President Carter Receives Second Annual Fulbright Prize

President Carter Receives Second Annual Fulbright Prize
Former President Jimmy Carter is the 1994 recipient of the J. William Fulbright Prize for International Understanding. He accepted the award on Oct. 1, his 70th birthday, during the Fulbright Association's annual conference in Washington, D.C.

"Jimmy Carter has done more for public service in general and for the promotion of mutual understanding among nations in particular than any American chief executive since John Quincy Adams," said Stanley Katz, president of the American Council of Learned Societies and chairman of the international committee that selected President Carter. "His career constitutes a living example of the principles that the Fulbright prize honors."

The award was created last year to reward those individuals who have contributed to bringing greater understanding among people and nations, according to Maurizio Gianturco, president of the Fulbright Association's Board of Directors. Nelson Mandela, president of South Africa, received the 1993 Fulbright Prize. The Coca-Cola Foundation donates the annual prize of $50,000 to each recipient. President Carter's prize will support programs of The Carter Center.

Carter Center Appoints Diplomat-in-Residence
Foreign Service Officer Vincent Farley has begun a one-year appointment as diplomat-in-residence at The Carter Center. He is working primarily on projects to develop and implement collaborative efforts between governmental and nongovernmental organizations in Africa. He serves as an adviser to the Center's programs in Conflict Resolution, African Governance, and Human Rights, which are working to increase economic development, strengthen democracy, and reduce conflict in Liberia, Ethiopia, Sudan, and other countries.

"I have the highest respect for President Carter's many initiatives to promote peace and reconciliation," Mr. Farley said. "I welcome the opportunity to join The Carter Center and assist in advancing those endeavors."

Mr. Farley is the former director of the U.S. Department of State's Office of Research and Analysis for Africa. He has been deputy ambassador in the Ivory Coast and Mauritania and also has served in Niger, South Korea, and Yugoslavia.

Carter Center Opens Office in GuyanaThe Carter Center has opened an office in Georgetown, Guyana, to support the country's efforts for economic development, electoral reform, and preservation of the environment. The office provides in-country assistance to the Center's Global Development Initiative (GDI), Global 2000 Program, and Latin American and Caribbean Program (LACP).

The GDI has worked with Guyana and its international donor partners since November 1993 to find ways to use development assistance more effectively. In January 1994, former President Jimmy Carter participated in the Caribbean Group for Cooperation in Economic Development meeting in Georgetown, at which GDI was invited to help the Guyanese government prepare a long-term development strategy. A GDI team went to Guyana in December to continue assisting with this process.

Global 2000's Environmental Initiative is working with the GDI to help Guyana achieve sustainable development while preserving its natural resources. The initiative seeks grass-roots input into formulating and implementing national policies to protect the environment.

LACP continues to assist the Guyanese Elections Commission with electoral reform. The program coordinated the Center's electoral mission to observe the 1992 national election in which voters chose Cheddi Jagan as their president. LACP sent a team to Guyana in early December to finalize recommendations for electoral reform. The Commission was expected to submit these recommendations to the government and major political parties for consideration.

Commission Issues Recommendations for Broadcast Independence
Media executives from the United States, the New Independent States (NIS), and Eastern Europe met in Russia this September to forge consensus on an important issue: freedom of the press.

Former President Jimmy Carter joined Eduard Sagalaev, president of Moscow Independent Broadcasting Corp., to co-chair the annual meeting of the Commission on Radio and Television Policy in St. Petersburg. They worked with Commission members from nations as different as Belarus, Tajikistan, and Russia to forge unanimous agreement on policy recommendations to develop responsible broadcast media--free from undue political and economic constraints.

"The issue of television/radio autonomy is absolutely crucial to the next stage of democratization," said Ellen Mickiewicz, Carter Center fellow and Commission director. "The Communique that issued from the Commission will enter parliamentary debates in several countries now grappling with broadcast regulation."

The meeting included broadcast media executives, policy-makers, and scholars from the United States, the nations of the former Soviet Union, Poland, and the Czech Republic. They unanimously agreed to recommendations released in a formal Communique. The recommendations included:

• State-owned television should be transformed into public service television.
• Buffer organizations should be formed in each nation to assign broadcast frequencies and grant licenses, protect free expression, and handle complaints about abuses.
• Broadcasters must have the ability to extend their signals without depending on government, except for frequency management. Until privately owned facilities are available, governments should open their distribution facilities to all broadcasters without discrimination and charge equal fees to both state and nonstate broadcasters for satellite time, transmission facilities, and equipment rentals or purchases.
• Journalists should be guided by voluntary codes of professional ethics.
• False or misleading advertising should be prohibited on radio and television.

The process of creating new, democratic organs of government power is beginning, and, as never before, the greatest responsibility rests with the broadcast media," Mr. Sagalaev said.

The Commission on Radio and Television Policy is a collaborative project of The Carter Center and the DeWitt Wallace Center for Communication and Journalism at Duke University. It has co-published two guidebooks with The Aspen Institute. Television & Elections offers alternatives to media coverage of political elections; Television & Minorities suggests ways to cover minority issues and ethnic conflicts in the former Soviet Union.

Children Make Peace a Creative Experience
In October, The Carter Center, in collaboration with the Atlanta Committee for UNICEF, produced a dramatic performance and educational workshop on peace studies for 100 5th- and 6th- graders from 20 Atlanta-area schools. Guided by trained artistic leaders, the students worked together to create expressions of peace and conflict resolution through the mediums of drama, music, poetry, art, and dance. Channel One, a cable television teaching tool, will broadcast a 30-minute special documentary of the event in late winter. Channel One is seen by approximately 8 million students across the United States.

Schools participating in the program received resource materials and study guides for teachers to use in their classes and to assist them in producing their own workshops. Theatrical Outfit, which helped put on the Atlanta program, will take the performance to schools throughout Georgia as part of a tour arranged by Young Audiences, the nation's largest nonprofit educational arts organization.

Also in October, former President Jimmy Carter; former Ambassador Marion Creekmore, The Carter Center's director of programs; and Robert Pastor, the Center's fellow for the Latin America and Caribbean program, held a forum on conflict resolution for the Close Up Foundation's live broadcast, "Close Up on C-SPAN." The forum was based on President Carter's book for young people, Talking Peace (Dutton Children's Books, 1993). Two hundred Atlanta-area high school students participated in the event. Also participating via satellite hook-up were students from Oregon, Michigan, and North Carolina.

Carter Center Not Involved in Antiguan Elections
The Carter Center's imprimatur for a free and fair election has become so important that it is sometimes used even when the Center is not involved. That was the case in the March 8 elections in Antigua and Barbuda.

Lester Bird, the son of 83-year-old Vere Bird, captured the most votes and succeeded his father as prime minister. The Bird family has ruled the twin island state for more than 50 years and has been accused of maintaining power through fraud. To respond to some of these charges and to obtain advice on electoral reforms, the Antiguan government invited Dennis Smith, formerly chief electoral officer in Barbados. Mr. Smith has worked with The Carter Center's Latin American and Caribbean Program as a consultant to Guyana, but he made clear to the Antiguan authorities that his work for them was strictly in a private capacity.

When Mr. Bird announced that The Carter Center would observe the elections, both Mr. Smith and the Center informed the Antigua Daily Observer that was not the case.

Nevertheless, Mr. Bird never retracted his statement, and after his victory at the polls, he tried to divert charges of irregularities by stating that the election had been certified by The Carter Center. Although most of the world was unaware of the Antiguan elections and the Bird government's actions, Douglas Payne, director of hemisphere studies for Freedom House, criticized Mr. Bird in an article titled "Foul Play in Antigua and Barbuda," published in Carib News. Mr. Payne reports that Prime Minister Lester Bird misled the Antiguan public and the international community about The Carter Center's involvement before and after the elections by falsely announcing that the Center observed the poll.