The Complexity of Cultural Diplomacy

Last year there was a special session of the Executive Board of UNESCO to discuss excavations that had been started by the Israelis on a ramp leading to the Al Aqsa Mosque. Those excavations, described as prudent technical work to assure the safety of the ramp by the Israelis, and as deeply suspicious by some Arabs, lead to demonstrations at the work site, and a request by the Arab nations for a discussion at UNESCO. An informal working group met in private to draft a resolution which was eventually accepted unanimously by the Executive Board. The resolution referred the matter to the World Heritage Center and its collaborating Intergovernmental Organizations, strongly encouraged the parties to the dispute to cooperate in its resolution, and required the UNESCO secretariat to monitor the process and report back to the Executive Board. The Israelis have since interrupted the excavation, the parties have been meeting to discuss solutions to the problem, and the process continues, fortunately without new outbreaks of violence

At the nominal level, the issue was protecting the most important site in the Jewish religion, a site of almost equal importance to Muslims, and a site of considerable importance to Christians, as well as protecting the safety of the pedestrians going to the Al Aqsa Mosque. More fundamentally, this is a key point of the conflict among three cultures. The political control of the holy places has triggered violence for centuries, including the Al Aqsa Intifada. The protection of the world heritage site has been the subject of debate at UNESCO for a generation.

Last night we did a role playing exercise in my class on UNESCO with students playing the parts of the members of the informal working group (Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, the United States and Norway) as well as the secretariat. I was struck by the complexity of the process involved in drafting a one page resolution. Of course, that resolution (which went almost unnoticed in the United States except by the diplomatic community) was an item of considerable interest in the middle east. More importantly, it avoided or at least postponed a flash point in the world's most explosive region.

The Israeli and Palestinian authorities were both seeking to be recognized by other states as legitimate governments with the right to negotiate for their peoples. On the other hand, each faced various factions within their own polity, some of whom favored violence over conciliation, and some of whom denied the rights of the other party. The Egyptian and Jordanian authorities, whose governments enjoy high levels of foreign aid, also have constituencies that are strongly concerned with the issues underlying the conflict; their nations have in the past been involved in Israeli-Palestinian wars, and their region is in turmoil. The United States delegation to UNESCO represented a nation in which Israel and Palestine are hot political topics, a nation at war in two other Muslim countries, and one about to enter an electoral campaign. Norway, with a highly experienced and respected diplomat at the helm, was not merely a distant neutral observer, but the representative of the European Union with its own diversity of strongly held views, and a representative of the community of nations that would hope that the conflict could be defused if not resolved at UNESCO. Moreover, the individual negotiators were individuals with their own views facing a prolonged negotiation (stretching far into the night) with a need to report to their colleagues from the 50 or so other nations participating in the Executive Board.

Even the Secretariat of UNESCO headquarters and the World Heritage Center had complex tasks. Their charter of course called for protecting the peace, encouraging the dialog among nations and among cultures, and protecting world cultural heritage. But the leaders of the organization also had to be responsive to the 191 nations, each with a vote in the governing "General Conference", most of whom sided with the Palestinian cause. They also had to be responsive to the countries that supply the majority of the organizations budget, and the United States and United Kingdom had left UNESCO in the past when the organization had acted in ways that they would not accept, leaving a deep hole in the budget, Moreover, there was bureaucratic conflict about the degree of control that UNESCO headquarters would exercise over the World Heritage Center, which has its own, independent governance.

One of the students caught me in a hallway after the class, exclaiming that she had no idea that diplomacy was so complicated!

I suspect that few Americans understand how important is can be that there exist organizations such as UNESCO where representatives of different governments can negotiate and try to find ways to peacefully resolve the religious, cultural, political and indeed economic issues that divide them and serve as potential flash points for future conflicts.