The Rose of Baghdad

In the name of culture, the top people of Florence were kept busy last week entertaining delegates to the fifth annual conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. The Business and Professional Women's Club poured tea in a villa where according to legend Giovanni Boccaccio met one of the voluptuous heroines of his Decameron. An Italian movie company held a special screening of an animated cartoon called The Rose of Baghdad, which allegedly had been inspired by the work of UNESCO. No one was quite sure what Boccaccio or Baghdad had to do with the organization's work; but then,

UNESCO had never been quite sure what its work was supposed to be.

Manana Means Today. Meeting in the gilded and brocaded halls of the Pitti Palace, delegates presented a total of 86 new proposals. Among them: a request to draw up a list of sources for an economic history from the 11th to the 16th Centuries, a suggestion that UNESCO collect material on teaching evolutionary biology.

However worthy, such pet projects did not seem altogether pertinent to UNESCO's director general, Jaime Torres Bodet, Mexico's able former Minister of Education, who is an impatient man. Cracked one UNESCO representative last week: "For Torres Bodet, manana means today." Bodet had a pet project of his own--nothing more nor less than peace. He favored a Yugoslav suggestion for an international intellectual congress for peace, a Belgian proposal to form a committee to study the effects of new weapons, a Czech plan to outlaw atomic weapons. When the conference rejected these projects, Bodet got sore. Cried Bodet: "I ask the conference to place on the agenda the selection of my successor."

Conscience Examined. With only four days of the conference left, a group of delegates got together in a secret midnight session, next day brought forth a petition, signed by 35 countries, urging Torres Bodet to reconsider his resignation. He received a similar cabled appeal from the U.N.'s Trygve Lie. He agreed to return to his job. Said Bodet in a closing speech: "It has been a conference of an examination of conscience . . . That, of course, is not everything, but is very much . . ."

The fact was that for UNESCO, manana still meant the day after tomorrow.

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