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UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organisation |
Mission to Tatarstan and Udmurtia
Mr. Wolfgang Reuther, UNESCO Representative in the Russian Federation, and Mr. David Adams, Chairman of the International Year for the Culture of Peace, went on a three-day mission to the Republic of Tatarstan.
Vice Chairman of the Kazan City Council, Mrs. Liudmila Andreeva, who gave the guests a high-level welcome at the offices of the Tatarstan Parliament, indicated that the culture of peace was a priority for the republic.
This statement was restated during the meeting with Mr. Kamil Iskhakov, the Chief Administrator of Kazan, who gave his guests an extensive document on their programme called "Kazan, a City of the Culture of Peace".
The Institute for the Culture of Peace and its Director, Mr. Engel Tagirov, welcomed the mission to Tatarstan. This is the first educational and research institution in Russia that trains experts in preventing and defusing ethnic and religious conflicts. On September 14, 1999, the day of the official launching of the International Year for the Culture of Peace, the Institute of Culture of Peace was opened with the assistance of the Republic Government in the framework of the Russian Pilot Project "Culture of Peace in Russia – Year 2000".
On April 28, a cultural festival staged in the city square to mark the opening of a branch of the Institute for the Culture of Peace in Elabuga.
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On May 10-13, 2000, Mr. Wolfgang Reuther, Director of the UNESCO Moscow Office, went on a mission to the city of Izhevsk, the capital of the Udmurtian Republic.
In Izhevsk, Mr. Reuther met with the local officials, the Deputy Chairman of the State Council Mr. Pavel Vershinin, the Minister of International Relations of Udmurtia Mr. Victor Vikulov, the Ministers of Culture, Education and Youth and heads of local educational institutions.
A Preliminary Agreement was signed between the UNESCO Moscow Office and the Ministry of International Relations of Udmurtia.
As a result of the meetings, it was agreed to set up a UNESCO Information Centre on the premises of the International East European University, one of the biggest universities in the republic, that had already started working.
Valery Chestakov, a programme specialist for culture of the UNESCO Moscow Office, represented UNESCO at the awards ceremony at the New Opera of Moscow on May 27, 2000, and, acting on behalf of the Director General of UNESCO, gave the Picasso Bronze Medal to Polina Nikitina, a young disabled painter from the Krasnoyarsk Oblast.
The prize was designed by the Philanthropist Foundation, a Russian charity NGO, operating to facilitate the integration of disabled persons into society through encouragement and promotion of their individual artistic creativity. Within the framework of its programme, it launched last year a competitive campaign in music, fine arts and poetry, which aroused a great interest among talented disabled persons in Russia and abroad.
UNESCO also supported this initiative, taking into account the great importance of the efforts undertaken by the Foundation for the sake of the 10 million disabled persons in Russia, whose situation presents a real problem for society and the government in the context of the ongoing challenging social and economic reforms.
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International Labor Organisation |
ILO Encyclopedia – Now in Russian
A presentation ceremony was held at the National Hotel in Moscow on May 25 for the latest, fourth edition of the ILO Encyclopedia on Labour Safety and Protection that came out recently in Russian. The ILO Moscow Office, assisted by the Russian Ministry of Labour and Social Development, has put in enormous efforts translating the four volumes of the Encyclopedia into Russian.
Leading lights in labour safety from Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine were invited to edit the translated text to render it in professional Russian. The translation includes 105 chapters, with a total of over a thousand entries, nearly 900 tables, and around 1,200 charts. As translation got along, the Centre for Labour Protection, Industrial Safety, and Social Partnership in St. Petersburg placed the translated chapters on its Internet website and, simultaneously, wrote a CD-ROM version provided with a search system. As a result of its painstaking efforts, a complete electronic version of the Encyclopedia was introduced to the guests invited for the presentation. Anyone can now view the product on the Internet (http://oshnet.me tut.fi:1887/iloencrus), which makes the Encyclopedia accessible for millions of Russian speakers in Russia and other countries.
As people speaking at the presentation ceremony noted, the Encyclopedia will be helpful in improving working conditions and reducing injuries and death on the shopfloor. It will be useful to industrial managers, government inspection personnel, and medical professionals. Curiously, for a solemn occasion the presentation was held to be, some of those present clearly distrusted the high-tech edition. They called on the Encyclopedia producers to put out a complete "heavyweight" version of the Encyclopedia in book form. The giggling these appeals sparked off were interrupted by Mr. G. Scharenbrojch, ILO Regional Director for Europe and Central Asia, attending the presentation, who suggested that the book devotees address their requests to the Federal Government – publishing books so large costs incomparably more than churning out computer printouts.