Waving Goodbye to UNESCO

By Susan Tifft

Angry at its leftist tilt, the U.S. pulls out

It was mid-afternoon when Jean Gerard, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and Richard Ahern, deputy chief of the U.S. delegation, left the U.S. mission in Paris for a short limousine ride to UNESCO's concrete-and-glass headquarters. They took an elevator to the fifth floor, where UNESCO'S Senegalese Director-General, Amadou Mahtar M'Bow, has his office. There they gave him a three-page letter, typed on U.S. delegation stationery. M'Bow barely glanced at it. "I will read this with great interest," he said, smiling stiffly. Gerard and Ahern turned and left.

The absence of diplomatic niceties was appropriate. The letter, signed by Secretary of State George Shultz and authorized by President Reagan, held no surprises. After three years of discontent and six months of intensive review, the Administration last week formally withdrew the U.S. from UNESCO. Declared Gregory Newell, Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs: "UNESCO has extraneously politicized virtually every subject it deals with. It has exhibited hostility toward a free society, especially a free market and a free press, and it has demonstrated unrestrained budgetary expansion."

Despite its high-decibel pullout, the Administration left the door open for reentry. UNESCO requires a member to give at least a year's notice before resigning, so the U.S. withdrawal does not take effect until Dec. 31,1984. The U.S. would consider rescinding its action, wrote Shultz, given "indications of significant improvement" in the way UNESCO operates.

That is unlikely. When UNESCO was founded in 1945, the agency's goals were high-minded enough: fostering literacy and education, preserving mankind's cultural heritage, promoting the exchange of scientific ideas. But as Third World nations became a more potent force in the U.N., the organization took a leftward turn. The first real scuffle came in 1974, when UNESCO voted to exclude Israel from a regional working group because it allegedly altered "the historical features of Jerusalem" during archaeological excavations and "brainwashed" Arabs in the occupied territories. Congress promptly suspended UNESCO's appropriations, which forced the agency to soften its sanctions. In 1976 Israel was readmitted; in 1977 U.S. funding resumed.

In 1980, at the UNESCO general conference in Belgrade, a majority of Communist and Third World nations called for a "new world information order" to compensate for the alleged pro-Western bias of global news organizations. The goals were the licensing of journalists, an international code of press ethics and increased government control over media content. Although UNESCO backed off under pressure from the West, it still allocated $16 million for a two-year program to study "media reforms."

The U.S. also chafed at UNESCO's increasingly collectivist outlook. The agency's charter, like that of the U.N., commits its members to support basic human rights. In the past five years, however, the "rights of peoples"--in other words, the state--have taken priority over "individual" rights.

"UNESCO has been emptying key Western concepts of their meaning," says Owen Harries, a former Australian Ambassador to UNESCO. The organization has spent some $750,000 for East-bloc "peace and disarmament" initiatives, which the U.S. considers little more than a subsidy for Soviet propaganda. On the other hand, it has spent only $32,000 for the education of refugees.

UNESCO was the only U.N. agency to increase its budget last year. In the past ten years the agency's two-year spending budgets ballooned from $165.1 million to $374.4 million. Under a dues formula that takes into account a member country's population and G.N.P., the U.S. pays a whopping 25% of the tab. Says U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick: "The countries which have the votes don't pay the bill, and those who pay the bill don't have the votes." Last year the U.S. was the only country to vote against UNESCO's original request for an inflation-adjusted hike of 6% in its budget as well as the final compromise increase of 4%.

The Administration was rankled fur ther by what UNESCO bought with its money: a bloated bureaucracy with a taste for the good life. Despite UNESCO'S stated concern for the Third World, few of its staff are deployed there. Indeed, 2,428 of its 3,380 employees work in the comfortable confines of the Paris headquarters, ,where a mid-level bureaucrat's salary is about $2,500 a month, tax free. Some staffers are better connected than qualified: the important post of personnel director went to Serge Vieux, the cousin of M'Bow's wife.

A final irritant was the autocratic M'Bow, who, according to Western members, pandered to Third World interests in hopes of some day getting enough votes to become U.N. Secretary-General.

Says Harries: "Apart from being an extraordinarily biased man, M'Bow is temperamentally confrontationalist and combative."

Last June, when Gerard and New ell met with him in Paris to protest UNESCO's budget, M'Bow reportedly responded by accusing the U.S. of racism.

The decision to leave drew cheers from unexpected corners: the liberal New York Times and the Washington Post. Overseas there was sympathy for the U.S. move but no rush to follow suit. Declared for mer French Minister for Cooperation Jean-Pierre Cot: "This gesture reeks of isolationism."

By week's end Shultz had sent a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar reassuring him that the UNESCO withdrawal did not presage a wider U.S. disengagement from the U.N. or its oth er agencies. At UNESCO, which stands to lose both money and prestige because of the action, M'Bow was uncommonly subdued.

"This is an incredible shock to UNESCO," said one agency veteran. "After all, a U.N.

organization can't function effectively very long without the participation of the richest country on earth." For better or worse, that is probably true, which suggests that no matter how vexing UNESCO has become, the U.S. might better serve world affairs by keeping its membership and trying to improve the organization from within.

There is little reason to believe that UNESCO, left on its own, will improve itself.

-- By Susan Tifft.

Reported by William Blaylock/Paris and Johanna McGeary/ Washington

With reporting by William Blaylock/Paris, Johanna McGeary/Washington