Early History of the Culture of Peace

I had the responsibility (except for the evaluation reports) to document the development of the Transdisciplinary Project in a series of Executive Board documents and General Conference documents. These were in addition to the reports I prepared regularly for the United Nations, which also included detailed descriptions of the Transdisciplinary Project (documents A/51/395, A/52/292 and A/53/370 - the latter available here as Annex VI). Hardly a year went by without a formal report, a fact which indicates, with hindsight, less the advancement of the programme and more the increasing skepticism of the ruling bodies of UNESCO and some members of the Secretariat. The UNESCO reports included the following:

* 1994 (18 August), 145 EX/15: The culture of peace programme: from national programmes to a project of global scope

* 1995 (20 September), 28 C/123: Report on the action of the culture of peace programme

* 1997 (23 April), 151 EX/43: Report on the implementation of the transdisciplinary project "Towards a culture of peace"

* 1998 (14 September), 155 EX/48: Evaluation report on the transdisciplinary project Towards a culture of peace available on-line.

* 1999 (24 September), 157 EX/39: Evaluation report on the transdisciplinary project; Towards a culture of peace available on-line.

* 2000 (4 May), 159 EX/37: Strategy paper by the Director-General on the place of UNESCO in the United Nations system-wide actions on the culture of peace available on-line

The Advisory Group, established by the Note of 16 June 1997, was convened only once - on March 5, 1999 - at Paris, for which I have seen the agenda and list of participants but no account of the discussion.

The "Human Right to Peace" was announced by Director-General Mayor in his New Year's message of January 1997. Already 23-25 February 1997, an Experts Meeting on the Human Right to Peace was convened in the Canary Islands. During the next ten months, this initiative was to create a veritable "firestorm" of controversy, culminating in a remarkable debate during the 29th General Conference on 6 November 1997.

The opposition to the Human Right to Peace, particularly by the European Member States, was linked to their concern that the Director-General was overstepping the domains of competence of the Organization and taking on initiatives that belonged instead with the United Nations Security Council which, of course, is more easily controlled by the major powers. This concern had surfaced earlier in a surprising debate on 29 April 1996 when the Executive Board rejected a draft decision to assist the United Nations in its educational initiatives for disarmament that had been proposed in document 149 EX/23 of 28 March 1996. Behind that debate lay European concern that UNESCO was going beyond its mandate in a series of meetings that the Director-General and his regional advisors were organizing with military establishments in Latin America (26-27 June 1996) and Europe (12 June 1996), as well as meetings to try to achieve a diplomatic settlement in the Sudan (11 April and 23-26 September 1995).

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