New chief aims to streamline UNESCO

Press, 20 October 1987, Page 9

New chief aims to streamline UNESCO

NZPA-Reuter Paris A Spanish scientist who is set to become UNESCO’s new DirectorGeneral aims to streamline the United Nations agency and lure back its disaffected major donor nations, the United States and Britain. A biochemist, Federico Mayor, emerged victorious in a tight contest for the job after the withdrawal of the controversial Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, of Senegal. Mr M’Bow’s support in the 50-member executive faded in face of threatened further walkouts by major donor nations if he received a third six-year mandate. Mr Mayor, aged 53, was a late starter in the race for the top job at the troubled agency, where he served as deputy director-general from 1978 to 1981. He presented himself as an “independent’’ candidate backed by scores of internationally prominent scientists and intellectuals, eight of them Nobel Prize winners. Mr Mayor went into politics 10 years ago, served as Spain’s Education Minister from 1981 to 1982 and currently is a Centre-Right member of the European Parliament. He discreetly but efficiently lobbied at the highest levels, presenting

himself as a technically qualified applicant for a technical job. The return of Britain and the United States to the organisation was absolutely necessary to restore its principles of universality, he said in a speech in California in 1986. Any attempts to create a new UNESCO would trigger “a chain reaction which would debilitate the entire United Nations system.” Mr Mayor wants radical reform of an agency, accused by Western critics of mismanagement and fuzzy programmes which have spiralled out of control. He seeks special powers for the director-general to produce a new programme including decentralisation of UNESCO functions to non-govern-mental organisations outside the United Nations system. Bom in Barcelona in 1934, he obtained his doctorate in pharmacy from Madrid University and in 1963 was appointed biochemistry professor at Granada University, where he was rector for three years from 1968. Currently a professor at Madrid University, he has published more than 50 scientific papers and headed a number of Spanish scientific organisations.