Space Without Weapons - a Missed Chance
On April 11 - 14, 2001, the "International Space Conference: Space without weapons - area of international cooperation in XXI century" was held under UN auspices in Moscow. The event had been first announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Millenium Summit in New York and coincided with the 40th anniversary of the first-ever manned spaceflight - that of Yury Gagarin on April 12, 1961.
The conference was structured into five symposia with almost 40 topic-related sessions where about 350 presentations were given. In his speech on the first day, Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia Georgy Mamedov trusted that "an intensive and free discussion" would be held in the course of the next few days. That's what I had hoped for - and did not get.
 Only the opening and closing session and the meeting on "Space and strategic stability" were interpreted into English. Consequently, it made no sense for non-Russian speakers to attend any of the other meetings unless they got hold of an individually assigned interpretor. Also, only 40 of the 250 delegates from 104 countries could book a seat for the excursion to space institutes and organizations in and around Moscow.
The program of the law- and policy-oriented sessions was so packed with presentations that no time was left for open discussion. To my knowledge, only two policy-oriented non-governmental organizations (NGOs) - INESAP and the Acronym Institute, with the latter being the only one considered for a presentation - participated in the conference outside an official government delegation.
NGO participation had been announced but critical voices were obviously unwanted. After some discussion, I could lay out printed material, but soon afterwards the papers were taken away and destroyed. I later learned that the European Space Agency's head of mission had demanded the Foreign Ministry to confiscate all papers on the table.
This conference was a missed chance in several respects. The US and Britain failed to send any delegates. Several US allies attended only with second and third level beaurocrats. To make things worse, the conference organization was such to confirm the boycott and frustrate many well-meaning participants, most of whom had come to exchange scientific and technical information.
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