US policy toward UNESCO - United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization - address by John R. Bolton, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs - Transcript

US Department of State Dispatch, July 6, 1992

Statement before the Subcommittees on International Operations and on Human Rights and International Organizations of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Subcommittee on Environment of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Washington, DC, June 25, 1992

I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you to discuss our policey toward UNESCO [UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization]. It is particularly timely to do so in the context of the recently completed GAO [General Accounting Office] report on the organization's management, administrative, budgetary, and personnel practices.

It has been 7 1/2 years since the United States withdrew from UNESCO because of the organization's excessive politicization, poor management, and runaway budgets. Since then, we have been working with our allies, with the Secretariat, and with Director General Mayor to promote reform. We have maintained a presence at UNESCO through our Observer Mission, have attended every meeting of the organization's governing bodies, and have made voluntary contributions of approximately $2 million per year in support of selected activities in which we continue to participate.

We are, consequently, pleased to note that the GAO report concludes that initial progress has been made in implementing management reforms. We have reviewed the report and find it a useful assessment of UNESCO's management practices. The report states that it is too soon to judge the effectiveness of some reforms. Knute Hammarskjold and Peter Wilenski, authors of a 1989 study on UNESCO's management, said much the same thing last January in a follow-up report on the implementation of their recommendations: "Extensive progress in reform has been made on a broad front but has not yet taken root. . . ."

The GAO report states that UNESCO has not solved long-standing problems with consultants and program evaluation. It makes 12 formal recommendations that address policies for decentralization of activities and resources, program evaluation, procedures for the use and control of supplementary staff, budget techniques, and payroll controls. These recommendations and the other suggestions made throughout the text provide helpful guidelines and a benchmark for further progress.

As we noted in the State Department comments included as an appendix to the report, each of the recommendations is consistent with goals sought by the Department of State for several years. In this regard, we believe that our policy of insistence on real change at Unesco--before any consideration of re-entry into the organization--has been a significant factor in motivating its member states, governing bodies, and the Secretariat, itself, to achieve the progress noted in the report.

In contrast to this progress, there are other areas of UNESCO policy which still deeply concern us. Particularly troubling was a UNESCO mission to Iraq in February, reportedly undertaken in cooperation with the UNDP [UN Development Program], to assess the situation of education. While sympathetic to humanitarian initiatives that meet essential medical and nutritional needs, we are not inclined to stretch essential civilian needs" discussed in UN Security Council Resolution 687 to repairing or replacing school buildings. Last August, the UN Sanctions Committee informed UNESCO that it was unable to reach agreement on the appropriateness of such a mission, and UNESCO wisely canceled its plans to send an assessment team to Iraq.

In September, the UNESCO Executive Board deferred, sine die, consideration of any discussion of the situation of the educational and cultural institutions in Iraq. In November, our Mission to the United Nations informed the UNESCO representative that we were not sympathetic to another UNESCO initiative to send a mission to Iraq to assess the status of schools and cultural sites. Nonetheless, a UNESCO/UNDP team spent 2 weeks in Iraq during the month of February. In a March 3 letter to Director General Mayor, the Kuwaiti Permanent Delegate to UNESCO expressed his surprise that UNESCO would undertake such a mission in the light of the board decision and the UN sanctions regime. The Director General responded that the mission was undertaken in consultation with the UN Interagency Humanitarian Program and did not contravene Resolution 687. The officer-in-charge of the Office of the Executive Delegate for Humanitarian Assistance indicated that the Director General did not consult his office prior to making a decision to send a minion to Iraq. We believe the action was ill-advised, potentially detrimental to the sanctions regime, and inconsistent with the spirit, if not the letter, of the Executive Board decision to postpone consideration of the status of Iraqi educational institutions.

Turning once more to the GAO report, we believe that particular attention should be given to the recommendation on better application of the rules on the use of supplementary staff and fee contracts to control the contract authorization procedure more effectively and make it more transparent and uniform. This is of considerable import in that supplementary staff costs and fee contracts amounted to nearly $70 million during the 1990-91 biennium. GAO found considerable gaps and inconsistencies in data on supplementary staff. This raised doubts "about whether UNESCO uses too many supplementary staff or validly employs them." We endorse the Hammarskjold-Wilenski recommendations that call for the introduction of a consistent and fair promotion system based on merit, a better career development system, and equal opportunity for women.