York, where with the assistance of Anwarul Chowdhury and the staff of the Bangladesh mission we distributed the copies to the desks of the Member States during the debate.
Still another frustrating episode began when Kiki and I flew to Madrid on January 20, 2016, to see him and to propose the project for an alternative Security Council. He seemed supportive at the time, as I reported to the directors of the Culture of Peace Corporation. But 15 months later he had failed to follow up as promised, and did not even answer the emails that I sent.
In 2021 he did sign on to the Declaration for the Transition to a Culture of Peace in the XXI Century that called for reform of the UN Security Council as I had proposed, and he added the demand for reform of the UN General Assembly to include the civil society.
Note added later: When Mayor died in December 2024 I wrote a nice tribute to him on CPNN with my personal souvenirs.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme