You can find the relevant documents in the chronology to the right.

Here are some thoughts from me and other people I discussed with.

The Boy Scouts of America are complaining about the governance of World Scouting, which the Secretary General shares with the World Scout Committee (elected from the World Scout Conference), and for this reason in mid-October they decided to stop paying their fees to the World Organization of the Scout Movement until the current Secretary General is not removed. The Swedish scout organization took the same decision. Since Americans and Swedes have de-facto control over the World Scout Foundation, they have made it suspended its contribution to the World Scout Bureau, too, with the same motivation, but without an explicit demand for the resignation of the Secretary General.

The unexpected loss of American fees and of the contribution of the World Scout Foundation (which paradoxically was instituted many years ago exactly in order to prevent excessive economic dependency of World Scouting from any single source) is depriving the World Scout Bureau of 40% of its total budget.

Without those resources World Scouting cannot operate and it is foreseen that without an alternative contribution of the same amount, the World Scout Bureau will cease operations before January. It would be impossible to hold the World Scout Conference planned for July 2008 in Korea, even though that Conference would be the right place to discuss and clarify all different opinions, in true Scout spirit, and to solve any internal controversy in the World Scout Movement.

Just a few months have passed since the World Scout Committee unanimously renewed its confidence to the Secretary General, based on a periodic evaluation of his acts. Wayne Perry, International Commissioner of the Boy Scouts of America, was among those who approved it. However, faced with economic blackmail, the same World Scout Committee, meeting in Cairo on November 12 to respond to the emergency, could be forced to sacrifice the Secretary General, in order to assure the continuity of the operations of the World Scout Bureau.

However, this would not just affect the Secretary General; they would also be forced to sacrifice the democracy and the principles of good citizenship that have constituted for a century the aim of the scout programme as delivered to hundreds of millions of young people through the Scout method, let alone the independence of  the World Scout Movement. Moreover, there is no guarantee that economic coercion could never be used again in the future to blackmail the World Scout Committee into undesirable actions.

The Sunrise Ceremony of August 1 seems so close… when millions of Scouts all over the world reaffirmed their Promise and their allegiance to the Scout Law and its values. What happened in the meanwhile?