'New era': Bulgaria's candidate wins the race to head Unesco.

The evening hours of September 22, Bulgaria's Independence Day, brought good news for those who had backed ambassador in Paris and former foreign minister Irina Bokova to be elected the new Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, Unesco.

After five days of voting, Bokova, who was also Bulgaria's permanent representative at Unesco, beat Egypt's culture minister Farouk Hosny in a final round run-off to succeed Koichiro Matsura as head of the international body.

Bokova was nominated for the post by the previous government in 2008, and Bulgarian officials devoted considerable effort abroad in face-to-face lobbying to win support for her.

The vote in her favour by the Unesco board, which chose her from an original nine candidates, is still subject to confirmation by a vote in October by the general assembly of the organisation, which has 193 member states.

Prior to the rounds of voting by the board, Bokova said in a message on her website: "The greatest challenge is to lead the world into a new era of peace and humanism, to create more inclusive, just, and equitable societies through sustainable economic and social development, based on science, innovation and new technologies that will serve mankind and will preserve the environment".

Reacting to the election, she repeated her pledges to reform Unesco, to make it more effective and less bureaucratic.

Prime Minister Boiko Borissov and President Georgi Purvanov welcomed the election win with similar messages saying that Bulgarians should be proud of the moment and Bulganan-language media trumpeted Bokova's triumph.

The election of Bokova was attended by controversy at home and abroad.

Bulgarian-language internet forums included grumblings about her membership of a family prominent in the country's communist era, with her father Georgi Bokov having been editor of party mouthpiece Rabotnichesko Delo ("Workers Deed") and her brother Filip being close to key figures in the Bulgarian Socialist Party, lineal successor to the Bulgarian Communist Party, in the form of current and immediate past leaders Sergei Stanishev and President Purvanov, respectively.

She beat Hosny after vociferous misgivings being expressed in public about his alleged statements about Jewish influence in the international media and for the fact that he said that he would burn Israeli books if they found their way into Egyptian libraries--comments which he said had been taken out of context; for the latter comment, he apologised. The statements led prominent European Jewish intellectuals and Jewish human rights organisations to speak out against his candidacy. In turn, the media in the Arab and Muslim world were irate about his defeat.

Al-Jazeera said that the defeat of Hosny sent a negative message to the Muslim world, while Egyptian daily Al-Masry Al-Youm said that a "clash of civilisations" had determined the vote and that Hosny had been brought down by "America, Europe and the Jewish lobby".

Arab media also published allegations of bribery for backers of Hosny to switch allegiance to Bokova, although no proof of this was offered and Unesco firmly rejected the allegations.

Egypt's Al-Abram newspaper said that France--even though it officially had joined the African Union and Arab states in supporting Hosny--had influenced its former colonies in North Africa to switch allegiance from Hosny to Bokova.

Against the background of the furore in media in Muslim countries, Bokova told France's L'Express that she intended to improve the dialogue between civilisations.

Unesco's mandate is to contribute to peace and security by promoting international collaboration through education, science and culture, to improve universal respect for justice, the rule of law, and the human rights and freedoms set out in the UN Charter.

It supports projects including literacy, technical and teacher training programmes, international science collaboration, cultural history projects, cultural diversity and the World Heritage Sites project.

Bokova will be the organisation's 10th Director-General, and at the end of her four-year term, will be eligible for election for a further term. Not only is she the first Director-General from Eastern Europe, Bokova is also--as several media reports pointed out-the first woman to occupy the post.

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