PARIS: UNESCO members on Thursday endorsed the election of their new chief, Bulgaria s Irina Bokova, who said she would soon head to Cairo to ease tensions with her defeated Egyptian rival, the agency said.
The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization elected Bokova director general in September after the rival bid by Egypt s culture minister, Farouk Hosni, was clouded by remarks he made about burning Israeli books.
Seen as the frontrunner, Hosni blamed Zionist pressures and a politicized agenda for his defeat in an unprecedented five rounds of voting.
The 57-year-old Bokova was confirmed as UNESCO s first female head and the first from the former Soviet bloc, with backing from 166 of 193 member states, the head of the Paris-based agency s general conference Davidson Hepburn said.
Seven countries voted against the Bulgarian diplomat, who is currently Sofia s ambassador to both Paris and UNESCO, while the rest abstained or voted blank, Hepburn told a news conference.
Bokova, who takes over for four years from Japan s Koichiro Matsuura, insisted her election had been democratic and transparent but said she was determined to mend fences with Egypt.
She told reporters the former UN chief Boutros Boutros-Ghali had invited her to attend a conference in Cairo in early December.
I said I would be happy to go. It is important to reach out to all of our friends, including in the Arab world.
A former communist and career diplomat, Bokova served briefly as Bulgaria s foreign minister from 1996 to 1997, and spearheaded her country s successful bid to join the European Union in 2007.
Fluent in English, Spanish, French and Russian, she is married with two children.
Many capitals initially supported the Egyptian Hosni as a gesture of reconciliation with the Arab world and Islam.
But his election campaign met strong opposition from US and French commentators as well as from Auschwitz survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, who said appointing Hosni would shame the global community. -AFP
