BY WALTER ELLIOTT
NEWARK – New Jersey’s largest city appears to be finishing 2023 like it had started the year – with a problem related to Sister Cities International.
When Councilman Luis Quintana received SCI’s 2023 Membership Directory, he noticed that Newark, and its partnerships with 15 other international cities, were left out. He asked Municipal Clerk Kecia Daniels to call the Washington, DC-based organization.
Quintana, at the Dec. 6 Municipal Council meeting, said that SCI told Daniels and the councilman that Newark had not paid its annual dues, currently at $1,380, for 14 years.
“I want to thank her (Daniels) for that because, if not, we would’ve been thinking we had the sister cities program,” said Newark’s longest tenured councilman at the meeting. “They said it was because we hadn’t paid our dues.”
Quintana, as chairman of the council’s international relations commission, had been a SCI member since 1994. President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the organization to promote cultural and educational relations among participating cities in the US and around the world.
Newark had been a sister city to 15 others among nine countries – from Azerbaijan to Portugal.
It announced a sister cities agreement with the southern Ghanaian city of Kumasi in 2017. An artist from the Ashanti region city created a 4,000-square-foot mural above 2 Treat Place on July 30.
A 2021 sister city agreement with San Sebastian, Puerto Rico led to the creation of a 500-foot-long mural on Mt. Prospect Avenue by 2nd Avenue.
Newark was last caught off guard when its city administration signed a cultural exchange agreement with “The United States of ShriKailasa” on Jan. 12 – until Mayor Ras Baraka revoked it Jan. 18.
The city had been “catfished,” for Kailasa does not exist.
Although founder Swami Nithyananda proclaimed its creation Dec. 3, 2019, Ecuadorian officials said they never sold the island off their west coast to him. Ecuador does not recognize Kailasa, nor does it assist the swami and his government.
News of the Newark-Shri Kailasa pact and revocation circulated in various Indian and Asian websites and publications. Nithyananda and his “ambassadors” had pulled a similar “agreement” with the Cleveland, Ohio suburb of South Euclid in 2008 and been seeking UN recognition since 2019.
“We can’t bring Sister Cities Int’l into an issue where there’s such controversy,” said Quintana at the time. He was urging stricter vetting of future prospective cities.
Quintana is now asking the city to hit the reset button and take inventory of its until recent sister cities.
“We’re going to gather all these sister city programs that we’ve established and look at which ones are important – which ones we’re going to put in the directory,” said Quintana. “Again, I was very embarrassed.”
That inventory taking includes Rio de Janeiro and four other Brazilian cities, two in Portugal and one each in Azerbaijan, The Bahamas, Cameroon, the People’s Republic of China, Gambia, Ghana, Liberia and Nigeria.
The inventory on the 2017 SCI directory does not include a later exchange agreement with Taoyuan, Taipei-Republic of China.
That 2017 directory also lists Montclair, Manasquan, New Brunswick and Toms Rivers as fellow participating New Jersey cities. The 2023 directory, however, keeps New Brunswick and replaces the other cities with Highlands and Point Pleasant Beach.
Montclair had exchange agreements with four other international cities – including Cherepovets, Russia. Montclair Mayor Sean Spiller, in a March 13, 2022 letter to his counterpart of the Vologda region city, said he was considering “pausing” their relationship for the duration of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Most of the other 67 SCI cities who had agreements with Russian cities – including Chicago, Dallas and Des Moines – have paused or suspended their agreements. A few, like Gainesville, Fla., have kept their agreements in place.
SCI participating cities, in the current directory, have 37 agreements with Russian cities. 26 with Israeli cities and five in the “Palestinian Territories.”
