U.S. Cites Bias, Management Flaws in Refusing to Rejoin UNESCO

The United States will stay out of UNESCO because of the same poor management and political bias that prompted Washington to leave the United Nations organization in 1984, the State Department said Tuesday.

“It is obvious that the time is not yet ripe to reopen the question of renewing United States membership in UNESCO,” the department said in a report to Congress on U.S. involvement with the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

The United States, along with Britain and Singapore, withdrew from UNESCO in 1984, charging that it was becoming a forum for partisan debates between Third World nations and the West and was showing “an endemic hostility” toward such bedrock U.S. tenets as a free press, free markets and human rights.

The report gives the details of U.S. dissatisfaction, alleging that UNESCO is ineptly managed, has little long-term budget restraint and is anti-Israel and pro-Palestine Liberation Organization.

At a briefing for reporters, John Bolton, assistant secretary of state for international organizations, who drafted the State Department report, said the United States is dissatisfied with an organization that spends 70% of its money on a “top-heavy bureaucracy” in Paris and only 7% on fighting illiteracy, one of UNESCO’s primary programs.

It also has failed to support freedom of the press strongly enough to suit the United States.

Bolton said UNESCO Director General Federico Mayor has as much as acknowledged that attempts to reshape the organization have failed. “I have moved some of the bricks around, but the bricks are still the same,” Bolton quoted Mayor as saying.

Mayor said in a statement released from the organization’s headquarters in Paris that the report “failed to take full account of the changes in the program,” including structural and management reforms announced in February.