Nevine El-Aref finds out who UNESCO's new director- general really is After winning 31 out of 58 executive board- member votes, the Sofia-born Bulgarian ambassador to France and permanent delegate to UNESCO, Irina Bokova, was named director - general of the organisation on Tuesday, beating Egyptian culture minister Farouk Hosni to the prestigious position. After the UN General Assembly endorses her appointment, Bokova will take over from the current director Koichiro Matsuura, a Japanese diplomat -- becoming the first woman, and the first Eastern European, ever to hold this post. Born in 1952 to a well-off family, many of whose members held important positions in Bulgaria, Bokova came of age during the Cold War, studying at both the Moscow Institute of International Relations and the School of Public Affairs in the University of Maryland, USA. On graduation Bokova immediately joined the Bulgarian foreign ministry, first joining UN staff in 1982. In 1996, following the shift from communism to democracy, she ran for the position of Bulgarian vice president but was not initially elected. It took her five years to return to politics with a vengeance, not only becoming vice-president but also playing an instrumental role in the negotiations preceding Bulgaria's entry into NATO and the EU. Her own success story seems a fitting example of her vision for UNESCO, in which gender equality features more heavily. In her address to the executive board, Bokova said she would work towards UNESCO making a greater investment in these areas. On Tuesday Bokova told the media that the competition had been a "friendly match... Mr. Hosni and I became friends during the campaign. He was the first to greet me for my victory. I am very happy, I am happy and a little tired, as it was a long campaign, and the five- round election exhausted me, but I am very happy," she said. She added that the electoral contest had dimensions beyond the competition as such: "The organisation needs reforms and some of them have been already started but there is a need to make it more efficient and less bureaucratic... UNESCO is part of the UN system and we have to join the efforts of all organisations in this system and work in one direction." Speaking on the telephone from the UNESCO headquarters in Paris Bokova told Al-Ahram Weekly that she is grateful for Hosni's support. "During the campaign, Hosni and me, we developed friendly relations and pledged that regardless of whoever wins, we will continue to work together." She agreed that being the first woman from the former Eastern Bloc to win this post marks a development on the world stage, explaining that she remains a typical representative of her generation of eastern Europeans who lived through the bipolar period. "We did not choose it," she said. "I think the importance is not that this generation has lived in different systems, but the importance is that they lived through this historic change, which liberated the spirit of millions of people and forced them to make enormous efforts and sacrifices in order to transform our society and we are still in the process." Her conviction is that "to some extent it gave us a lot of advantages to understand better what it is we talk about when we talk about human rights, human dignity, transformation, reform, crisis, the necessity of investing education in order to make progress in culture and tolerance." She pointed out that coming from southeastern Europe, the site of so much conflict in that last decade, gives her a different perspective on some issues and more opportunity to engage with and endorse cultural dialogue. In the process of being elected, Bokova said, she worked ceaselessly with her team, benefiting from the support of the Bulgarian president, government and diplomatic service to communicate her vision for UNESCO. "During the campaign I visited 45 countries, eight UNESCO bureaus, the World Bank -- trying to pass the message. I believe in the role of UNESCO... I worked with many people and I am very happy to realise that my message got through and I think that this is the reason behind my victory." The view that a possible campaign against Hosni in the Western press may have tilted the balance in Bokova's favour has been widely expressed since, with commentators citing Western journalists who referred to a statement made by Hosni a year ago to the effect that, had he found Israeli books published by the Ministry of Culture, he would have personally burned them. This was the subject of a recent France 24 television interview in which Bokova responded openly to the question of whether she received covert support from Washington: " I was really intensively concentrated on my own work and I have never involved myself in what other candidates are doing. I do believe that we won because we were good and did a good campaign... We passed a very positive message to the whole world... I was given the support of the majority of the executive council not because of the mistakes of somebody else but because we did a very good job." She was Bulgaria's candidate, she added, not the US's; until the third round she had competition from both Europe and the US. "Obtaining 31 votes means that I got the support of a large number of countries from different regions: Asia, Africa, Latin America and of course Europe... During meetings of the EU circle of ambassadors, we have discussed many times the work of UNESCO and the necessity of providing better management, better visibility, better performance for the different sectors of the organisation." Bokova thanked the EU ambassadors for their support, singling out the Austrian diplomat Benita Ferrero-Waldner, another candidate for the job who chose to withdraw and make way for Bokova, calling her from New York to congratulate her on Tuesday. " Ferrero-Waldner's withdrawal gave me more opportunity to win the post," Bokova said, adding that Ferrero-Waldner is highly respected in Bulgaria since she received the highest Bulgarian honour for contributing to the return of four Bulgarian nurses detained in Libya in 2007. Bokova is "a friend of the Arab world's", she said in the course of the same interview, even if her appointment prevents an Arab candidate from playing an international role; the entire world should pool its efforts to facilitate the work of the organisation, to the benefit of the entire world. Bokova described Bulgaria as a multicultural and multiethnic country where creeds coexist in peace. Her hometown in the southwest, she said, is 80-percent Muslim. "I never believed in the theory of the clash between civilisations. On the contrary, all along my professional life as a diplomat and a politician, I never believed in such division and I don't believe that it happened now. UNESCO is a universal organisation, I hope we can move on and bring UNESCO to a different level of importance as to the dialogue of cultures and the message of tolerance. UNESCO was born in the spirit of bringing a message of tolerance of humanism and diversity after the Second World War." Yet within Bulgaria itself, some feel that Bokova's communist past makes her unqualified for UNESCO leadership; many Bulgarians are unhappy with former leaders of the Communist Party resuming positions of power. Speaking on the national radio the Bulgarian blogger Ivo Indzhev said, "Those who dislike communism in this country are not happy about her promotion. For people in this region, her appointment sends the message that the West can swallow someone's communist past very easily but can't abide an Arab who is anti-Israel." In a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article entitled "Why the UNESCO Election is a scandal", Bulgarian-German writer Ilija Trojanow described Bokova's election as an example of how even 20 years after the collapse of communism, the same figures are still in power. Trojanow's article focuses on pertinent moments in Bokova's biography: the fact that her father was a member of the Politburo of the Bulgarian Communist Party, which gave Bokova privileges such as studying at the International Relations Institute in Moscow. Children should not be punished for the sins of their parents, he goes on, but that does not justify the "clan politics" that inform Bulgarian public life, with former Prime Minister Sergey Stanishev for example another Politburo member, or the father of former Chief Prosecutor Nikola Filchev a secret service agent in charge of concentration camps. Bokova has yet to denounce the crimes of the Bulgrian communist regime. "The new Director General of UNESCO belongs to a small, powerful clique, which has ruined Bulgaria, and is only playing a game of democracy, as long as its privileges are not taken away. Two GULAG-survivors from Bulgaria declared that Bokova's election was shameful to all of us." Abiding legacy Ahmad Mahmoud reviews the history of UNESCO "The truth," said former UNESCO Director General Federico Mayor, speaking in Paris in 1995, "is that any history begins when human beings draw on their knowledge of the past in order to better understand the present and look ahead to the future, when they come to realise that they must look into the facts, events and trends that have prefigured their own era. It is only when their background and their links with the past are brought to light that the present ceases to be incomprehensible, gratuitous and meaningless." The statement sounds particularly interesting in the light of the circumstances in which UNESCO came into being. It was in the course of an Allied Ministers of Education meeting in 1942, while the Nazi threat raged on, that the Western powers began to ask how they might rebuild educational systems once security was established. The ideas they came up with quickly developed into a major project whose plans included in the entire world, and in a conference held in London in 1-16 November 1945, directly after the end of the war, representatives of the Allied powers declared the establishment of an organisation that would promote a culture of peace and help prevent the disasters of war, based on the recommendations of the 1942 meeting. The purpose of the organisation was eventually defined in those terms: "to contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among nations through education, science and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms which are affirmed for the peoples of the world, without distinction of race, sex, language or religion, by the Charter of the United Nations." A total of 37 states signed the constitution, with 20 states becoming official members once it started being implemented in 1946: Australia, Brazil, Turkey, Czechoslovakia, the Dominican Republic, South Africa, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, China, France, Canada, Lebanon, Egypt, Mexico, the UK, Norway, New Zealand, India, the US and Greece, with the first convention held in Paris, in the English language, in 19 November -10 December 1946 and bringing together the representatives of 37 states with the right to vote. Japan and West Germany joined in 1951 (East Germany would not join until 1972, with the two members becoming one following unification in 1990), Spain in 1953, the Soviet Union (to become the Russian Union in 1992) in 1954. In 1960, 19 African states joined the organisation, and in the period 1991-1993, 12 former Soviet states became members in their own right. UNESCO regulations require the election of a new director general every six years (with a possible second lasting only four years). Koichiro Matsuura was elected to the post in 1999 and reelected in 2005. UNESCO's director generals since establishment Julian Huxley (1887-1975) United Kingdom, 1946 - 1948 Born in 1887. Zoologist but also philosopher, educator and writer. He played a leading part in the creation of UNESCO. The pamphlet he published on taking up office, UNESCO, Its purpose and Its philosophy, aroused impassioned but constructive controversy at the time. For almost twenty years (1950-1969) he was Vice-President of the International Commission for the History of the Scientific and Cultural Development of Mankind, and was particularly active in establishing a number of major non-governmental organizations. He died in1975. Jaime Torres Bodet (1902-1974) Mexico, 1948 - 1952 Born in 1903. Head of the Libraries Department of the Ministry of Education from 1922 to 1924 before being appointed Professor of French Literature at the University of Mexico City. In 1929, he joined the diplomatic service, in which he occupied various posts in Europe. Under-secretary for Foreign Affairs (1940-1943) then Minister of Education (1943-1946), in which capacity he launched a campaign on an unprecedented scale to combat illiteracy. Appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1946, he had the previous year led the Mexican delegation to the London conference establishing UNESCO. Appointed Director-General in 1948, he resigned four years later. He died in 1974. 1952 - 1953 (acting DG) John W. Taylor, United States John Wilkinson Taylor (1906 -- 2001) was a U.S. educator. He was President of the University of Louisville from 1947 to 1949. He served as the acting director general of UNESCO between 1952 and 1953, following the resignation of Jaime Torres Bodet. Vittorino Veronese (1910-1986) Italy, 1958 - 1961 Born in 1910. Doctor in Law and an anti-fascist lawyer, he quickly took an interest in social and educational problems and international co-operation. After the collapse of Fascism he took up a senior post in banking and became Secretary- General, and subsequently Chairman of the Catholic Institute for Social activity and of Italy's Catholic Action (1944-1952). Member of UNESCO's Executive Board from 1952 to 1956 and its Chairman from 1956 to 1958, he was appointed Director-General in 1958 but resigned on health grounds in 1961. He died in 1986. René Maheu (1905-1975) France, 1962 - 1974 (acting 1959, 1961-1962) Born in 1905. Professor of Philosophy. Cultural Attaché in London (1936-1939). After teaching in Morocco (1940-1942) he occupied a managerial post in the France-Afrique press agency in Algiers, before joining the Executive Office of the Resident-General in Rabat. In 1946 he entered UNESCO as Chief, Division of Free Flow of Information. In 1949 Jaime Torres Bodet appointed him Director of his Executive Office. In 1954 he became Assistant Director-General and was UNICCO's representative at UN Headquarters from 1955 to 1958. Promoted Deputy Director-General in 1959, Acting Director- General in 1961, and in 1962 Director-General, for two successive mandates. He died in 1975. Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow (1921-) Senegal, 1974 - 1987 Born in 1921. After completing his higher education in Paris, he taught history and geography in Senegal, where he directed basic education from 1952 to 1957. Minister of Education and Culture during his country's transitional period of internal autonomy (1957-1958), he resigned in order to engage in the struggle for independence. After this had been achieved, he became Minister of Education (1966-1968) and then of Cultural and Youth Affairs (1968-1970) and was a member of the National Assembly of Senegal. Elected to the Executive Board in 1966, he became Assistant Director-General for Education in 1970. Appointed Director-General in 1974, he was reappointed for a second term of office in 1980. Federico Mayor (1934-) Spain, 1987 - 1999 Born in 1934. PhD in Pharmacy. Director of the Severo Ochoa Molecular Biology Centre (Madrid, 1973-1978). Under- secretary of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (1974-1976). A member of Parliament and Chairman of the Parliamentary Commission for Education and Science (1977- 1978) he later became Adviser to the Prime Minister on these questions. Minister of Education and Science (1981-1982), in 1987 he was elected a Member of the European Parliament. After being Deputy Director-General of UNESCO from 1978 to 1981, he returned to the Organization as Special Adviser to the Director-General (1983-1984), whom he succeeded in 1987. Koïchiro Matsuura (1937-) Japan, 1999 - Koïchiro Matsuura of Japan was appointed by the Organization's General Conference on November 12 1999 to serve a six-year term as Director-General of UNESCO. Mr Matsuura, born in Tokyo in 1937, served as Ambassador of Japan to France from 1994 to 1999. He was educated at the Law Faculty of the University of Tokyo and at the Faculty of Economics of Haverford College (Pennsylvania, U.S.A.) and began his diplomatic career in 1959. Posts held by Mr. Matsuura include those of Director-General of the Economic Co- operation Bureau of Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1988); Director-General of the North American Affairs Bureau, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1990); Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs. He also served as the Chairperson of UNESCO's World Heritage Committee for one year, until November 1999.
