Facing a growing avalanche of corruption scandals that threatens to bring down her network and even the disgraced agency she leads, the communist director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and her allies are scrambling to install a corrupt successor who can help keep a lid on all the malfeasance. If an independent outsider were to take over and launch a serious investigation of what has been happening at the UN agency since scandal-plagued UNESCO boss Irina Bokova took over in 2009, it could even result in prison terms, well-informed sources told The New American magazine. However, with operatives for Islamist and communist regimes leading the race so far, and the media remaining largely silent, it will take significant efforts by the agency’s member states to ensure accountability and transparency.
As regular readers of The New American know well, UNESCO Director-General Bokova, a lifelong communist from a powerful communist family, has been facing serious corruption accusations for years. Perhaps most troubling of all is her membership in the Bulgarian Communist Party (later renamed “Socialist Party”) and her service to the savage dictatorship that, according to experts on democide, murdered hundreds of thousands of innocents during its reign. Her father was a leading communist, too, even serving as the editor-in-chief of its propaganda newspaper. As the daughter of a top communist, Bokova was trained at the elite Soviet KGB-dominated State Institute of International Relations in Moscow, which specialized in training future diplomats and operatives for service to international communism. She has never apologized for her role in the brutal party or her service to the regime.
More recently, Bokova has also been ensnared in a seemingly never-ending series of scandals. First, she got caught lying on her CV. Then, her ownership of luxurious properties around the world — New York City, London, Paris — properties that investigators said her income could not account for — was exposed by the watchdog group Bivol. After that, scandals involving cronyism in her appointments of unqualified candidates to senior UN posts emerged. She was also widely accused of using public money to campaign for the UN secretary-general job while offering “awards” to potential supporters of her bid including Obama, Communist Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s wife, and other key players. Just last week, another investigation by Bivol revealed that, in violation of UN rules, she was using her luxurious tax-funded UN office-apartment in Paris as the registered place of business for a shadowy private company named after her and her husband.
While Bokova has somehow managed to stay in power amid the scandals, the corruption has already started catching up to her husband. Like Bokova, her husband, Kalin Mitrev, is also a longtime communist operative with deep ties to international communism and the former regime’s mass-murdering “security” services. And like Bokova, Mitrev also set up shop within the shadowy world of international multilateral organizations — specifically, Mitrev has been serving as the Bulgarian government’s representative to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). According to multiple news reports last month, though, Bulgarian authorities launched an investigation into Mitrev. Among other major concerns, Mitrev received about half a million U.S. dollars, part of it via Swiss bank accounts, as part of an alleged money-laundering and influence-buying scheme known as “Azerbaijani laundromat” tied to the brutal dictatorship ruling Azerbaijan.
The case was opened after the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and other media exposed the allegedly shady dealings in major newspapers across Europe. Despite her well-known close ties to the brutal regime in Azerbaijan, Bokova denied knowledge of her husband’s schemes. “I am not privy to the details of my husband’s consulting business and equally, your questions about my opinion on Azerbaijan and its leadership are wholly misplaced,” she was quoted as saying in media reports surrounding the investigation into her husband. “I most vehemently deny any wrongdoing and will consider defamatory any publication of these totally unfounded conjectures on your part.” It was not clear whether she has attempted to take legal action against the media yet. But several other embattled UN agency chiefs, including the chief of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, who is connected to a Latin American communist network, have been abusing European legal systems to silence journalists exposing their corruption. U.S. lawmakers have also expressed concerns over Bokova’s ties to the regime in Azerbaijan.
Insiders who have been sounding the alarm for years explained why Bokova is so desperate to ensure a friendly operative takes over UNESCO after her term expires. “If a new leader comes in and does any digging, Bokova could go to prison,” a senior source inside UNESCO close to the selection of a new leader told The New American, requesting anonymity to speak frankly about the sensitive situation. “Her husband is already under investigation in Bulgaria for corruption. They are scared to death to have any sort of audit, or check for accountability, or to check how she spent UNESCO money on her campaign to be UN Secretary-General — they are scared absolutely to death. But if it’s the Chinese candidate, she’ll be fine. If it’s the candidates from Qatar or Egypt, that’s OK for them also, because they are also corrupt. Bokova is desperate to get somebody from the corrupt regimes into the position to protect her from her corruptions being discovered.”
Despite the growing tsunami of scandals — and despite the well-documented mismanagement of UNESCO that has long been known worldwide — Bokova has managed to avoid any accountability. As this magazine reported in June, UNESCO staffers have been practically begging UN leaders and other officials to investigate the situation at their agency. Indeed, in a letter written by Bokova herself, she admits that under her leadership, the organization is in crisis and on the brink of disaster. More than a few powerful national governments, including the United States, Japan, Israel, and the United Kingdom, expressed major concerns, with some even cutting off funding. Despite all the evidence and documentation of corruption and Bokova’s links to international communism, though, UNESCO’s member states and the so-called “international community” have done nothing substantive to put an end to it so far. Bokova remained in office, and the problems only grew more severe.
The high-level UNESCO source expressed shock and dismay at the culture that now permeates the powerful UN agency. “There has been no accountability, they are totally ignoring the corruption, with Bokova behaving as a red [communist] princess, and because she’s leaving she doesn’t give a d*** about the organization,” the insider said. “The impunity and the arrogance — you behave arrogantly when you know there is impunity — this is something she learned from the communist regime times. There is just total impunity for the leaders, you do what you want, with no accountability, this is what she brought to UNESCO and the UN.” The source said much of the corruption is well known to UNESCO staff, who have been pleading for intervention from UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, another prominent socialist with deep ties to international communism through his leadership at the Socialist International.
Incredibly, despite the stench of scandal and the ties to international communism, Bokova was also recently appointed to UN General Assembly President Miroslav Lajcák’s new Team of External Advisors, which one prominent analyst referred to as a “gathering of international communism.” The UNESCO source was outraged. “How can you appoint Bokova after so many scandals? The most corrupted people, the most swimming in dirty scandals, are now advising the general assembly president,” the insider said, flabbergasted at the developments. “Can you imagine where this organization is going? Knowing this, you can say close down this organization, let’s all go home.” The source also pointed to other posts sought by Bokova as she prepares to leave UNESCO in tatters. “We have in front of us a multinational communist regime enterprise — they stick together, they support each other, like nobody else,” the insider said. “Maybe the Nazis were operating like this, but I can’t think of any other comparison in history.”
But with her term at UNESCO expiring soon, that could all change — at least theoretically. With Bokova and the entire communist network she is connected to at risk of being exposed, team Bokova and its allies are scrambling to install one of their own at the helm of UNESCO. In January, citing insider sources familiar with the discussions, The New American became the first publication in the world to report that Bokova saw Communist Chinese agent Qian Tang, who leads UNESCO’s “education sector,” as a good candidate for the top job at UNESCO. With the final selection for the spot set to happen in the coming days or weeks, it has now been widely reported that the mass-murdering regime in Beijing is also lobbying to have Tang installed as the next director-general. He is widely considered a frontrunner now. However, considering the Communist Chinese record of tyranny, cultural genocide, censorship, and mass murder, among other concerns, more than a few prominent voices are speaking out against the prospect of having yet another powerful UN agency under Beijing’s control.
Aside from his loyal service to the most murderous regime in human history, Tang also has other skeletons in his closet. Among other concerns, insiders warned that he and his tax-funded staff have been running his campaign to lead UNESCO at public expense. Indeed, instead of doing what taxpayers are supposedly paying him and his staff to do, Tang and his entourage have been jetting all over the world soliciting support from governments and dictatorships for his Beijing-backed bid to take over the UN agency. More than a few insiders and analysts have suggested a major conflict of interest, saying he should have resigned or stepped down from his post as assistant director-general of UNESCO while campaigning for the top job. Indeed, it is not clear whether he represents UNESCO or Beijing on his travels around the globe, critics said.
In a recent PR piece published by the supposedly “conservative”-leaning U.K. Telegraph, Tang boasts that he would use UNESCO to “cultivate a generation of global citizens,” defined in other UNESCO documents as students who have been “inculcated” with “a notion of belonging not just to their own country but to broader trans-national and global entities.” Tang also bragged about his role in formulating “Sustainable Development Goal 4” in the UN Agenda 2030 scheme, which calls for indoctrinating every child on the planet to not just accept, but to actually “promote,” the UN’s totalitarian “sustainable development” ideology. Indeed, the regime in Beijing bragged openly about its “crucial role” in creating the UN “masterplan for humanity,” and top socialists have called the scheme the “Next Great Leap Forward” for the planet. “UNESCO is guided by the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda,” Tang said. Ironically, he claimed “freedom of expression” — something that can land you in a labor camp or on the execution table in Communist China — would be a key part of his mission.
But for international communism, Tang would be the perfect candidate. On one hand, he would join the growing roster of Communist Chinese agents running UN agencies and even Interpol, the self-styled global “law enforcement” agency that was once totally controlled by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime. As this magazine has documented, the regime in Beijing and its totalitarian-minded allies in the West are positioning the Communist dictatorship to play a leading role in the international order. With UNESCO under continued communist leadership, the agency would no doubt continue working zealously to indoctrinate children around the world into the totalitarian ideologies of statism, globalism, “sustainable development,” and more. Under Bokova, the agency worked hard to promote its totalitarian ideologies in school standards, textbooks, and more, even boasting of its role in shaping the values, beliefs, attitudes, and spirituality of children around the world. At the same time, Tang would undoubtedly work to ensure that Bokova’s legacy of corruption, nepotism, and extremism would remain undisturbed. The chances of a serious investigation or audit would be practically zero.
Bokova also tried to push a candidate from Azerbaijan, although it appears that scheme foundered. Aside from the Chinese agent, sources in UNESCO said the other front-runners to lead the agency include the candidates from Egypt, Qatar and France. The French candidate has essentially no experience aside from a dubious ministerial position in the deeply unpopular administration of disgraced former French President Francois Hollande. She is a member of Hollande’s Socialist Party, which has close links to socialist and communist regimes and movements around the world — meaning she, too, would be unlikely to support a serious investigation of Bokova’s tenure. The Egyptian candidate, meanwhile, also has a checkered past, and is linked to a regime that is known for human-rights abuses. The candidate is said to be friendly to Bokova and would also be unlikely to let the light shine in on her predecessor’s abuses. With the regime in Qatar currently embroiled in allegations by its neighbors of support for international terrorism, that candidacy may be on its way down. Most of the nine major candidates for the job come from actual dictatorships.
Amid the race, at least two of the candidates’ home regimes have been accused by insiders aware of the machinations of improper influence buying at best — and full blown corruption at worst. In correspondence obtained by The New American, the communist dictatorship ruling Vietnam, which is pushing its own Bokova-friendly communist candidate to run UNESCO, offered all-expenses paid trips to Vietnam for the ambassadors to UNESCO or their representatives. The offer was extended to all 58 of the voting board governments involved in the decision-making process surrounding the UN agency’s leadership. The Islamist regime in Qatar made a similar offer, inside sources familiar with the dealings told The New American. “This is active corruption,” a UNESCO source who outlined the scheme to The New American explained. “In addition to the money changing hands in envelopes.” Almost all ambassadors refused the offers, the source said.
Unfortunately, UNESCO is hardly unique within the UN system. In fact, the corruption, intrigue, nepotism, totalitarian agenda, and scandal that has swamped the UN’s “education” agency, while perhaps more extreme, is typical of UN bureaucracies. Other parts of the UN system, especially the “peacekeeping” military and various “aid” schemes, have been rocked by the systematic and widespread rape and sexual abuse of children — virtually all of which goes unpunished. Communist operatives are running huge swaths of the UN system, using U.S. tax dollars to push their anti-American, anti-freedom agenda. It is time for Congress to quit making the American people accessories to this via U.S. funding of the UN. And in the meantime, UN criminals must not be allowed to hide behind “diplomatic immunity” to escape justice. Regardless of who ends up in charge of UNESCO, corruption must be prosecuted, and the U.S. government should cut all ties with the out-of-control outfit. Voting for the next UNESCO chief begins October 9.
Photo of Irina Bokova: United Nations
Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe but has lived all over the world. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook. He can be reached at [email protected].
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