Luxor4u

Egyptian foreign relations isn’t in a winning spot at the moment and the world media has a deal to say about its policy and some very rough stuff about the leading personalities so you would think it’s a good time to put the best foot forward.

The latest Egyptian initiative is Moushira Khattab as candidate for the head of UNESCO.

Her qualifications might mean something to certain people in Egypt - but you be the judge:

Cabinet Minister under Mubarak – Family and Population. Not a big success I suggest and not really relevant.

She is 74 years of age looking for a 4 year term – maybe 8 years like most predecessors have been given. We need more old people in top jobs although 8 hour days might be a challenge as might regular international travel and in any case she should be checked at some stage for Alzheimer’s.

She was Egyptian ambassador in a number of minor posts and no major posts – so even Mubarak had a view about her diplomatic skills, potential and achievements.

Wkileaks describes her as a ‘close friend’ of the divine Suzanne and an impediment, along with the Mubarak sons, to reform of Egyptian education - which is a lot better than the US comments about some serving ministers and maybe being close to unpleasant people and opposing reform is an achievement - to some eyes.

Hawass has published an article supporting her.

She is Vice President of an Amsterdam ‘charity’ which publishes no annual report nor financial statement. Maybe this is a relevant ‘achievement’.

Served as secretary-general of Egypt’s National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM), ‘where she tackled the issues of female genital mutilation (FGM) and child marriage’. I think the latest Egyptian stats showed she failed.

Her last real job seems about 6 years ago so until this candidature its been a long time since anyone thought her a valuable asset worth hiring.

She has no background or experience in anything relevant to the functions of UNESCO (culture, history, education, freedom of expression and thought, environment) and her general experience as a Minister, manager and diplomat seems not to include any success or achievement in a management role. Her academic background is not relevant to this job.

She seems to have fantastic self-promotion skills.

6 Egyptian human rights groups, none of whom are associated with the government, have strongly protested her nomination. The world press reports this but not the Egyptian press. The locals claim in the western media that she is ‘complicit in human rights violations’ – maybe that is a qualification for the job? Al Ahram reports only that a score, which they do not detail, of local community/human rights organizations support her nomination. Really.

Apparently UNESCO is a bloated and politically festering mess so some candidates should feel more at home in this than others. Unfortunately it needs radical reform which may not suit some – particularly octogenarians who have a very limited history of reform and close associations with unpleasant people. According to French state radio and Reuters the election campaign is a diplomatic bully boy exercise where the credentials of the candidates are irrelevant - therefore some candidates might do better than you think.

Obviously she is the best local candidate – wonder what the second best looks like?

The current incumbent, from dubious Bulgaria, has a husband who took a E450,000 ‘gift’ from the horrible Azerbaijani’s who are destroying their historical buildings in Baku and on which UNESCO has been silent whilst its UNESCO's leader is a friend of its first/worst lady. The UK Minister has apparently described her ‘as a old fashioned communist’ and a ‘disaster’ and allegations of corruption, nepotism and mismanagement are numerous (including in a petition from 159 of her staff). Apparently her public CV contains flattering untruths. So the opportunities look bright for 'enterprising' new incumbents with the 'relevant' experience (as long as they don't reform anything). https://www.occrp.org/en/40-press-relea ... er-silence and https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... ing-claims and http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -year.html

I know Trump is garbage but that doesn’t mean that his recent call for major UN reform – including clean up of its staffing - is all wrong. The US stopped funding UNESCO 6 years ago and now proposes to leave it to the lunatics to run. https://www.dailysabah.com/world/2017/1 ... ody-unesco

UNESCO’s budget is 345 pages long and is incoherent but the office of its chief seems to cost at least $US7 million. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/0 ... 44305e.pdf so its not exactly a job designed to attract a high minded person devoted only to public service. I’ve done a much bigger budget which took up only 50 pages and was written in clear English and contained lots of numbers, objectives and performance criteria. On the other hand UNESCO’s budget is big on rhetoric and low on numbers/targets/outcomes/performance criteria. It’s a disgrace that wouldn’t pass an Auditor General in any civilized country and doesn’t pass any accounting standards – although by Bulgarian standards its probably state of the art.

Still it could be worse. The alternative candidates are Qatari and French (with a Jewish background). Maybe the job should be left vacant – along with a few thousand other UNESCO jobs. Doing nothing could be better than these people doing something and the saved money could be given to the poor rather that tax exempt UN 'workers'.

Maybe for the new top job they could do what everyone else does with a management job – hire a professional search and selection firm to give frank and honest advice on which candidate is good and which one is hopeless. These firms are usually good at detecting lies in CVs.

What's your problem Hafiz?

Moushira Khattab seems to be the perfect choice for head of UNESCO

An Egyptian non-entity for a basket case of an institution.

The Lower House of the Egyptian Parliament wants to do its part to help Khattab’s UNESCO attempt: House Human Rights Committee Chairman Alaa Abed issued a statement calling for the prosecution of (Egyptian) NGOs and civil society members that opposed Khattab’s candidacy, AMAY reports. The MP suggested that naysayers should be charged with “being unpatriotic” and “adopting stances similar to … Human Rights Watch” — clear infractions of the criminal code, if ever there was one. https://enterprise.press/

How locking up Egyptians is going to deliver more UN votes for Egypt escapes me but gives you a clear measure of the political judgment of this senior Egyptian politician.

He has a track record on Human Rights.

He was previously a secret police officer, a member of Mubarak’s political party and an MP for that party, who was accused 10 months ago in the middle east media and by a fellow Egyptian MP of being personally involved in torture. The deputy chair of the committee is also a former police officer. http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/origina ... versy.html

(people say we need Mubarak back – maybe he, and his people, never left)

The New York Times has more specific background information on allegations against him. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/opin ... ml?mcubz=0

Local organizations, not funded by the government, also have opinions about him. http://www.egyptindependent.com/nchr-sl ... committee/

The job of Chair of the Human Rights Committee is not one for freedom lovers and a recent previous Chair of this Parliamentary committee said to demonstrators in 2011 “Whoever says ‘down with the military regime’ will be beaten with a shoe and his tongue will be cut off.” http://pomed.org/pomed-publications/pom ... g-dissent/

I guess if more tongues had been cut off in 2011 Mubarak would still be in power.

Until recently it was different. In April 2016, Mohamed Anwar al-Sadat, president of the Reform and Development Party and the nephew of the late Egyptian president, was elected the short lived committee Chair. He took a moderate human rights approach and was quickly removed from his position, expelled from Parliament and may have had his citizenship cancelled. Apparently he talked to NGO’s. One of the leaders in his expulsion was the current Chair who has now succeeded him in this job after previously, and embarrassingly, losing the earlier public MP vote to Sadat.

This time the election of the current Chair was easy because all other candidates withdrew - at the very last moment – very odd and I wonder why.

Recent round-ups should come as no surprise because the former close friend of the Mubarak family, member and senior official in the NDP and Mubarak cabinet minister Faiza Abou el-Naga has been at this for years and wants all outsiders rounded up and out – including the sons of US Cabinet Secretaries and particularly NGO’s, both local and international – but oddly not Salafi NGO’s as long as they are funded by the Gulf.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/mi ... 75bc41ed6c

Paradoxically she was for years Egypt’s official representative to the United Nations Human Rights Council. I guess her credentials were that she knew a lot about human rights – and how to remove them. Others members on the UN Human Rights Council bring not dissimilar skills – including Syria.

She is now elevated to be the President’s current National Security Advisor which must be a bit of a problem because she is very unpopular in Washington and The New York Times prints that she is “hostile to the US” https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/06/worl ... ml?mcubz=0 whilst al Ahram has published that “American officials simply hate her” and “Members of Egyptian civil society despise her” http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent ... uckus.aspx. Other experts and Washington insiders say even worse things about her. https://www.cfr.org/blog/egypt-being-fayza-aboulnaga. As far back as 2007 she was trying to get Transparency International kicked out and repress NGO’s. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08CAIRO399_a.html. She also seems also to believe in conspiracy theories, states that Freedom House is a secret ‘Jewish lobby’ and her track record of action and language is extreme and populist rather than diplomatic – but I’m sure her septuagenarian judgment and sanity are considered, by some, to be sound.

How you can be a Presidential national security advisor who is hostile to and hated by your most powerful ally is a question that has no obvious answer.

I think its fair to say that Human Rights is in ‘safe’ hands – in fact the same hands its always been in. Why change anything? Even if the world changes Egypt should stay the same. Also, old hands should be given all the new jobs and more tongues should be cut out – possibly by those with previous practical experience of torture.

Update - France's Audrey Azoulay has won the vote against the Qatari. Egypt voted for her but al Ahram fails to mention she has a Jewish background – still that is better than being a Muslim Qatari at this particular time and at 45 years, with a world class tertiary education, including in management, and relevant experience as a previous serving French Culture Minister, I guess she is qualified for the job. For some she is a worry because she believes in reform and freedom of expression, so expect Faiza Abou el-Naga to make an early statement that UNESCO is a Jewish conspiracy whilst she forgets her boss voted for her.

Some places are different. Azoulay's Jewish/Moroccan father is a prominent and very successful official advisor to the King of Morocco so I guess people who claim blood descent from The Prophet (as the King does) don't believe in Jewish World Conspiracies and didn't kick all the Jews out.