Word: unesco
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...weeks the 158 member countries of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization had been locked in a battle over choosing a new leader. Senegal's Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, 66, was seeking his third six- year term as UNESCO director-general, despite complaints that his previous stints were characterized by profligate spending and anti-Western bias. The U.S. angrily withdrew from UNESCO in 1984, and Britain pulled out a year later. Last week the organization's executive board chose a compromise candidate, Federico Mayor Zaragoza, 53, a former Spanish Minister for Education and Science and onetime UNESCO deputy...
...Aides to the director-general now claim that he never promised not to accept a draft, and would serve again if elected. Though there are eleven other nominees for the job, Kaunda's endorsement carries weight: he is chairman of the Organization of African Unity, which includes 62 of UNESCO's 158 member states. The election will take place in November. Among the perks that M'Bow may be reluctant to give up: a $160,000 salary and a rent-free apartment atop UNESCO's Paris headquarters...
Over the past 15 years, however, the postwar spirit of internationalism seems to have waned and given way in this country to something quite different. Our behavior toward international organizations has become less supportive and our voice often petulant and shrill. We have left UNESCO, pulled out of the ILO for a time, rejected the World Court, threatened to leave the FAO, cut our contributions to the World Health Organization and the United Nations itself, and balked at supporting new initiatives by the World Bank...
...potential legal action, though, is all too predictable. The U.N. has always thrived on intimidation. UNESCO, it's "cultural" wing, has a long and ignominious tradition of ignoring democratic ideals in the face of intimidation by the U.N.'s totalitarian members. Now its just the U.N. doing the intimidating...
Whenever the topics of UNESCO, the U.N.'s condemnation of Zionism as racism, or the organization's continued support for Pol Pot come up in discussion, U.N. apologists usually start talking of the U.N. as the champion of law in the nasty and brutish international arena...