In the race for the post of Director-General of the United
Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), Irina Bokova, Bulgaria’s obscure and rather uninspiring
candidate, surprisingly defeated the better-known Egyptian
painter and culture minister Farouk Hosny. Jewish groups
campaigned heavily against the Egyptian candidate who got into
trouble over a careless threat he made last year — after
militant Islamic deputies in Egypt’s parliament had complained
that the Library of Alexandria under his supervision was full of
Jewish books — to burn any such books he could find there (an
insensitive, even anti-Semitic remark he later apologized for).
It is not clear whether it was this controversy that swayed
Obama’s State Department to shift its support away from Hosny,
who seemed to have been the candidate favored by the Bush
Administration, and back Ms. Bokova instead.
But who is this Irina Bokova, who will become the first
woman and first East European to lead this pivotal U.N. agency in
charge of promoting international cooperation in education,
science, and culture? Bokova, the 57-year-old privileged daughter
of a once powerful propaganda bigwig in Communist Bulgaria, had
received her bachelor’s degree from the Moscow Institute for
International Relations in 1976. She had been twice elected a
member of the post-Communist National Assembly and served briefly
as Bulgaria’s foreign minister in 1996-1997. She even ran
unsuccessfully for vice-president in 1996 on the ticket of the
Bulgarian Socialist (ex-Communist) Party. But when I first met
her in the fall of 1982, Irina Kolarova (as she was then known)
had just been appointed third secretary at the Bulgarian Mission
to the U.N. in New York, where she worked mainly in the General
Assembly’s Third (Human Rights) Committee. Beneath her unassuming
exterior, she was a tough and loyal Communist apparatchik. But
her stay in New York was cut short after the State Department
rejected for nearly two years the accreditation of her
journalist-husband, Liubomir Kolarov, most likely because of his
known association with Communist Bulgaria’s spy agency, the
DS.
Another reason for her early recall may have been an
extramarital affair she was having with her colleague and current
husband, Kalin Mitrev, the mission’s then unhappily-married
second secretary. Their liaison was kept secret for a while,
probably because Kalin’s father was another Communist big shot,
but it came out into the open early one evening when a crowd of
concerned New Yorkers gathered outside the mission’s residential
building in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It turned out that
Irina’s heavy-drinking husband had been dangling from their 11th
floor apartment’s balcony, trying in vain to jump onto the
balcony of the floor below (where Kalin resided at the time
without his sickly wife and two young daughters), obviously in an
attempt to catch the two love birds in flagrante delicto.
After my defection in July 1988, I nearly came into contact
with Irina again in early 1990, when Irina, accompanied by her
teenage son and daughter, attended for six months the
University of Maryland’s School of Public Affairs as a Ford
Foundation fellow. She had just gone back to Bulgaria, but I met
a very close Bulgarian friend of hers, another Ford Foundation
fellow at College Park, where I was studying for my graduate
degree in political science. Our mutual friend informed me of
Irina’s miraculous transformation from a devout old-guard
Communist into a post-Communist “democrat,” as she seems to have
abandoned her strongly-held Communist views. According to her
friend, Irina was divorcing her ever-inebriated husband and was
planning to wed Kalin, who was separated from his wife. In
another sign of the changing times, Irina was also on the verge
of tearing up her Communist party card, like all other
Soviet-educated Communist diplomats who now wanted to turn
themselves into politically unaffiliated foreign-service
professionals (in order to keep their sinecure jobs). In another
surprise, she had befriended a well-connected American professor
named Madeleine Albright (the future Secretary of State in Bill
Clinton’s second term). After Irina had accosted Albright at one
of the latter’s public lectures, the two became close friends.
Strange, because the Irina I knew would have never approached any
American “bourgeois” academic, let alone allow her to become her
bosom friend and mentor.
When the Socialists (ex-Communists) recaptured Bulgaria’s
presidency and premiership several years ago, Irina was appointed
Bulgaria’s ambassador to France and permanent representative to
UNESCO. She is now married to her old flame Kalin, Bulgaria’s
current representative-director in the London-headquartered
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Then last
December, she announced her seemingly most unpromising candidacy
for UNESCO’s top job. She won in a very tight race, when UNESCO
Executive Board voted 31-27 in her favor during the final, 5th
round of voting (her election must still be approved by a
conference of all UNESCO members opening October 15 in Paris). In
an attempt to smooth over any hurt feelings over the rejection of
the Arab world’s candidate for UNESCO’s top job, Bokova has since
promised to tour the Arab countries. She has even spoken out in
defense of Roman Polanski, the famous Polish French movie
director detained in Switzerland and threatened with extradition
back to the U.S. to face the music in a 32-year-old “statutory
rape” case.
It is not entirely clear what led to her unlikely election,
but what concerns me most is just how ill-prepared Irina Bokova
really is for the tough top spot at this important and once
politically troubled international organization (which the U.S.
and the U.K. had quit in protest in 1984 for the next twenty
years or so), considering her background as a mediocre
ex-Communist bureaucrat. Even though I believe that her election
is sending the wrong message to the post-Communist part of the
world, I sincerely hope that her record as UNESCO head will not
be as checkered as her past.
