PARIS: Bulgarian career diplomat Irina Bokova won the top job at the UN culture agency Tuesday after a race clouded by anti-Semitism accusations against her Egyptian culture minister rival, UNESCO officials said.
The former foreign minister was elected director general of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization after five rounds of voting by its executive council that finally eliminated her main rival Farouk Hosni.
Hosni, an abstract painter who is currently Egypt s culture minister, has been dogged by anti-Semitism accusations after saying last year that he would burn Israeli books.
Bokova paid tribute to her defeated rival, praising him for the friendship and respect he had shown her.
I said to the Egyptian delegation that I hope that we will be together and that I never believed in the idea of a clash of civilizations, she told reporters at the Paris headquarters of the UN body.
Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov told AFP in Sofia that this is really unexpected and a huge victory for a small country like Bulgaria.
Israel, which did not oppose Hosni s candidacy, praised Bokova for her victory.
Israel welcomes the election and is convinced that fruitful cooperation with UNESCO will continue and even be reinforced, the foreign ministry said in a statement.
A French foreign ministry statement said Bokova was a woman of conviction who has international experience that will be particularly useful to fulfill UNESCO s ambitious mandate.
But Egyptian writers union leader Mohammed Salmawy slammed the result.
The Jewish lobby has put a great deal of pressure and taken some statements made by the minister, put them out of context and made them political, he said.
The vote by UNESCO s 58-nation executive council gave 31 votes to Bokova and 27 to Hosni, officials said.
Bokova is a former communist turned europhile who has represented Bulgaria on UNESCO s board since 2007 and is also ambassador to France and Monaco.
When she takes over from Japan s Koichiro Matsuura – after her appointment is endorsed next month by UNESCO s 193-member assembly – she will become the body s first woman boss and its first from the former Soviet bloc.
The multilingual 57-year-old, who helped draft her country s new constitution after the fall of Communism, served briefly as foreign minister in 1996-1997 and has worked at UN headquarters in New York.
Nine candidates were in the running when UNESCO s council began voting last Thursday, including European Commissioner for External Relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner, who was seen as a favorite.
But they dropped out one by one until only Bokova and Hosni were left.
Hosni s supporters had said his election as the first Arab head of UNESCO, which has a mandate to promote global understanding through culture, science and education, would send a positive signal from the West to the Muslim world.
But his detractors, who include Auschwitz survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, said his appointment would shame the global community.
In his lengthy political career, Hosni has often been accused of promoting anti-Semitism, in particular in 2008 when he told the Egyptian parliament: I d burn Israeli books myself if I found any in libraries in Egypt.
Hosni, who has been Egypt s culture minister for 22 years, insists his comment was made during an angry exchange with hardliners from the Muslim Brotherhood and had been taken out of context.
Khattar Abu Diab, a political scientist at the University of Paris III, told Egyptian television that Arab, African and third world states must look at this (Hosni s defeat) as a challenge directed at them.
Other contenders for the UNESCO job included Lithuania s UNESCO ambassador Ina Marciulionyte, Benin ambassador Noureini Tidjani-Serpos, former Algerian foreign minister Mohammed Bedjaoui and Russian ex-deputy foreign minister Alexander Yakovenko.
