The Brotherhood of Sister Cities : Peace, Understanding on Agenda at International Parley

Mayor Tom Bradley, welcoming foreign delegates to the Sister Cities International conference at a garden party at Getty House, the mayor’s residence, grinned and said, “Yes, we have the mayor of Timbuktu . . . until he showed up at the front door I was not convinced.”

But Mayor Abbas Fouad Abdal Kader was there, all right, wearing a traditional caftan and proffering a ready smile for other guests, most of whom in this crowd didn’t have to be told that Timbuktu is not poetic fancy but a West African city in Mali, on the southern edge of the Sahara. (Accessible by camel, Niger River boat or, now, airplane.)

1,200 Participants

During the five-day session here last week, 1,200 representatives from such geographically, politically and culturally diverse nations as Australia, China, Mexico and the Soviet Union talked about such things as business development, youth exchanges and technical assistance programs.

They heard lofty words about the importance of being sisterly from Charles Z. Wick, director of the U.S. Information Agency, who in his address spoke of the Sister Cities program as “the kind of people power that keeps the world moving away from confrontation and toward conciliation.”

And he reminded delegates, most of whom were Americans, of their opportunity as citizen-volunteers to reverse what he termed America’s “serious” public relations problem abroad. “What people think is determined by what they know,” he said, “(and) by how they know it.” For many in other nations, he suggested, the “how” is television and the “what” is “Dynasty,” “Dallas,” “Magnum, P.I.” and “The A-Team.”

Sister Cities International is a nonprofit Washington-based organization that emerged from President Dwight Eisenhower’s People-to-People program, established in 1956, to become a good-will network reaching into all 50 states and 86 foreign countries, with 750 U.S. communities claiming at least one sister city in another country. (Los Angeles, with 14, leads the way, with sisterly ties to Athens; Auckland, New Zealand; Bombay, India; Bordeaux, France; Eilat, Israel; Guangzhou, China; Lusaka, Zambia; Mexico City; Nagoya, Japan; Pusan, Korea; Salvador, Brazil; Taipei, Taiwan; Tehran and West Berlin).

Emphasis on Peace

There was a wholesale swapping of keys to cities worldwide. And, predictably, hundreds of words were spoken about peace and understanding.

And, if the reality is not universal brotherhood--L.A.’s affiliation with sister city Tehran is currently suspended, for example, and there were no representatives at this meeting from South Africa, El Salvador, Haiti or Nicaragua, among others--the good feelings seemed real enough.

Ethelda Singer, the conference chairwoman who has served a decade as a national vice president of Sister Cities International, put it this way: “We’ve had people shaking hands when their governments don’t even speak to each other.”

A round table of delegates had agreed to sit down between sessions and talk informally: The Soviets had harsh words for the reaction of the Western press to the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident in April. An Australian had challenging words for yachtsmen gearing up for the 1987 America’s Cup race, saying the Aussies are a cinch to win.

The trio of Soviets, who spoke through a woman interpreter, were Sergey Paramonov, vice president of the Assn. for Relations Between Soviet and Foreign Cities, Moscow; Ivan Cherepanov, also of the association, and Shukurallo Mirsaidov, mayor of Tashkent, a city of more than 1 million close to the Afghanistan border in the southwestern part of the U.S.S.R.

Cherepanov spoke of the importance of programs such as Sister Cities in “helping strengthen peace,” of six Soviet cities that have connections to U.S. cities and of “10 (others) that are making contacts now.”

One of the links is between Tashkent and Seattle; Virginia Westberg of Seattle and Rosanne Royer, wife of Seattle’s mayor, spoke enthusiastically about plans for a pen pal program and student exchanges at both high school and university levels.

Personal Contact

Said Mirsaidov: “We hope that through personal contact (other nations) will become convinced of our equal drive toward peace. . . . Unfortunately, the press of other countries doesn’t completely enlighten the people” about the Soviet Union.

He added, “Americans think, from poor information received, that some sort of threat exists. That’s a very deep misunderstanding . . . we’ve never threatened anyone nor have we intended to threaten anyone but we’ve never allowed ourselves to be put in a position of being hurt, either.”

And he mentioned what he termed a misconception among Americans “that the Soviet people are more backwards.” Americans, he said, have a “foggy view” of Soviet technology and educational levels.

“Not in Seattle,” volunteered Westberg, mentioning specifically an exchange in which Soviet children’s art was exhibited at the Children’s Museum in Seattle.

When asked, the Soviets were also critical of media handling of the disaster at Chernobyl.

“We had a big tragedy,” Cherepanov said. “We learned a very big lesson for ourselves. You can’t joke around with the atom. What occurred there can be no comparison to what could occur if an atomic war did start.” He hoped, he said, that it was a lesson learned “throughout the world.”

But Mirsaidov was critical of handling of the Chernobyl story by English television and American and other Western newspapers, contending that they “created around this tragedy a great deal of turmoil.” For example, he said, foreign governments with participants in an international cycling competition that was under way at the time in Kiev “were almost forcing their people to leave” and thus creating a climate of fear.

He called it “politicizing” of a tragedy, adding, “It’s not ethical.”

As the Soviets talked, Mitsuo Tonouchi, mayor of Minoritown, Ibaraki, Japan, sat snapping their pictures. Tonouchi is a dairy farmer in Ibaraki, a farming community 60 miles northeast of Tokyo and he has longtime, if somewhat tenuous ties, to the Sister Cities International network.

It all began, he said, 16 years ago when “I came to Abilene (Kansas) to buy a cow.” In Abilene, he said through an interpreter, “I thought I saw the future--our city wanted to be like Abilene.” This statement brought a smile to the face of Connie Cooper, 31, an Abilene dental hygienist who is a city commissioner and former mayor of that city.

So, three years ago, it was arranged that Ibaraki and Abilene would be sister cities. And, if they seem like peculiar partners, they are not without bonds. These are not the best of times for Japanese farmers, Tonouchi noted--”Naturally, people want to go to the factory and get more money. Farming is more hard work.” He spoke, too, of the problem of dairy “overproduction” in a land where people drink little milk.

Now, about that first visit he made to Abilene 16 years ago, well, he said, he sent back three cows to Japan. Then he grinned and said, “Those three cows now are 46 cows.”

Seated side by side were Philip John Kalinda, a city councilman in Lusaka, capital of Zambia, and Amanda Wash, a Los Angeles pharmaceutical company consultant whose interest in Kalinda’s country “started when I was in Africa as a Peace Corps nurse” in the ‘60s. Today, Los Angeles and Lusaka are sister cities and she has led a delegation to that country.

Kalinda, asked to tell something about his city, spoke of the burgeoning population (800,000), “all of whom live within a radius of 10 miles,” creating “major problems” of overcrowding in Lusaka and its outskirts and shortages of water and housing.

Progress has also brought skyscrapers--and additional problems. Kalinda explained, “Our fire engines could not cope. They would not reach.” So, Sister Cities lent a helping hand with a study, now completed.

Although this was Kalinda’s first visit to America, he was taking it all in stride--glitz, glitter and freeways. “I’ve read quite widely,” he said. “I wasn’t under any illusions. And our television system is very good. Every schoolchild from grade eight would know what to expect.” The latter, he acknowledged, is “a mixed blessing.”

Fred Glover of Sutherland Shire, Sydney, Australia, needed little urging to tell the group something about Australia. Glover proceeded on a geographical tour, mile by mile. But his was not the standard tourism pitch. Describing the outback, he said, “There are stretches where you drive for 90 miles and the road does not bend . . . the most boring country you’ve ever seen.”

New South Wales? “A hell of a lot of sheep,” Glover said. The Australian people? “In your language, they’re very laid back.” He managed a plug for Australian wine, and Australian football. And he more than mentioned in passing that Australia is “home of the America’s Cup, and they’re preparing to defend it for all they’re worth.” Will Australia win that race in 1987? “Oh yes, no doubt.”

Cissy Vanek, from Lakewood, Colo., Sutherland Shire’s sister city, had her own assessment from a visit to Australia: “Their pace, their life style, it’s what we had in the ‘50s. They have time for people.”

For the most part, youth delegates--there were 34 international youth representatives from a handful of countries and about 135 Americans from 15 states--did not spend their time talking about Chernobyl or crime or pollution, said Melissa Goitia of Tempe, Ariz.

“They were real interested in our life styles,” said Goitia, a junior at Arizona State University majoring in business, “what we do on weekends. They see the adults are asking the heavy-duty questions.”

There is one exception, she said: They do ask about drugs and drinking.

Claudia Parpaglione, 21, of Sestri Levante, Italy, who is visiting Santa Cruz, Sestri Levante’s sister city, said of the problem: “It exists much more than here, drugs and alcohol. Many young people drink very much in Italy,” where there is no minimum legal drinking age.

“Heroine, cocaine, LSD, it’s a big problem,” Parpaglione said, both in big cities and small ones such as Sestri Levante, a Riviera city of 20,000. Drug pushers are arrested, she said, “but they don’t stay much time (in jail)” and “you can pay money and get free.”

Representing Sestri Levante’s sister city was Gar Eidem, a 16-year-old Santa Cruz High School student who hopes to be “some kind of scientist.” Through a Sister Cities exchange, he spent a month in Sestri Levante last year.

Regensburg, West Germany, is Tempe’s sister city and Goitia spent six weeks there in 1983 on an exchange. “I was embarrassed at times at my ignorance” of that country, she said, and she came to understand that “sometimes we (as Americans) have a lopsided point of view.”

For example, Goitia said, she was often told by West German acquaintances, “ ‘What your country does affects everyone. Sometimes you don’t see that.’ But with nuclear weapons in their backyard, it’s important to them who’s our President.”

When the young do sit down to serious talk, debates can be “very heated, very emotional,” she said, “but in the end we always become friends.”