Irina Bokova only seemed to have an outside chance until the campaign run by the favourite was derailed
THE BACKROOM intrigue behind the election of a new director general at Unesco rarely stirs much interest outside the corridors of the agency’s headquarters in Paris. But the acrimonious contest that ended last September with the Bulgarian Irina Bokova becoming the first woman to head the UN’s cultural, educational and scientific agency offered the sort of drama that the world’s media could not resist.
Bokova (57), an experienced diplomat and former foreign minister, was given little more than an outside chance until the campaign run by the favourite for the job, Egyptian culture minister Farouk Hosni, derailed in a fraught row over censorship and book burning.
As the race reached its denouement, Hosni came under attack for a remark he made in the past about being willing to burn Israeli books. The septuagenarian painter insisted his comment had been taken out of context, but amid condemnation from Jewish groups – as well as unease from some Arabs who were critical of book censorship in Egypt – member states turned to Bokova as a consensus figure.
Sitting in her office in Unesco’s colossal headquarters in Paris, Bokova says she is confident that the rancour of last autumn is “behind us”. She and Hosni are friends, she points out, and one of her first foreign trips as Unesco director general was to Egypt, where Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak gave her a warm welcome. “We had extremely friendly talks, and I got all the support of Egypt,” she says.
After her success in the Unesco election, Bokova’s own past came in for some close scrutiny. Some Bulgarians pointed to the fact that her father was a key figure in the Bulgarian Communist Party and that she was educated at Moscow’s State Institute of International Relations, arguing that a former member of the communist elite was not qualified to lead the UN’s agency for culture and education.
Bokova, a polished speaker of five languages known for her conciliatory instinct and work on arms control, rejects the criticism.
“Sometimes it’s said I was a militant communist,” she says. “I never was. I was a diplomat. Of course in Bulgaria everyone was a member of the Communist Party, but that’s something else. There was no choice.”
Her father broke with the communist leadership in the mid-1970s, Bokova says, while she credits her stint as a student in Moscow in the 1970s with having opened up the world to her. “At that time, life in Moscow was very much more open than it was in Bulgaria,” she says. “I had the good fortune to be there at that time.”
In her new job, Bokova directs a UN agency with a huge remit and a relatively low profile. Once referred to as “the UN’s brain”, Unesco is charged with advancing aims such as peace, security and human rights by promoting international collaboration through education, science and culture. Although it has a comparatively modest budget, its projects range from the tsunami alert system and a global digital library to protecting the world’s patrimony and research on water supplies. One of her priorities in office, Bokova says, will be tackling the rates of worldwide illiteracy, particularly among women and girls. “There are 760 million people who are illiterate in the world – two-thirds are women and girls,” she says. “If we give the ability to read and write to a man, that’s great. But if we give the ability to read and write to a woman, we give that education to a whole family, because a woman who is educated encourages her children much more.”
While Bokova values Unesco’s role as an intellectual and moral authority, she hopes to improve its ability to make its presence felt in the world, which means “working with governments on the ground to transfer our ideas and our policies”. In her analysis, previous criticism of Unesco – that its remit is so broad and diverse – has been weakened by the emergence of issues such as global warming. While the agency might not have a role in negotiating carbon emissions reductions, for example, many of its interests – biodiversity, water and natural reserves – are critical to the climate-change debate.
“Our mandate is at the heart of globalisation . . . What was once a challenge – having responsibility for these broad sectors – has now become our advantage.”