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Midterm Report on Culture of Peace - 2005
Youth Report on Culture of Peace - 2006
A trilogy of books for a new strategy
Final Report on Culture of Peace - 2010
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
It is not surprising to know that the United Nations is dominated by the Great Powers, but when you come up against this directly, it can be quite frustrating and even surprising. That is the essence of what happened in 2005 when I submitted the Midterm World Report on the Culture of Peace for publication by the UN.
The background for the story is told on the web pages of the World Report on the Culture of Peace, but for diplomatic reasons, this is the first time that I have told the whole story. And even now, this is not the whole story, since there are some things I cannot know since much of the decision-making in the UN is kept secret in order to hide political pressures and cover up incompetence.
The World Report from the Civil Society was called for in the annual General Assembly resolutions for the Culture of Peace Decade, which requested a mid-term debate on the Decade and inputs from the civil society to be sent to the Secretary-General (S-G). However, I anticipated resistance from the S-G's office because the office has kept any mention of peace out of the Millennium Development Goals, and because the person in the S-G's office responsible for this, Jeffrey Sachs, was the CIA man who destroyed the Soviet economy, managing a 10,000x inflation when he was sent over to serve as Yeltsin's economic advisor in the early 90's. Also, there were credible reports during the run-on to the invasion of Iraq that the S-G's telephones were tapped by the United States.
Therefore, when we started work on the World Report, I drafted a letter that was sent by Federico Mayor to the S-G informing him of the report and asking what date they needed it. A letter from Mayor to the S-G is at a high level, since Mayor had been the Director-General of UNESCO (which is at the same high level as the S-G), and because Mayor was being considered (and later chosen) as co-sponsor of a high-level UN task force on Alliance of Civilizations.
Although the letter was sent on November 2, 2005, there was no reply by January, so I made inquiries by way of Under-Secretary Chowdhury, and was told that the S-G's office had not received the letter. So on February 18, 2005, I faxed a copy of Mayor's letter to Under-Secretary Chowdhury and on February 23, he told me that the S-G's office had "found the letter" and would reply.
Despite the promise, there was never any reply. What happened, we will probably never know. Perhaps it was simply the American and British staff members of the S-G office that blocked any reply. Or perhaps they consulted with the Chief of Programming at UNESCO, Hans D'Orville, who was responsible for culture of peace and was apparently connected to the Heritage Foundation (see other story), and who put pressure on them to block it.
Meanwhile there was another obstacle in our path. I was working with several NGO committees who requested the NGO unit of the UN to advertise a request for NGOs to contribute to the report. And the NGO unit refused. In this case, the key person was Paul Hoeffel, the chief of the NGO unit, who was involved in the blocking of the statement we made at the UN after the September 11 disaster. On the other hand, I would imagine that Hoeffel would not have blocked it by himself without obtaining higher authority, such as those at the S-G's office.
As reports for the fall session of the General Assembly are usually due in June, the ambassador from Bangladesh sent on June 29, at my request, the report to the Secretary-General along with a letter, recalling that the General Assembly resolutions had invited such a report, and requesting:
I feel privileged to present the report, Civil Society Report at Mid-point of Culture of Peace Decade, to you for submission to the 60th Session of the UNGA for its consideration in the plenary meeting planned to be devoted to the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World, 2001-2010.
I had chosen to work with the ambassador from Bangladesh because traditionally, since the year 2000, it is Bangladesh that has taken responsibility for the annual resolution in the General Assembly for the Culture of Peace Decade.
For a month there was no reply from the S-G's office, but then on August 1, the Bangladesh ambassador received a reply from Chen Jian of the S-G's office saying that the report would be "reflected in the report of the Secretary-General." But he had not agreed to publish the report itself, which was the intention of the Bangladesh request.
I drafted a reply from the ambassador, saying:
This reply is quite disappointing. I would prefer that you would issue the summary report as a self-standing document in full, so that all of its contents will be available for the plenary meeting of the General Assembly on this subject. there are separate sections of the summary report for each region of the world, allowing civil society to speak in its own unique voice from each region, as well as two pages of verbatim quotations from major international organizations and two pages of valuable verbatim suggestions for our work in the second half of the Decade.
This time, the ambassador refused to send the letter. Why not? We may never know. Was there political pressure or simply reluctance to engage in a possible conflict with the S-G?
Meanwhile, the Secretary-General's report to the General Assembly was published and included some of the suggestions from the World Report, constituting about 10% of the full summary. But even the suggestions were chosen, and those that might offend the Great Powers were omitted. It could have been worse, however. The excerpts mentioned the website so that readers could find the full report if they wished, and the main body of the report was that submitted by UNESCO where my ex-assistant had done the writing. Since she and I had been in constant contact over the previous months, she had therefore included as part of the UNESCO report, the main conclusions that we had found in the World Report!
As described on our Internet website, the Youth Advocacy Team visited and lobbied many ambassadors before the October debate of the General Assembly, and one of them was the ambassador from Bangladesh. Once again, he promised to submit the report to be published by the UN, and this time I provided his office with the precise format that was needed, based on a similar public document that had been submitted for publication the year before by Malaysia.
Youth Advocacy Team of 2005 at work in Vienna Cafe at UN
And once again, I waited. And waited. Finally, on January 3, I called the man whom the ambassador had delegated the work to and asked what had happened. He told me that the S-G's office had refused to publish the document.
So once again I wrote to the Bangladesh ambassador:
As you probably know, I have a good deal of personal experience with the UN Secretariat having worked for 10 years in the system, including at the level of Director. It continues to be my understanding that the Member State has the right to insist on the publication of a document such as the one in question, and that the Secretariat does not have the right to refuse such a request. Mr Rahman recounted to me the reasons the Secretariat gave him and they do not, in my mind, constitute adequate grounds for refusal. I note, in this regard, that their refusal was not in writing, but only by telephone.
There has been something strange about this matter beginning back in 2004, when the office of the Secretary-General refused to respond to the letter on the subject of the Civil Society Report that was sent to the Secretary-General by Federico Mayor. Their refusal was particularly surprising because Mr Mayor is not only the former Director-General of UNESCO, but also newly named as co-sponsor of the High-Level Group for the Alliance of Civilizations.
I can only guess that certain members of the staff of the Secretary-General are following a political agenda that differs from the agenda of the General Assembly, which, thanks to initiatives from Bangladesh and other states, has made the culture of peace a major priority in the Outcome Document of the World Summit. If this is the case, then I think the staff of the Secretary-General need to be challenged.
Personally, however, the reason that I persist on this matter is because I am responsible to the 700 organizations who submitted more than 3,000 pages of text and hundreds of photos to the Civil Society. They submitted their information in the belief that it would be published as a UN document. I intend to fulfill my obligation to them, if at all possible.
Therefore, I would appreciate your persistence in this matter, and I remain at your service to assist in any way you wish.
Once again, no response. I sent a second copy of the letter on January 30, requesting a reply, and there was no response. Once again, the question arises, Was there political pressure or simply reluctance to engage in a possible conflict with the S-G?
Five years later, in 2010, we had similar problems trying to get UN recognition for the Final Report on Culture of Peace as described on another page.
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