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Al-Ahram Weekly 21 - 27 October 1999 Issue No. 452 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 21 - 27 October 1999 Issue No. 452
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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The pen may be mightier than the sword, but as far as the contest over UNESCO's new director general is concerned, it's money that seems to hold the upper hand. Al-Ahram Weekly, in Paris and Cairo, follows the unsavoury battle
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters New departures for UNESCO?
By Daniel RobertsonAs Al-Ahram Weekly went to press the results of the second round of voting for the new director-general of UNESCO were known. As expected, the Japanese candidate Koichiro Matsuura had emerged the clear winner with 27 of the possible votes cast, with Ghazi Al-Qoseibi following with ten, Ismail Serageldin with four and Gareth Evans, an outsider candidate supported by various European and English-speaking countries also gaining six votes. This meant that the executive board of the organisation would meet again for further rounds of voting until a clear winner emerged.
Reports indicated that the voting had been along standard lines and in accordance with the kind of diplomatic manoeuvring that has so marked this election, despite the hopes of UNESCO's founders that such activities would play no part in the life of the organisation. Though voting was of course carried out by secret ballot, reports in the Paris press indicated that countries in the Arab/Islamic world had voted for the Saudi candidate, that those in the developing world, perhaps with half an eye on Japanese funds, had given their votes to the Japanese candidate, and that Sweden and several African states had voted for Ismail Serageldin.
Paris for its part had given its vote to the Japanese candidate, since, according to a number of reports in the French press, President Jacques Chirac had given his personal undertaking to the emperor of Japan that France would be voting for Matsuura. The one surprise was that Egypt had reportedly voted for its national Serageldin, and not for Al-Qoseibi as had been widely anticipated. This might be considered a breach of protocol (see the accompanying article 'May the best man win').
However, in truth the elections for UNESCO director-general have featured many possible breaches of protocol, with various diplomats and officials regularly being quoted in the press professing themselves shocked by various irregularities in the campaign. And for its part the austere French daily Le Monde, which usually aims for a certain hauteur where such things are concerned, commented that the conduct of the election campaign had, once again, put UNESCO's future in doubt.
Koichiro Motsoura
Gareth Evans
Ghazi El-Qosebi
Ismail Serageldin
"What has filtered through of the conduct of the campaign for this post over the past few months will have done nothing to restore the image of this decried institution," the paper wrote. "Candidates excluded from running from the start, without their names even being made public... Japanese lobbying so obvious as to be shocking even in an institution that does not have the reputation as a model of probity... pressure from Saudi Arabia, the sole object of which seems to have been to prevent another Arab candidate from gaining the post... Nothing at this stage would lead one to think that one was at the dawn of a new departure for UNESCO."
That UNESCO was, however, in serious need of a new departure the paper went on to underline. After the debacle of the mid 1980s, when the United Kingdom, Singapore and the United States withdrew from the organisation in protest at alleged financial mismanagement and 'communist infiltration', the two six-year terms of office of the organisation's present director general, the Spaniard Federico Mayor, which began in 1987 and end on 15 November, have been given over to trying to restore UNESCO's fortunes. New management plans have been adopted, decentralisation enthusiastically pursued and a major new programme, 'The Culture of Peace', which bore Mayor's personal imprint, launched.
This campaign has had some undeniable results, one of which having been the British government's decision to rejoin the organisation in 1997, and another being a steadily increasing budget and range of initiatives to follow the black years of the late 1980s when the sudden withdrawal of US funds seriously damaged UNESCO's ability to present itself as a major player in its stated fields of competence.
Nevertheless, Mayor's legacy has been ambiguous, and the new director general of the organisation will have to contend with a kind of sometimes none-too-gentle mockery of the institution that has been apparent in the Paris papers since the summer, perhaps born of long experience of its foibles. Le Monde, for example, though it set out in its even-handed way the challenges facing the organisation in the new millennium, nevertheless could not resist the temptation to give a largely negative verdict on Mayor's stewardship.
As far as the present election is concerned, the most sensational intervention in the whole campaign has been that which appeared in the left-of-centre French newspaper Liberation on 16 August. This article, signed by the Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun and the Egyptian sociologist Mahmoud Hussein attacked Al-Qoseibi's candidature and supported that of Serageldin. Entitled 'Let us avoid the shipwreck of UNESCO', the authors announced that in their view Al-Qoseibi's candidature was unacceptable since he was "a civil servant of a state that has not signed the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights," a comment that subsequently led to furious debate, and not only in the French press.
Tomorrow the name of one candidate will go forward to the assembled member states of the UNESCO general conference for approval. As Le Monde put it last week, that candidate will have the formidable task of "defining a strategy better adapted to the time, as well as programmes that follow from that strategy and human resources that are adapted to them".
However, UNESCO's future will not only be the concern of its new director general, the paper went on to say, "since, like the entire United Nations system, UNESCO is an inter-governmental organisation, and its destiny depends in the final analysis on the will of those states that make it up, beginning with that of the most powerful among them" -- perhaps a reference to the continuing absence of the United States from among UNESCO's member states.
