A New Year's Message from the President of UEA
The president of the World Esperanto Association, d-ro Probal Dasgupta, wrote the following It has been translated into English by Tim Westover and Steve Brewer. The original Esperanto-language version can be found here at the UEA website.
At the threshold of hope
Between the 100th anniversary of UEA in 2008 and the 150th anniversary of Zamenhof's birth in 2009, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights turned 60. The United Nations and UNESCO are following the International Year of Languages 2008 with the International Year of Reconciliation 2009 and the International Year of Human Rights Learning 2009 -- almost as if they knew that Zamenhof was an activist for language equality and for peace. Should we not celebrate that the stars mysteriously align with our goals?
In April, we held a symposium at the United Nations in Geneva, for the first time in ten years. In July, our academics in Amsterdam met to discuss the presence of Esperanto in universities around the world for the first time in 40 years. In December we celebrated Zamenhof's birthday with UNESCO in Paris for the first time ever. On the way to the Universala Kongreso happening for the first time in Bialystok, we pause to catch our breath. Again UEA has engaged the international system. What hopes inspired our return to this scene? What thoughts brought us to this particular point?
The discussion around human rights, which was already beginning in Zamenhof's time, was written into the statues of the post-war UEA in 1947 -- one year earlier than the international community, which formally adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. In the 60's, the president of UEA, Ivo Lapenna (a professor of international law, whose 100th birthday we celebrate in 2009), brought this vision to a new level.
Lapenna was convinced that, to reach the cultural conscience of the public and beat back the often-systematic disrespect for human language rights (this disrespect he named "linguistic genocide," a term that has subsequently gained significance), we must engage culturally and scientifically with the academic world. On the basis of this already established vision of intercultural dialog, UEA began the book series "Oriento-Okcidento" (East-West). Independently recognizing that sociolinguistics did not sufficiently reflect language-planning, UEA launched a specialized journal with the linguist Dr. Victor Sadler as the first editor. That journal, "Language Problems and Language Planning" (LPLP) became a great success of our Center for Exploration and Documentation (CED). It placed language-planning on the world's scientific map.
When you launch a cultural-intellectual enterprise, you must be prepared to learn from it and not dictate conclusions a priori. Our association, under whose auspices the series "Oriento-Okcidento" bloomed, is proud to be an umbrella organization, whose collection of translations has become increasingly equal with respect to source languages. Translations give readers the opportunity to learn. We are proud that in and around LPLP, we have learned a lot about language problems.
The Prague Manifesto (1996) (English text here) was an important step in that learning process. The answers to "whither UEA?" can be found in that bridge document. In what sense do I name the Prague Manifesto a "bridge document," that marks the beginning of our communal brainstorming with movements for language rights?
On one hand, because although UEA always gave priority to the conservation of linguistic and cultural treasures of mankind (symbolized by the series "Oriento-Okcidento"), since 1996 that priority has been a part of our regular daily efforts. On the other hand, we do not want to bind to their traditional languages exactly those people that want to expand their linguistic repertoire. In order to maximize their liberty, we plead for bi-lingualism, based on the pedagogy of adding a second language without eroding the first. We acknowledge the importance of creating educational systems that adapt to the concrete needs of the public, especially from those social groups whose needs the current educational systems are likely to ignore. For that reason, our LPLP is often concerned with the educational policies for the least-advantaged students.
As a bridge between the series "Oriento-Okcidento" and LPLP, the Prague Manifesto asks for multi-language education for all people, which will steer us towards peace. To understand how UEA sees the Zamenhofic link between the language year 2008 and the reconciliation year 2009, re-read our hopes in the Prague Manifesto, at the end of which we assert that "exclusive reliance on national languages inevitably puts up barriers to the freedoms of expression, communication, and association. We are a movement for human emancipation."
