Bulgarian Who Is to Lead Unesco Advocates Political Pluralism - NYTimes.com

By DAN BILEFSKY

PRAGUE — The Bulgarian diplomat who defeated the Egyptian culture minister in a close vote on Tuesday night to become the first woman to lead Unesco is a 57-year-old mother with two grown children, an expert in arms control and the daughter of an influential family who came of age during the cold war.

But the diplomat, Irina Bokova, who is the Bulgarian ambassador to France and Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, said in an interview on Wednesday that growing up in Communist Eastern Europe had made her a fervent advocate of political pluralism and European integration.

She also said she intended to work to diminish the acrimony that underlay the five rounds of voting that led to her election.

Ms. Bokova said she had been a member of the Communist Party as a young person in Bulgaria out of necessity rather than by choice and, like her country, had long since shown a strong commitment to democracy. “I am from this cold war generation that lived through this period; we didn’t choose it,” Ms. Bokova said by telephone from Paris, where Unesco’s headquarters are located. “All my life I have shown I supported the political transformation of my country. I have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Ms. Bokova is a member of the Socialist Party, formerly Bulgaria’s Communist Party, now in opposition. Her father, Georgi Bokov, edited the country’s leading Communist newspaper. Like many children of the elite at the time, Ms. Bokova studied at Moscow’s State Institute of International Relations.

After defeating the Egyptian culture minister, Farouk Hosny, who was accused of anti-Semitism and censorship in his 22 years as culture minister, she called Mr. Hosny a friend. Trying to reach out to the Arab world, she emphasized that she came from a small town in southwest Bulgaria, which had a large Muslim population, and she said she was committed to multiculturalism. She is expected to be confirmed at the Unesco general conference on Oct. 15.

She said she would strive to give Unesco a more prominent role in talks on climate change and would focus more resolutely on gender roles, the financial crisis and other issues. As the first Eastern European director of Unesco, she said she would help improve the region’s prominence in cultural affairs.

Assen Indjiev, a Bulgarian television journalist, said Ms. Bokova was a consummate diplomat, someone who avoided ideological battles in favor of quiet diplomacy. “She is a conciliatory politician who prefers to be behind the scenes,” he said. “No one in Bulgaria believed that she would make it, because we are a small and poor country, but she was determined and she succeeded.”

Meglena Kuneva, a former Bulgarian foreign minister who is now the European commissioner for consumer affairs in Brussels, said Ms. Bokova’s election would “help improve Bulgaria’s image on the world stage.”

Yet her election also prompted some division in her country on Wednesday, with some Bulgarians questioning whether someone with a Communist past was qualified to lead the United Nations’ leading agency for culture and education. Some analysts in Bulgaria said her former ties to the Communist Party had touched a nerve among many Bulgarians, who were dissatisfied that former Communists were still in positions of power.

“Those who dislike Communism in this country are not happy about her promotion,” Ivo Indzhev, a Bulgarian political blogger, said in a telephone interview. “For people in this region, her appointment sends the message that the West can swallow someone’s Communist past very easily but can’t abide an Arab who is anti-Israel.”

A reader on Mr. Indzhev’s blog lamented that while even some people in censorship-prone Egypt had dared to criticize Mr. Hosny, the establishment in Bulgaria had chosen to gloss over Ms. Bokova’s past.

Diplomats said that as ambassador to France, Ms. Bokova was an effective champion of her country, summoning senior French officials to the embassy and presenting Bulgaria’s point of view, in particular when the European Union issued scathing reports criticizing Bulgaria for flouting the rule of law. As a candidate for vice president in 1996, she advocated Bulgaria’s membership in NATO and the European Union.

Fluent in English, French, Spanish and Russian, she said her real ambition had been to be a foreign correspondent, but that was not considered appropriate for a woman in Communist Bulgaria when she was young. “You were expected to be a good and loyal wife,” she said.