The Yamoussoukro Congress

All is now ready for the Statement to be presented for approval by Unesco's General Conference at its next session. The draft resolution will be submitted by Spain. Some countries have already shown their readiness to support it. I first did a legal study of the procedural modalities followed in similar cases, and I have chosen the one I think most appropriate. I hope that the Member States (158 at present) will unanimously support the Statement. I look forward to this occasion. You deserve such a result! / I shall be seeing you in Paris at the preparatory meeting for the Yamoussoukro Conference on "Peace in the minds of men". / Peace, / Federico Mayor

For the first prepcom meeting on September 5, 1988, I took a bus instead of a taxi from Charles DeGaulle airport and arrived late. Federico Mayor was already in the middle of his opening speech in which he charged the participants with their task. I was doubly embarassed when he stopped his speech and greeted me personally (and very warmly) as I entered the meeting room at Miollis (UNESCO).

Rumor had it that the congress was being planned as a way to get the President of Cote d'Ivoire, Felix Houghouet-Boigny, the Nobel Prize for Peace, although in the end he did not attend the Congress but took part in 4th of July ceremonies at the American Embassy that day. In general, I was favorably impressed by the participants that UNESCO had brought together for this and a second planning meeting which took place in March of 1989. The representative of Cote D'Ivoire, Christolph Wonji, was an intelligent and charming spokesman. The UNESCO person charged with the congress, Georges Kutukdjian, was a controversial fellow whom I would work with in the coming years.

With Felipe MacGregor at Yamoussoukro. Click on photo to enlarge.

The participant who most impressed me was a Peruvian Jesuit of Scotch ancestry, Father Felipe MacGregor. On the very first day, he spoke out against the armaments industry and its targeting of the Third World for its profits, and he wanted the Seville Statement expanded to deal with institutional violence. Felipe brought with him to the conference a beautifully-illustrated book that he had edited in Peru, a pedagogy book for the culture of peace, with the simple title "Cultura de Paz." I spent much time with him in the two prepcom meetings and became convinced of his vision.

Knowing that Federico Mayor is a writer of poetry, I put my thoughts in the form of a poem which was conceived in a personal dialogue with Marie-Angelique Savane at the Commission and which eventually made its way into the little book that UNESCO published about the Yamoussoukro Congress. It expresses the hope that was held out at that moment of history because of the disarmament agreements signed between the US and the USSR, and it picks up the phrase that I had learned from Felipe MacGregor, the "culture of peace." Ironically, my version of the last stanza of the poem differed from the published version which was edited by Kutukdjian, as I had written it in the form of a question: "Are we ready/ In UNESCO / to provide these tools of the mind?" At my suggestion, Mayor also commissioned a poem for his presentation that was written for him by Kutukdjian, beginning:

From the heart of Africa in Yamoussoukro there rises today
A song of hope -
That understanding and agreement,
Tirelessly sought
Will take the place of violence, hate and rancour.

Addressing the Congress as the first speaker.

At the Congress itself I was the initial speaker, presenting the Seville Statement on Violence, and asking for his adoption by the Congress. But first I wrote the following prophetic words, although I don't recall if I actually delivered them verbatim:

In these times the peace of history has accelerated. We are in a time of rapid, dramatic, radical change.

Central to this change is the possibility, in fact the necessity that we abolish, that we eliminate one of the oldest and most important of all human institutions, the institution of war, the organized violence of states and nations.

Never before has history seen such a profound transformation - which must transform not only the nature of States, but even the nature of all human relations, of rich and poor, powerful and weak, men and women, humanity and nature.

I was assisted in my advocacy for the Seville Statement at the Congress by signatories Riitta Wahlstrom, Santiago Genoves and Samir Kumar Ghosh. Ironically, the UNESCO book about the Congress claims that the Seville Statement was introduced by both me and Tapio Varis, who had nothing to do with the Seville Statement, other than being co-chair of the session where I spoke. This mistake later found its way into a book on the culture of peace by Anaisabel Prera Flores and Patrice Vermeren which claims that the Seville Statement "doit beaucoup aux travaux et à l'action des professeurs D. Adams et T. Varis." And so history gets mis-written! In any case, the Congress adopted the Seville Statement, which led to its adoption later by the UNESCO General Conference.

Felipe MacGregor was on the drafting committee for the Congress Declaration which not only adopted the Seville Statement on Violence, but also provided the first UNESCO formulation of the culture of peace:

...construct a new vision of peace by developing a peace culture based on the universal values of respect life, liberty, justice, solidarity, tolerance, human rights and equality between women and men.