NO.176-2
Meguro UNESCO Short News
Unesco's Fat Gets a Trim And Reform Is in the Air
By BARBARA CROSSETTE Sunday International Section UNITED NATIONS, March
5.2000.
In the family of United Nations agencies, Unesco has long been the spoiled
child. The top jobs -- in Paris, no less -- were invariably cushy and easy
to get with a little political pull. Reformers anxious to curb the selfish
traits of this wayward offspring came and went without a trace.
When a new director general with new ideas, Koichiro Matsuura of Japan,
was elected last fall, he thought he knew quite a bit about how bad things
were. He had been Japan's ambassador in Paris for five years and chairman
of Unesco's World Heritage Committee.
"But I discovered once I was inside that the mismanagement was much
more serious than I had anticipated -- a lot of arbitrary appointments,
arbitrary promotions," he said in an interview. His office alone had
20 politically appointed advisers hired without professional screening.
They were soon dismissed.
Mr. Matsuura, a lawyer and economist who graduated from Haverford College
in 1961 after four years at Tokyo University, made tough speeches to the
board of the agency -- formally the United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization -- and to its staff.
He opened a Web site for complaints from the 2,500 employees.
"I discovered that there were a lot of people more demoralized than
I had anticipated," he said. "Rewards to the undeserving, not
to those who deserved them -- that was a common theme." He found that
some departments had refused to meet with outside auditors, and in-house
auditing systems were "weak, almost nonexistent."
Mr. Matsuura, 62, a veteran diplomat who is fluent in English, French and
Spanish, succeeded Federico Mayor Zaragoza of Spain. Mr. Mayor is blamed
for acquiescing to many political appointments demanded by member nations
but won praise in his two-year term above all for squashing Unesco's efforts
to develop a "new international information order," which many
nations saw as an attempt to regulate or muzzle the press.
In 1984, the information proposal and mismanagement at the top of the organization
prompted the United States to withdraw from Unesco. Britain and Singapore
followed suit, but Britain went back in 1997 under Prime Minister Tony
Blair. President Clinton told Unesco in 1995 that he was prepared to restore
American membership, but administration officials say there is no money
to rejoin.
Mr. Matsuura hopes to tempt the United States back in with a reform plan
he says he will put in place this spring.
David Malone, president of the International Peace Academy in New York
and a former Canadian Foreign Ministry official in charge of relations
with international agencies, is skeptical.
"I think Matsuura faces an uphill battle in turning around an organization
which is deeply scarred," he said.
"The problem of Unesco is that successive heads have turned it into
a personal patronage machine, neglecting programs and bloating the staffing,"
Mr. Malone said. "We used to all know what the Unesco objectives were.
Now nobody knows what Unesco does beyond the World Heritage sites. The
important work is on literacy, education, key cultural monuments and themes,
and serving as a forum for the promotion of high scientific standards.
Who ever consults Unesco now on science?"
Mr. Matsuura is the first Asian to head Unesco, which was established in
1946. Since then, Mr. Matsuura said, the world has changed "and we
must evolve with it." He says Unesco, with a largely Europeanized
view of culture -- more than half of the 630 World Heritage sites are in
Europe -- needs to extend more help to the poorer nations that also want
to save their historical artifacts and natural sites and cultures not necessarily
covered by the current convention governing world heritage.
"We cannot be simply content with promoting intellectual cooperation
among developed nations, without paying attention to the needs of developing
nations," Mr. Matsuura said. "The convention only covers tangible
things. It does not cover intangibles like craftsmanship, music, tradition
and languages."
Unesco was founded to promote peace through knowledge and communication,
Mr. Matsuura said, and he is planning to interpret that in very concrete
ways. Unesco has already been involved in projects as diverse as restoring
colonial Havana and recreating a traditional silk industry in Cambodia.
Mr. Matsuura is making a big push into education. He has been asked by
Bolivia to help create a higher education system, and Haiti is seeking
advice on all levels of schooling. But the biggest job will be Nigeria,
where President Olusegun Obasanjo is asking Unesco to design a basic school
system. "There is a country of 120 million people," hesaid, "and
their education is in shambles."