Mark Fettes

Mark Fettes during the 100th World Congress of Esperanto, Lille (France), 2015
President of World Esperanto Association
In office 2013–2019
Preceded by	Probal Dasgupta

Mark Fettes is an Esperantist and university professor of education, who has been since 2013 President of the World Esperanto Association, known by its Esperanto initials as UEA.

Fettes worked from October 1986 until January 1992 in the UEA central office as editor of the monthly magazine Esperanto. In this period he also re-established the UEA's public relations section; he has become known as a speaker and organizer. In 1990 he wrote an essay on the theme "One language for Europe," which won an award from the European Union Studies Association and later appeared as an official Esperanto document in several languages.

At the 77th World Congress in Vienna he was elected as a UEA board member, and in 1994 he accepted the position of Secretary-General after the resignation of British Esperantist Ian Jackson. He was re-elected as Secretary-General the following year, but in 1996 he resigned that post in favour of Italian Esperantist Michela Lipari, although he remained a board member until 1998. At the 81st World Congress in Prague, he launched the Prague Manifesto, a multilingual document which emphasizes democratic communication, language rights, preservation of language diversity and effective language education. Fettes also organized the first Nitobe symposium, organized as an homage to the Japanese author, educator and diplomat Nitobe Inazō; the symposium's proceedings later appeared in the book Al lingva demokratio ("Towards linguistic democracy").

In 1992 he became an editor of the Esperanto magazine Monato, with a column La monda vilaĝo ("The global village"), a position he held till 1995. Fettes began working with the Esperantic Studies Foundation (ESF) in 1995 and became its first director-general in 2000. In April 2001 he organized a seminar on Esperanto and education in Arlington, Virginia, part of the Washington, D.C. conurbation. The colloquium led to the creation of two educational website projects — edukado.net and lernu.net.