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FIDE-REFORM Open letter to the President of FIDE & current leadership
========================================== The following are our sincere recommendations that we submit for voluntary implementation. If we do not hear from you within one week from today, we may lobby for wider support. All correspondence may be sent to this email address: kv.s@12move.nl. For reasons of privacy, others supporting our initiative will remain (for the moment) in the background.
Our forwarding address: Yours sincerely, Kaarlo Schepel ===================================== The New Clothes of the Emperor (version 2004)
Mr President, Ladies and Gentlemen, Usquert (the Netherlands), 13th of August 2004 We wish to introduce ourselves as a group of concerned chess players from around the world, who have followed Fide for over 25 years. We do not seek power, but we strongly suggest you study our well-considered advice. After monitoring and evaluation of the functioning of Fide especially for the past two years, we have collectively come to the conclusion that Fide is doomed unless it is reformed. Both as a business unit and as a representative organisation of voluntary member federations, Fide is using models that have been outmoded and outdated for a long time. The Soviet Union and its satellites collapsed about 15 years ago, because they did not change with the times. Most developing countries only have survived at a price since 1990 with the aid of the IMF and the World Bank, as a result of arbitrary policies and often taken on emotional grounds by politicians, not by technocrats or based on economics. Multi-nationals and major corporations run by CEOs with poor managements skills and not properly supervised by a Board of Directors have been going out of business for the last 15 years because they did not respond to the more competitive international business environment, and to international marketing changes and challenges. Fide is in danger of going under for the same reasons. It must change or die. Without prejudice we state: We have studied the Fide Handbook, and cannot find anywhere that Fide must rely on the largesse of one man, nor that all major issues should be decided by the same person. Basically the latter policy has been the case for over 20 years, and the former for nine years. This model has only served the interests of a small circle of chess politicians, almost ignoring the following categories that keep OUR GREAT GAME of chess alive: Professional chess players; Amateur chess players active as club managers ; Publishers of chess magazines and chess books, chess writers and chess journalists; Scholastic, qualified teachers who derive at least 50% of their income from chess; Manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers (i.e. shop-keepers) and internet sellers of chess books, basic chess materials and internet related chess equipment; (and very important) Private and public sponsors who do not agree with the way Fide and the WC cycle is run. We feel that many of these have had good reasons to consider (or actually) abandoning Fide, because their needs are not met. Continuing on the current path is a prescription for disaster. We demand that those who allowed the current system to be introduced, supported and maintained take responsibility. We strongly suggest immediate remedial action incorporating all or most of our reasonable ideas. If Fide were to be a viable business it
would be arranged into departments, so that we would have the following
committees. Each of them must have three six year budgets and specific
goals to meet: Even grown men occasionally believe in fairy-tales. But like all fairy-tales, the current one - that unlimited funds will be provided in exchange for loyalty has a beginning, a middle and an end. We never believed that all funds would be given without strings. Our reading has always been that the President (whose specific responsibility it is to find the funds) underwrote Fide for the next three years, starting in 1995. We now call on His Excellency (as per Prague agreement) to indeed officially announce that he will underwrite the match Kasparov - Kasimdzhanov, and the final match of the winner vs. the winner of Kramnik Leko. We then call on the Presidential Board, the Executive Board and the General Assembly in Mallorca to voluntarily implement our suggested Reform (below). And we call on all to assist us in running honest and fair elections for a new Fide President, an Executive Director and the new Presidential Board who will accede to their changed task in November 2005. The new Business Model has been proposed above. The new organisational model is closely linked to this but will not work unless the following overdue changes are passed by the General Assembly: (a) The World Championship Cycle (Zonals, Interzonals, Candidate matches, Semi-Finals and WC match) a major source of income of Fide, at classical time-controls, are reintroduced in 2005. (b) Member nations that do not show, do not vote. Absentee ballots are abolished. (c) Member nations that have not shown at Fide Congresses since Elista 1998 until today lose their voting rights and get observer status. Only when they appear at two successive Congresses and show a notarised, certified statement that they have 250 paying members, are they readmitted as full members. (d) A new weighted voting system is to be introduced that credits the actual number of members of each federation. We suggest differentiation between member federations that have e.g. (i) less than 100, (ii) resp. 2,000 members; (iii) less than 10,000 (iv) resp. less than 25,000 members; (v) less than 75,000 (vi) resp. less than 250,000 members; (vii) less than or (viii) more than 1 million members. Subject to negotiation, these should therefore receive a different number of votes. (e) The position of the Fide President becomes ceremonial, to be compared with that of the German and Italian Presidents, the Chancellor in a major university or of a King or Queen in a constitutional monarchy. The power for daily affairs lies with the Executive Director and his staff who take their direct instructions from the General Assembly and the Executive Board. (f) A Security Council is to be installed with veto-rights if three permanent members object. Details in the longer proposal (upon request, sometime next week). This Council will function as a Board of Directors would in a major corporation. (g) The President of the ACP (currently Joel Lautier) should get an automatic place on the Presidential Board, and can discuss in this body matters relating to the World Championship Cycle on behalf of chess professionals on basis of equality with the Executive Director. (h) The Conflict of Interest issue in Fide has to be addressed a.s.a.p. by a written code of conduct. (i) The President and the Executive Director are elected in the future for one term only of four years, which can be extended for reasons of excellence by two years, but only with a 2/3 majority vote in the Fide Congress. (j) A minimum of 10% of the Fide budget is to be invested annually into scholastic chess, i.e. the Chess-in-Schools program and CACDEC. At least two of the available multi-lingual certification programs for scholastic chess are to be ratified and offered to all member federations (at cost). The aim is to expand organised chess players worldwide to 15 million members, and those with a basic knowledge of chess to 500 million. Sponsorship desperately depends on these moderate goals. (k) Each traditional chess nation from Europe & North-America adopts a minimum of one developing nation to nurture our logo Gens Una Sumus. (l) The Anti-Doping Regulations introduced on 01 August are suspended until further notice. (m) The Presidential Board engages in the future in an active dialogue with internet groups on policy, so that public opinion within chess is harnessed for support. (n) The deal with Fide Commerce is renegotiated. Kaarlo Schepel spokesperson for the Action Committee for a Democratic FIDE
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