Moushira Khattab runs for UNESCO’s 3rd round on Wednesday

CAIRO – 10 October 2017: Egypt’s candidate for the UNESCO Director-General post, Moushira Khattab, maintained the third rank with 12 votes out of 58, following the withdrawal of Polad Bülbüloğlu of Azerbaijan on Tuesday a few hours before the beginning of the second round. This marks a slight change from the first round when Khattab received 11 votes.


Egyptian candidate Khattab received 12 votes, while Hamad bin Abdul Aziz Al-Kawari of Qatar ended up with 20 votes, Audrey Azoulay from France with 13 votes, Pham Sanh Chau of Vietnam with five votes, Qian Tang from China with five votes, and Vera El Khoury Lacoeuilhe from Lebanon with three votes.


The Qatari candidate received 20 votes in the second round, causing questions about financial bribes, which the Qatari regime allegedly utilizes to buy supportive voices.


There is conviction that the votes obtained by the Qatari candidate in the first and second rounds represent the final ceiling of the votes that can be indirectly obtained via financing during the voting process.

Some voices inside UNESCO have called on China to withdraw Qian Tang before the third round, which is due to kick off at 18:30 (Cairo local time) on Wednesday.

The votes for Egypt’s Khattab and Qatar’s Al-Kawari increased by only one vote in the second round compared to their results in the first round. Lebanon’s El Khoury lost three votes in the second round after succeeding in getting six in the first round. France and China kept the same votes in the second round as the first, with 13 and five votes respectively.

Neither the first nor the second round are a precise indicator of the expected results, but reveal the form of political interrelationship among the members of the Executive Council.

“The Egyptian delegation is assessing what happened in the first round, especially regarding the position of the 17 African countries in the Executive Council that are from the African consensus on the candidate of the continent,” said Ahmed Abu Zeid, spokesman of the Foreign Ministry on Monday.

On Tuesday, Abu Zeid stressed that the Egyptian delegation in Paris will maintain continued efforts to win more votes cast in favor of Khattab in the third round due to take place on Wednesday.

On Monday, the African group in UNESCO held a coordination meeting to announce their support for Egypt’s Moushira Khattab for the top post at the U.N. cultural organization.

A few hours before the second round, the President of the Pan-African Parliament, Nkodo Dang from Cameroon, voiced support for Moushira Khattab’s candidacy for the Director-General post in an official statement issued during the parliament’s session Tuesday.

Nkodo’s statement declared unified African support for the Egyptian candidate.

“In the name of all African peoples, we announce our support for Ambassador Moushira Khattab in the UNESCO elections. We call on all African institutions and permanent representatives at UNESCO to support Khattab as the candidate of Africa,” the statement read.

Unfortunately, the 17 African member states of UNESCO did not unite behind only one African candidate despite repetitive pledges that their votes would go to the Egyptian candidate.

Sources within UNESCO aware of the political bonds between member states at the moment have disclosed, on the condition of anonymity, that “the process of elections currently taking place for UNESCO’s Director-General will reveal political nets and goals that far outreach the elections for this post.”

Those sources added that “those who have voted for the Qatari candidate have forgotten that bringing him to the forefront of the candidates will, in effect, bring shame to an organization meant to be a safeguard for culture, heritage, civilization, history and sciences. It will, in effect, be a stigma attached to the entire international community’s forehead, especially the major states that have always called for the prevention of politicizing the organization’s endeavors, and respect to human rights.”

“Maybe it would do good if the elections come to favor the Qatari candidate, to show everyone how opportunist some states are, and to allow some member states to re-evaluate their values and the values of UNESCO in all its endeavors and missions,” the sources speculated.

They also clarified that the politicization of UNESCO will become a fact and a reality if the Qatari candidate, or another candidate from the major member states that have prepared this scenario, wins the position. “It will be beyond repair, and its missions of bettering human rights – the sole reason that the UNESCO was created – will become null and useless,” they added.

The new director-general of UNESCO will be named on October 13. Then, 195 members in the General Conference will make the appointment in view of recommendations from UNESCO’s Executive Board.