The New UNESCO

JP/6/WP1

James H. Ottaway Jr. Chairman World Press Freedom Committee The Washington Post

The United States had many good reasons for leaving the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) back in 1984. But now there are just as many good reasons for returning to it.

Sept. 11 and its aftermath underline the need to join a U.N. agency that is the world's leading forum for policymaking on ideas of culture and communication. America is under attack with specious arguments about its cultural and intellectual influence. Military security is not enough to guard against seriously poisoned minds that commit terrorist acts. UNESCO can become a major force for restoring rationality to this ideological struggle.

The issue of U.S. return to membership in UNESCO is under negotiation in a House-Senate conference committee. The House voted to authorize $60 million for reentry a year ago. Key senators such as Jesse Helms, R-N.C., and Joseph Biden, D-Del., have indicated their approval. George Shultz, Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, who signed the U.S. withdrawal notice, has spoken out for returning to UNESCO.

UNESCO has reformed its top-heavy bureaucracy by cutting senior level staffing more than 50 percent. The organization has also turned itself around on the issue that was the major political reason for the nearly simultaneous withdrawals of the United States and Britain: the Soviet-backed drive by third-world authoritarians for a "world information and communication order".

The World Press Freedom Committee, a far-flung coalition of labor and management groups united to defend the liberty of print, broadcast and Internet news media, was at the forefront of those warning of the dangers. Senior committee officers served on two successive State Department citizen review panels, which determined that Washington was justified in leaving UNESCO.

The United States left, but the committee remained engaged by working against UNESCO policies that favored international press restrictions. This effort was so successful that UNESCO is now seen by press freedom groups as a strong ally in defending and extending press freedom. Two successive UNESCO directors-general, Federico Mayor of Spain and now Koichiro Matsuura of Japan, have braved the would-be press restricters. Mayor stared down a serious threat by China to boycott UNESCO over the award of its first annual press freedom prize to Gao Yu, a jailed Chinese economic journalist. Matsuura has just faced down the ire of Zimbabwe after this year's award went to Geoffrey Nyarota, that country's leading independent editor.

UNESCO's man in Kabul rang alarm bells with press freedom groups about the new Afghan government's highly restrictive press decree. It includes subjecting journalists to Islamic sharia law. A protest campaign by the World Press Freedom Committee has led the new Afghan government to tell UNESCO it will invite press freedom advocates to a September conference to help revise the law. Earlier, well before the Sept. 11 attacks, Matsuura was out raising world consciousness on the nature of the extremist Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Beyond the need for damage control to protect U.S. interests, there are real opportunities at UNESCO to advance the ideological interests of the international coalition against terrorism. Elizabeth Pryor, a senior U.S. diplomat, has produced a remarkable independent study highlighting the benefits of U.S. reentry. It outlines the striking parallels between U.S. and UNESCO post-Sept. 11 policy goals in the organization's educational, cultural and communication spheres.

The thrust of the study is that Sept. 11 demonstrated that U.S. security can no longer be defined in purely military terms and that the extremist offensive against American cultural values must be answered through school curriculums, working for tolerance and rationalism and the correcting of cultural misperceptions in foreign publics. In Pryor's words: ``UNESCO offers an ideal forum in which to promote a realistic and positive image of the U.S. Its program of cross-cultural dialogue can defuse the anger engendered by misunderstanding.''

From the press freedom viewpoint, UNESCO has demonstrated that it is the best, most active ally in the U.N. system of the world's often-beleaguered free press. The U.S. government, with its traditional backing for press freedom abroad, should reinforce UNESCO's helpful role as a friend of a free press.