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Carter Center
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Carter Center is a nongovernmental, not-for-profit organization founded in 1982 by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn Carter. In partnership with Emory University, The Carter Center works to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering. The Atlanta-based center has helped to improve the quality of life for people in more than 70 countries. In 2002, President Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work “to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development” through The Carter Center. [1]
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The Center’s motto – “Waging Peace. Fighting Disease. Building Hope.” – highlights the two core program areas for Carter Center activities. Peace Programs strengthen democracy, mediate and prevent conflicts, advance human rights, and monitor elections around the world. Health Programs seek the control and eradication of diseases such as Guinea worm disease, river blindness, malaria, trachoma, lymphatic filariasis, and schistosomiasis, work to diminish the stigma against mental illnesses, and improve nutrition through increased crop production in Africa.
Work in these areas is guided by five principles:
- The Center emphasizes action and results. Based on careful research and analysis, it is prepared to take timely action on important and pressing issues.
- The Center does not duplicate the effective efforts of others.
- The Center addresses difficult problems and recognizes the possibility of failure as an acceptable risk.
- The Center is nonpartisan and acts as a neutral party in dispute resolution activities.
- The Center believes that people can improve their lives when provided with the necessary skills, knowledge, and access to resources.
The Center strives to give millions of the world’s poorest people access to skills and knowledge they can use to identify solutions that will improve their own lives. In its first 25 years, the Center achieved a number of milestones, including:
- Observation of more than 67 elections in 26 countries [2]
- Helping over 8 million small-scale farmers double or triple grain production in 15 African countries [3]
- Creating avenues to peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Haiti, Liberia, North Korea, Sudan, and Uganda
- Reducing cases of Guinea worm disease worldwide from 3.5 million in 1986 to fewer than 25,000 in 2007 [4]
- Strengthening international standards for human rights and the voices of individuals defending those rights
- Advancing efforts to improve mental health care and diminish the stigma against people with mental illness
The Center is governed by a board of trustees, which oversees the organization’s assets and property and promotes its objectives and goals. The board is chaired by John J. Moores.
A community advisory group – the Board of Councilors – includes public and private-sector leaders who support The Carter Center and its activities in their communities and organizations. Members attend quarterly presentations on the Center’s work.
President and CEO John Hardman oversees the Center’s day-to-day operations and staff of 160, which includes international experts in the fields of peace and health. More than 100 student interns from universities around the world assist the staff each year.
Center-based councils of eminent persons who offer guidance to or participate in Center activities include: the Council of Presidents and Prime Ministers of the Americas, the International Council for Conflict Resolution, the International Task Force for Disease Eradication, and the Mental Health Task Force. The Carter Center also collaborates with other public and private organizations.
The Carter Center is located next to the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum on 37 acres of parkland two miles from downtown Atlanta, Georgia. The library and museum are owned and operated separately by the United States National Archives.
The Carter Center played a key role — with the U. N. Electoral Assistance Division and the National Democratic Institute — in building consensus on a common set of international principles for election monitoring.
Since it began monitoring elections in 1989, the Carter Center has monitored 69 elections in 27 countries, including these recent elections:
- August 15, 2004: Venezuela, Recall referendum
- May 15, 2005: Ethiopia, Ethiopian general elections
- December 3, 2006: Venezuela, Venezuelan presidential election, 2006[5]
In 2002, President Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development".
Regarding the Venezuelan recall referendum of 2004 in which Chavez was supported by a 59% of the voters, according to a report by J. Michael Waller, vice president for information operations for the Center for Security Policy, a neoconservative think tank:
- Carter's "continued international work certifying election results has provided essential political cover to anti-democratic forces in the region. Indeed, it might be said that over the past four years, Jimmy Carter has been the most visible and arguably most influential U.S. leader in Latin America."
- "The [ Hugo Chávez ] regime delayed and obstructed the recall referendum process at every turn. Once the regime was forced to submit to such a referendum, moreover, it used a fraud-filled voting process to ensure victory. The government did everything—including granting citizenship to half a million illegal aliens in a crude vote-buying scheme and 'migrating' existing voters away from their local election office—to fix the results in its favor. The outcome was then affirmed and legitimated by ex-President Jimmy Carter’s near-unconditional support."
- "Jimmy Carter ignored pleas from the opposition and publicly endorsed the results, despite the fact that the government reneged on its agreement to carry out an audit of the results. Carter’s actions not only gave the Venezuelan regime the legitimacy it craved, but also destroyed the public’s confidence in the voting process and in the effectiveness of international observers."[6]
Criticism of President Carter's book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, and Carter's subsequent response to the criticism, resulted in the resignation of several Carter Center advisory board members (although not any of the Center's governing Board of Trustees) and its first executive director.
- See main article: Palestine Peace Not Apartheid#Critical reaction and commentary
- On December 8, 2006, in response to the book, the Carter Center's first director and founder of its Middle East program, Kenneth W. Stein, who is a professor of Middle Eastern history at Emory University and director of its Institute for the Study of Modern Israel, resigned his position as honorary fellow of the Center and from its Board of Councilors, making "a clean break," he said, because his "professional reputation was being affected."[7] Stein said that the book "was replete with factual errors, material copied from other sources, and simply invented segments."[8] His detailed review of the book appears in the Middle East Quarterly, which is published by Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, and edited by Michael Rubin, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.[9]
- On January 11, 2007, fourteen additional members of the Carter Center's Board of Councilors of over 200 members resigned in protest over former President Carter's book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.[10]
- On January 23, 2007, National Review Online posted a related story by Claudia Rosett, journalist-in-residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute based in Washington, D.C., alleging that the Carter Center receives a great deal of funding from Arab nations and leaders but that the Center refuses to fully disclose its financial backing to confirm or deny the story.[11]
- ^ Norwegian Nobel Committee, 2002 Nobel Peace Prize announcement, [1], October 11, 2002, accessed December 12, 2007.
- ^ The Carter Center, "Elections Monitored by The Carter Center", accessed December 13, 2007.
- ^ The Carter Center, "How the Agriculture Program Helps Farmers in Africa", accessed December 13, 2007.
- ^ The Carter Center, "Distribution of Dracunculiasis Cases Reported During 2006", accessed December 13, 2007.
- ^ Steven Dudley, "Venezuela: Chávez Aiming for a Landslide," Miami Herald December 3, 2006, accessed December 4, 2006.
- ^ J. Michael Waller, "What to Do about Venezuela?"PDF (75.0 KiB) Occasional Papers 6 Center for Security Policy May 2005, accessed February 5, 2007.
- ^ Rebecca Trounson, "Former Aide Criticizes Carter Over Mideast Book: In L.A., Kenneth Stein Says 'falsehoods' in Book on Mideast Prompted His Resignation," Los Angeles Times January 13, 2007, accessed February 5, 2007.
- ^ Associated Press, "President Carter's New Book Spurs Aide To Resign," New York Sun December 8, 2006, accessed February 5, 2007.
- ^ Kenneth W. Stein, "My Problem with Jimmy Carter's Book," Middle East Quarterly 14.2 (March 2007). Accessed February 5, 2007.
- ^ Ernie Suggs, '14 Carter Center Advisors Resign," Atlanta Journal-Constitution January 11, 2007, accessed February 5, 2007.
- ^ Claudia Rosett, "The Ex-Presidency: The Question of Carter's Cash: In which our reporter follows the money." National Review Online January 29, 2007, accessed February 5, 2007.