Some Hope for UNESCO

The decision of Amadou M’Bow to retire from the leadership of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a welcome one, a step on the long path to restoring the credibility and vitality of UNESCO.

This step alone will not be enough. That was evident in the fact that M’Bow, had he wished, could have had a third term as director general. He enjoyed, for all the evidence of poor management and questionable leadership, the confidence of the majority of the members. The willingness of the majority to keep him on is testimony to the problems that the organization still faces if it is to regain its original integrity, bring back to membership the United States and Britain, and stem the threat of others to quit.

M’Bow has been a destructive leader, exploiting ideological issues and global political differences to consolidate his power with the support of Third World and Marxist-oriented nations. The result has been divisiveness, a redirection of an organization from its important mission, and ultimately the crumbling of support as first the United States and later Britain withdrew from membership.

But M’Bow was encouraged in this by a majority of the membership, and to the extent that this majority is determined to pursue this corruption of the organization’s basic goals, UNESCO will continue on a path of isolation. UNESCO is not alone among the international organizations in its offenses against the purpose of the U.N., but it has been the most extreme.

The majority has now within its power to change course. This can be done with the selection of a director general who is at once a competent administrator and a person committed to uniting the nations in the cause of education, broader sharing of scientific knowledge, and protection of cultural heritages. And it can be done by abandoning once and for all those causes, such as the new world information and communication order, that have betrayed, as the State Department expressed it, “an endemic hostility toward the institutions of a free society.”