Monday, May 07, 2012
Last fall, UNESCO, the United Nations Educational,
Scientific, and Cultural Organization, granted membership to the Palestinian
Authority, which is not a state. It did so despite clear warnings from
Washington that this would entail an immediate freeze on all U.S. funding to
the agency. After the vote, President Obama rightly followed through, as
required by U.S. law.
But since then, UNESCO and the Obama administration have
been pressing Congress to change the relevant law and allow U.S. funding for
UNESCO to continue. They allege that the loss of funding threatens the
viability of UNESCO programs vital to U.S. interests and that the cut
improperly punishes a valuable voice for integrity and moderation.
A number of these claims do not stand up well to scrutiny.
On the program side, UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova has argued that the
loss of U.S. funds endangers UNSECO programs for literacy in Afghanistan,
Holocaust education, and tsunami-warning systems. A closer look reveals that
UNESCO’s role in these areas is not vital and in some cases is minimal.
The literacy programs for Afghan police and citizens are
funded not by U.S. assessed contributions to UNESCO but by Japan’s voluntary
funding. UNESCO merely manages the programs in coordination with the Afghan
government, particularly its education and interior ministries. UNESCO is not
the only group — either within the U.N. system or outside it — capable of
performing these activities. UNESCO has recently acknowledged that these
programs are voluntarily funded by Japan and not significantly affected by the
U.S. funding freeze.
As for Holocaust education, Claudia Rosett of the
Foundation for Defense of Democracies reports that “the lone full-time staff
member on this project is paid out of a donation from Israel, which also kicked
in a large chunk of the $536,000 collected in recent years for projects related
to this program. UNESCO’s annual contribution comes to a niggardly $215,000.”
The U.S. share (22 percent) of that is $47,300, about 1.5 percent of the amount
spent annually by UNESCO, which, Rosett explains, squanders it “via bad
management and a taste for business-class airline tickets.”
UNESCO’s alarm about undercutting the tsunami-warning
system also seems overblown. The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission
(IOC) leads UNESCO’s tsunami efforts. It was allocated $9.487 million (about
$4.25 million per year) in the 2010–11 two-year budget. The U.S. share of that
is less than $1 million.
Not all IOC funds go to its tsunami programs. The IOC
also focuses on pollution, climate change, oceanic research, and other
activities. Even so, that total IOC budget is a fraction of the amount spent
annually — $42 million in FY 2009 — by the U.S. on its own tsunami-related
programs. This funding not only supports the U.S.’s warning systems but also
assists tsunami programs in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. In fact, USAID
has provided millions of dollars for the construction and development of these
regional sytems.
It is worth noting that in its 2013 budget the Obama
administration proposed cutting U.S. funding for tsunami programs by $4.6
million — more than UNESCO’s total annual allocation for the IOC. This is a
curious policy if the administration is truly concerned that tsunami-warning
systems would be greatly affected by the UNESCO funding freeze, which involves
a comparatively minor reduction.
Indeed, some scientists and managers involved in regional
tsunami programs seem oddly sanguine about the suspension of UNESCO funding.
The IOC’s performance indicators for its tsunami programs and the accompanying
benchmarks — for example, six intergovernmental meetings, four workshops and
six missions to raise awareness, four training workshops — provide insight into
the relative unconcern about losing UNESCO support. The IOC’s main contribution
is not to actually fund or construct the warning systems but rather to assist
coordination among partner nations and hold and organize conferences and other
meetings. These activities can be useful but could easily be assumed by other
U.N. agencies such as the World Meteorological Organization or the
International Maritime Organization.
But that might not even be necessary. The IOC has its own
distinct membership of 143 nations, separate from UNESCO’s 195 member states.
The IOC membership does not include “Palestine.” It is possible that voluntary
funding for the IOC, as opposed to America’s direct contributions to UNESCO,
may not be affected.
What about UNESCO’s role as a voice for moderation and
integrity? In addition to granting membership to the Palestinians, whose
territory is used by terrorists to attack Israel, the organization and its
executive board have exhibited repeated lapses in judgment.
• Last year UNESCO
elected Syria (the same government currently killing thousands of its own
citizens) to the organization’s human-rights committee. To add insult to
injury, when the U.S. sought to reverse that decision, the board voted to
maintain Syrian membership. As the U.S. ambassador to UNESCO asked, “How many
dead and wounded journalists must be carried out of Syria before we recognize
that the situation in that country is an affront to the very purposes for which
UNESCO was founded?”
• Also last year,
UNESCO belatedly ended its financial support for a Palestinian children’s
magazine when news reports revealed its anti-Semitic content and praise of
Adolf Hitler.
• Earlier this
year, UNESCO’s board decided to approve under a new name a prize donated to
UNESCO by Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the corrupt dictator of oil-rich
Equatorial Guinea since 1979 — a publicity stunt for Obiang decried by Western
nations and human-rights groups.
• Most recently,
Director-General Bokova awarded Saudi king Abdullah with UNESCO’s “highest
honorary recognition award” for his “efforts in enhancing the culture of
dialogue and peace.” Saudi Arabia is accused of grave human-rights violations
by the State Department.
These troubling actions are particularly damaging because
UNESCO’s main product is its name and reputation. UNESCO’s 2010–2011 budget
devoted 87 percent of all resources to staff costs (including temporary
assistance and contracted services, travel, and general operating expenses,
meaning they spend very little on actual, physical projects on the ground.
Indeed, UNESCO is, for the most part, not an implementer.
It helps arrange meetings, facilitates information sharing, publishes reports
and studies, provides the U.N.’s sky-blue stamp of approval to projects, or
grants a U.N. imprimatur to projects largely funded by national aid agencies.
These activities can be useful, but UNESCO’s problem is
that it is not the only U.N. body capable of fulfilling those duties. A 2011
United Kingdom report rated UNESCO’s performance poor, noting:
UNESCO’s significant under-performance in leadership
means it is rarely critical in education and development. . . . It has poor
systems and is unable to identify its results. . . . [It] has performed a
useful post-disaster role in education planning and protecting cultural
heritage, but needs clearer policies. …Administration costs remain high.
Insufficient attention [is] paid to transaction costs. . . . Substantial room
for improved financial resource management, in particular to address poor
allocation mechanisms and inadequate management of poorly performing
programmes.
The summary of that report concluded that if “measures
are not implemented satisfactorily and performance does not improve, then the
UK will consider whether it should continue to be a member of UNESCO, or
whether there are more effective ways of supporting our objectives on
education, culture and heritage.”
With American funding to UNESCO frozen, no doubt the U.S.
will explore alternatives as well. UNESCO’s exaggerated claims of importance to
U.S. interests are likely driven by fear that America, and possibly other
nations, will recognize that the agency is not nearly as vital as it wishes
everyone to believe.
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