A discussion has been unfolding among some public officials, including former ambassadors and ministers, over the nomination of former minister of antiquities and tourism Khaled Al-Enany for the post of director-general of UNESCO. Public opinion must have been a little mystified by some of the issues they raised. For example, why did the government nominate this individual to such a prominent position when only a few months earlier it dismissed him from his ministerial post? Would he not stand a better chance of obtaining the UN position if he were still minister?
My answer to the first question is that Al-Enany was nominated while he was still minister. Initially, the government was going to wait to announce this until the nomination process officially opened in 2025. But then it decided to make its decision public ahead of time so that everyone should know that Egypt intends to compete for the top UNESCO post. The government undoubtedly calculated that this would give it more time to prepare for and implement a strong campaign in which our candidate would visit as many as possible of the countries that have the right to vote in the elections of the UNESCO chair. These are the members of the UNESCO Executive Board who will number 58 in 2025 now that the US has decided to rejoin the body. Washington had withdrawn from it some years ago because it decided that UNESCO was anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian.
The campaign involves more than winning the support of the permanent delegates to the UNESCO Executive Board. The election of the director-general is ultimately a political decision taken at the highest levels which, in turn, requires high-level communications between senior officials in the nominating state and their counterparts in the member states of the Executive Board.
As to the question of whether Al-Enany’s chances of winning would be stronger if he were still a minister, I responded that, actually, the opposite is the case. If he were in office at the time of running for the UN post, at every stop in his campaign and in every meeting with the press he would be barraged with questions about the government’s policies and supporters of rival candidates would try to undermine him by grilling him on issues he is not responsible for, from the state of human rights and freedoms and deteriorating standards of education to the state of the economy and even Egypt’s position on this or that international crisis. Al-Enany is in fact in a much better position now. He has the advantages of the full support of the government and its material and political resources, without having to shoulder the responsibility for parrying spurious attacks against its policies.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 24 August, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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