**The race for the leadership of Unesco, the UN’s cultural arm, has begun in Paris with controversy surrounding one of the front-running candidates.**Farouk Hosny, Egypt’s culture minister, made a pledge in 2008 to burn Israeli books in Egyptian libraries.
He has since expressed “solemn regret” but has been criticised by Jewish European groups and US commentators.
The Executive Board’s 58 members will interview each of the nine candidates and then vote in a secret ballot.
Mr Hosny has been Egypt’s culture minister for the past 22 years and says on his website that he is a man of peace.
“I have been serving as minister of culture in a state that made peace with Israel and is persistently endeavouring to give precedence to dialogue over violence,” he says.
Cultural relations
Despite Egypt’s 1979 peace deal with Israel, the country has resisted cultural integration in protest at Israel’s continued occupation of Arab land.
In the wake of the criticisms of Mr Hosny, the Egyptian culture ministry agreed to publish Arabic translations of two novels by the renowned Israeli writers Amos Oz and David Grossman - for the first time.
Opposition to Hosny’s candidature comes from Auschwitz survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel as well as prominent Jewish intellectuals Bernard-Henri Levy and Claude Lanzmann.
They wrote in Le Monde newspaper that “the international community must spare itself the shame of appointing Farouk Hosni to the post of Unesco director general”.
They said the book burning comment was just one of many “insane declarations… of hate and error” accompanying a “frenzy of conspiracy theories” that Mr Hosny had made.
They quoted him saying in 2001: “Israeli culture is an inhuman culture… aggressive, racist, pretentious… based on a simple principle, stealing that which does not belong to it and then claiming it as its own.”
Farouk Hosny says that his remarks were taken out of context and that people should not judge him on those remarks alone.
“Do not look at one sentence. Review 27 years spent in the service of culture and make an assessment of what I did in the service of humanity, creativity, writers and books,” he says.
Other candidates
Hosni’s main rival for the post is thought to be European Commissioner for External Relations and ex-Austrian foreign minister, Benita Ferrero-Waldner.
Other candidates in the running are Lithuania’s Ambassador to Unesco Ina Marciulionyte, former Bulgarian Foreign Minister Irina Bokova, former Algerian Foreign Minister Mohammed Bedjaoui and former Russian deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Yakovenko.
There are two candidates from Africa, Tanzania’s Sospeter Muhongo, a geologist, and Benin’s ambassador to Unesco, Noureini Tidjani-Serpos.
The 193-member UN agency has a mandate to promote global understanding through culture, science and education.