UNESCO is run by Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, a Marxist from Senegal, Africa, who is its Director General. Twenty senior staffers have left UNESCO since 1980 when M’Bow was elected to a seven-year term. He seems to have a tight hold on the organization, despite evidence that Soviet spy plots and the arson of files go on under his nose.
One was Pierre de Senarclens, a Swiss national, who said that his Human Rights Division has been debased into a pressure group for Soviet objectives. He said it is “no longer possible to have any form of discussion or intellectual debate” because of the “climate of suspicion, prejudice, intolerance, incoherence, arbitrariness, fear and servility.”
Peter Lengyel, an Australian professional who has been high on the UNESCO staff for the last 22 years, has made public his insider’s view of UNESCO. He says that this organization is now plagued with “demagogic disregard for orderly procedures,” has “a staff atomized by suspicion and fear,” and has suffered “the wilful destruction of professionalism.”
U.S. Ambassador to UNESCO Jean Gerard says that UNESCO has become downright dangerous. She says, “It legitimizes programs which promote state control. It is so skewed, so distorted, so far from its basic purposes, that I do not feel we have a right to stay and be an accomplice.”
The principal use of UNESCO is as a propaganda forum for Russian Communism to spread its ideology among Third World nations. UNESCO is the world’s largest publisher of books, publishing five books per week in seven languages.
UNESCO sponsors teacher-training projects in Africa and Latin America. It hosts 200 international conferences annually for professionals. But UNESCO’s concept of “education” is to promote disarmament of the West. Another brand of UNESCO’s “education” is to send funds to terrorist groups such as the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) and SWAPO (South West Africa People’s Organization).
UNESCO has an ambitious program to establish a New World Information Order (NWIO). This is really a program to control the communications system of Western nations through (1) making the media subject to control by the government, (2) giving the government the power to license journalists, and (3) establishing an international agreement that each country should be allowed to screen out all foreign broadcasts.
UNESCO is an enthusiastic supporter of the New International Economic Order (NIEO). That high-sounding phrase means forcing America to transfer its wealth to the Communist-controlled nations in order to “correct inequities” between Western and socialist living standards through foreign aid, low-interest loans, and gifts of American technology. NIEO is simply a vehicle to criticize capitalism and freeload on the free-market economy.
UNESCO has played Uncle Sam like Uncle Sap. Former representative to UNESCO from Australia, Owen Harries, said, “It hardly seems normal, fair or reasonable that 88% of UNESCO’s membership collectively contributes only one percent (1%) of the budget, while at the same time the American taxpayers contribute 25% of the budget and sometimes 90% of all expenses and grants.”
In 1983 when 47 Communist spies were expelled from France by the Mitterrand socialist government, 12 were members of the Soviet delegation to UNESCO. Three of them were on Director M’Bow’s immediate personal staff.
Those three still draw their salaries and one has even had his contract extended! Being caught as a Communist spy is obviously no bar to employment at UNESCO!
The United States has only one vote even though we pay 25% of the total budget.
We have no need for UNESCO and it was an exercise in righteous indignation when President Reagan announced that the United States would withdraw at the end of 1984.
Those who argue that the United States should stay in UNESCO and “work from within” are clinging to internationalist hopes long since proven false. It makes much more sense to say that, so long as Director M’Bow is running the shop, he will not be allowed to do it on our money.
