PARIS Once attacked by many countries, including the United States, as ideological and inefficient, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization now plays an important role in many international ethical and social issues.

Koichiro Matsuura, the organization's director-general hopes that this and the extensive management changes he has carried out at Unesco, will persuade Washington to rejoin the organization, which it left in protest 17 years ago.

Two U.S. congressmen - Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, and Jim Leach, an Iowa Republican - are leading a bipartisan House campaign to rejoin.

A spokesman for Mr. Lantos said this was "now clearly in America's interest," since Washington pays on a voluntary basis for several of Unesco's programs on subjects such as literacy, preservation of culture and science education, but has no direct voice in how the agency is run.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 1999 called Unesco "an organization whose values we share, whose work we encourage and whose ranks we expect to rejoin." But whether this will happen depends on a reassessment of U.S. relations with the UN system being carried out by the Bush administration.

While other UN agencies, such as the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization, deal with specific scientific issues, Unesco grapples with some of the more intangible ethical and moral problems caused by the onrush of science and technology or the march of globalization.

The organization seeks ways to make knowledge universally accessible and preserve cultural diversity. For example, it has fought attempts to use patent law or copyright to claim ownership of discoveries about the human genome. It is involved in the fight against AIDS, contending that education is one of the most effective ways of stopping the disease.

Through its science division, the organization is coordinating efforts to ensure an adequate supply of fresh water and map ocean resources. It seeks to preserve human dignity by placing limits on experiments on the human genome. A Unesco convention, prohibiting human cloning for reproductive purposes, has been signed by 188 countries.

"We have to humanize the process of globalization," Mr. Matsuura said in an interview. "It is progressing very rapidly, particularly in financial and economic affairs, but it is bringing benefits only to a small number of people. I feel that Unesco must deal with these people who are not benefiting much from globalization."

He intends to do this primarily by attempting to make basic education available to every child and increase the opportunities for adult learning.

With only about 4 percent of the global population connected to the Internet, Mr. Matsuura acknowledges that putting a computer in every home is a distant dream. Nevertheless, a spokesman said, the organization wants to set up regional computing centers to bring the benefits of information technology to as many people as possible and break down the barriers between what it calls the "info-rich" and the "info-poor."

When Mr. Matsuura, then Japan's ambassador to France, was elected in 1999 with strong support from his government, he was largely an unknown quantity. Since then, the mild-mannered official has both pleased and shocked with the sweeping nature of the reorganization he has imposed at Unesco.

Out went dozens of senior officials promoted or appointed by his predecessor, Federico Mayor, a Spanish scientist. Mr. Matsuura is reducing the number of directors from nearly 200 when he took over, to about 50.

An international competition that attracted more than 300 candidates from outside the UN system for some posts is bringing in some surprising people to fill the positions of assistant directors-general immediately under Mr. Matsuura.

They include Sir John Daniel, the head of Britain's Open University, and Pierre Sane, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, whose task will be to provide scientific approaches to human and social problems like AIDS or ethnic and religious tensions.

Mr. Matsuura has appointed another recognized expert in distance learning, Abdul Waheed Khan, the rector of Indira Gandhi Open University in India, as assistant director-general for communication and information.

To preserve cultural diversity Mr. Matsuura wants to save the world's intangible treasures, such as song, dance and drama, from the onrush of globalization. Before becoming director-general, he headed Unesco's World Heritage program to save cultural assets as diverse as Venice and the Galapagos Islands for posterity.

Now Unesco is preparing a program that will enable specialists in endangered cultural activities to continue their work and pass on their skills to the young.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　
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