The more things change....

GOVERNMENT MINISTERS around the world are considering their replies to a pressing invitation to attend a conference the last week in June at Yamoussoukro, the birthplace of Fdlix Houphoudt-Boigny, president of the Ivory Coast. A dusty village in the bush when he was born, Yamoussoukro is now the official capital. The president has built a palace there, with pools for crocodiles, and construction is under way of a church that is to be bigger than St. Peter's, up to now the biggest church in the world.

The conference will be on "Peace in the Minds of Men" and is the work of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. The invitations urging the ministers to attend come from Federico Mayor, the former Spanish education minister, who was elected director general of UNESCO in 1987. Mayor took office promising to reform the troubled body, which the U.S., followed by Great Britain and Singapore, had quit in disgust four years ago.

Mayor, trained as a biochemist, is a man of great charm, and is universally liked. But the Yamoussoukro conference, like much at UNESCO, smacks of the bad old days of Mayor's predecessor, Amadou Mahtar M'Bow of Senegal. In particular, announcements of a jamboree on peace rouse memories of the vast and useless 1982 world conference on cultural policy in Mexico City, most memorable for the vitriolic attack on U.S. "cultural imperialism" by Jack Lang, then as now minister for cultural affairs in the French Socialist government.

It was such anti-American bias, together with serious mismanagement of funds, that prompted the departure of the United States, UNESCO's single biggest financial contributor, causing the loss to UNESCO of $50 million a year, a quarter of its budget. However, even more damaging than the loss of funds, says Richard Williamson, who was assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs up until this March, is that "UNESCO's moral and political authority is hollow without the membership of the countries that left." What has Mayor done to create conditions that would favor their return?

There have been improvements, some say. "People no longer look over their shoulders when they talk to each other in the corridors," says an American whose business takes him frequently to UNESCO headquarters in Paris. "Mayor will come to our meetings, if we ask him," says a member of the science sector, citing a conference at which the director general spent seven hours talking to the participants, "working for us. . . . It was something M'Bow would never have done."

For another UNESCO civil servant, it is too early to give a definite opinion: "Mayor is a charmer, he's a very nice guy, but we have yet to see whether the charm will be applied to getting things done." An official from the Third World explains: "The hopes of the best people were raised by M'Bow's departure, only to be dashed by Mayor's poor leadership."

One of the most widely made criticisms of M'Bow was that he was always traveling in great style and seldom attending to business at headquarters. The same charge is leveled against Mayor. "Mayor was at his desk just 15 days during the first three months of this year," says a disillusioned Paris staffer. "He is just not a hands-on manager," says a Western diplomat: "he goes around the world making promises, but no one in Paris is doing anything to implement them."

The gap between words and deeds troubles such critics as Dragoljub Najman, a former UNESCO assistant director general. He cites the pressconference ballyhoo that surrounded the launching of International Literacy Year on March 2. "It is one more proof of the absurdity of the UNESCO program," says Najman, a Yugoslavian. "It is not UNESCO that is going to make children literate." An in-house study of earlier UNESCO literacy projects concluded that the problem of literacy lay largely in a lack of political will on the part of governments. Under Mayor, UNESCO also claims it will help develop the science capacity of the least developed countries. "How?" asks Najman. "Such claims raise the problem of UNESCO's relevance-or rather, irrelevance. UNESCO is empty talk."

This sentiment is echoed by many others. The anti-American tone and activities have been reduced, says Richard Miller, the State Department observer at UNESCO, but have not been replaced by much of anything. "The problem now is that the activities are useless rather than objectionable." For Pierre de Senarclens, a Swiss who is director of UNESCO's humanrights division, part of the problem is that programs lack coherence. "It is possible," he says, "to agree on concrete programs of international cooperation, but there has been no serious effort to adequately define the areas of such cooperation.".

The true agenda at UNESCO is probably best discerned by looking at its successive six-year Medium-Term Plans. The final draft- of Mayor's first plan has just been published. It will be commented on by the UNESCO Executive Board, made up of representatives of fifty governments, in May, and then submitted to the General Conference in Paris in November-to which all 160 member states may send delegates-for possible revision and adoption.

DIPLOMATS AND others with a professional interest in UNESCO who have read Mayor's plan tend to shake their heads and shrug. Concrete activities proposed by the organization's specialists in education, natural and social sciences, culture, and communication have been largely omitted, leaving only the vaguest of outlines. "If the plan goes through as it is now," says a diplomat who has studied it, "Mayor will be able to do whatever he pleases and no one will be able to pin him down and say he is not sticking to the plan."

Mayor has more than once said the plan will reform UNESCO by reducing the number of "major programs" .from 14 to six, thus concentrating .efforts. But his critics say he is only playing with words. They cite a document circulated at UNESCO last year in Mayor's name. It explains that what were "major programs" under M'Bow would now be called "programs," and what had been called "programs" would become "sub-programs." In addition, a new top category was established-"major program areas."

"In fact," says Najman, "there are 17 'major programs' in Mayor's planM'Bow's 14, and three of Mayor's." By Najman's count, the number of "programs" has been reduced from 55 to 54, but "sub-programs" have increased from 144 to 197. "It is even further atomization of UNESCO activities," he says.

That there are problems in reconciling what Mayor says with reality is suggested by an incident during his visit to Washington in February. Mayor gave the American press some good news: plans for a New World Information Order, he said, "no longer exist" at UNESCO. The Information Order is a project favored by Third World militants and Communist states, who see it as establishing more balanced reporting and better distribution of the news worldwide by giving a bigger role to Third World journalism . Its Western critics, including American liberals, see it as a means of promoting state intervention and control of the press.

When supporters of the program in Paris learned of Mayor's remark, says Najman, "they yelled bloody murder." At a meeting of the 35-nation intergovernmental council of the International Program for the Development of Communication, the Venezuelan representative challenged whether the director general can change decisions taken by the UNESCO General Conference, such as the decision supporting a New World Information Order. And, indeed, the agenda for the Yamoussoukro conference includes "the responsibility of media decision-makers" and "the overhaul of the role and the messages of the mass media."

The continuing doubts to which UNESCO gives rise have never dampened the ardor of a small group, active inside the Washington Beltway, who have been working for a return of the U.S. to UNESCO from the day it left. Alan Keyes, assistant secretary for international organization affairs from 1985 to 1987, says he was aware of a group, "in the State Department and elsewhere, whose top priority as far as UNESCO was concerned was to get the U 'S. back in, regardless of whether there were reforms." And it is now making its move.

BACK IN PARIS after his visit to the States, Mayor boasted that as a result of his visit, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would review American relations with UNESCO. And, at the initiative of Senator Pat Moynihan, thc committee did just that on April 19.

The committee heard two panels. The first was divided two and two between those more optimistic about Mayor, and those more skeptical. The more optimistic were Leonard Sussman of Freedom House (moderately optimistic) and Gene Lyons of Dartmouth College (wildly so). The skeptics were Ed Feulner of Heritage and the present writer (both very skeptical). Then followed a second panel of what a Senate aide was overheard to call "the regular shills," drawn from the museum and educational worlds.

They repeatedly stressed how much the American community of arts and sciences is losing because the U.S. is no longer in UNESCO. "But it is a major illusion," says one well-placed UNESCO watcher, "that tbe U.S. departure from UNESCO has harmed the possibilities for Americans to have international contacts. We are more welcome to participate in UNESCO activities than ever before and can take part in virtually any of them. The fact is, Americans have never had more prestige or influence at UNESCO than we do now that we are out of it."

Owen Harries, former Australian Ambassador to UNESCO, is now co-editor of the foreign-affairs quarterly The National Interest. "M'Bow's departure was essential but not sufficient for the countries that left to return," he says. "Substantial changes are required: Has Mayor turned UNESCO back toward its original purposes? Does his MediumTerm Plan drop the wasteful and inconsequential scatter-gun approach to activities and concentrate the organization's efforts? The answer to both questions is, apparently, no."