Unesco will therefore welcome the United States. The Americans are making a comeback to an organization they left in 2017, on the decision of Donald Trump. The reinstatement of the first world power was made following a favorable vote during an extraordinary general conference of this organization dependent on the UN based in Paris.
“The resolution has been adopted,” announced the president of the assembly, the Brazilian Santiago Irazabal Mourao, triggering applause. Some 132 states voted for this American return, 15 abstained and 10 opposed it, including Iran, Syria, China and especially Russia, whose delegation had multiplied the speeches Thursday on points of procedure and the amendments on Friday in order to delay the debates.
“We would welcome Washington’s willingness” to join Unesco, which “would strengthen our organization”, but “we believe that they are trying to take us into a parallel world, which really exceeds all absurd descriptions books by Lewis Carroll,” thundered a Russian diplomat on Friday.
“In this distorted space, those who uphold democracy and the rule of law are beginning to drag us into violating these rules and arrogating privileged rights to themselves,” he continued, saying the United States must pay their arrears to Unesco in full before being able to join it, when Washington proposes to do so gradually.
“The way in which the United States has requested this return is not acceptable” and is akin to “a violation of the spirit of the Constitution” of this institution, for his part castigated an Iranian diplomat. Washington had left Unesco in October 2017 denouncing the “persistent anti-Israeli bias” of this institution. This withdrawal, accompanied by that of Israel, had been effective since December 2018.
Since 2011, and the admission of Palestine into UNESCO, the United States, then led by Barack Obama, had stopped all funding for the UN organization, a huge setback for it, then that US contributions made up 22% of its budget. But Washington proposed in early June, in a letter to Audrey Azoulay, “a plan” for their return to the UN organization for education, culture and science.
While the American debt to Unesco, contracted between 2011 and 2018, is today 619 million dollars, more than the annual budget of Unesco, estimated at 534 million dollars, they indicated that they had asked Congress to disburse $150 million for fiscal year 2024, with an equivalent amount to be disbursed in subsequent years “until the arrears to Unesco are cleared.”
