Inter Press Service - January 27, 2004
Jim Lobe

The massive 373-billion-dollar spending bill approved by Congress last week and signed into law by President George W. Bush on Friday will permit the United States to return as a member in good standing to the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) after a nearly 20-year boycott of the Paris-based agency.

It provides 71 million dollars for U.S. dues to UNESCO in 2004 and for the last quarter of 2003, to ensure that Washington can run for a seat on UNESCO's policy-making executive board.

The bill also includes 34 million dollars for another U.N. agency with which Washington, particularly the Bush administration, has had troubled relations: the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA).

Under strong pressure from the anti-abortion movement, the administration has withheld congressionally-mandated appropriations for UNFPA for two years, citing controversial charges the organisation provides indirect support for China's family-planning programme, which anti-abortion activists claim uses forced abortions and sterilisations.

The administration has not yet said whether it intends to withhold the UNFPA money for 2004.

The total foreign aid bill came to 17.55 billion dollars, nearly 1.3 billion dollars below Bush's initial request of a year ago, but also a six percent increase over spending levels for fiscal year 2003, which ended Sep. 30.

But the bill does not include any of the 89 billion dollars approved for Iraq and Afghanistan late last year.

The largest single allocation in the fiscal year 2004 bill was 3 billion dollars for Israel, in mostly military assistance, followed by Egypt, which will receive some 2.1 billion dollars.

The World Bank's soft-loan facility, the International Development Association (IDA) is to receive nearly one billion dollars.

Under the bill, the United States will spend a record 2.4 billion dollars this year on the fight against the global HIV/AIDS epidemic, with virtually all of the money targeted at sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean.

Of that amount, the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria will receive 500 million dollars, 300 million dollars more than Bush had requested.

The Fund, which is designed to distribute assistance quickly to proven programmes, has been starved for cash since it launched operations two years ago, and the increased U.S. contribution, while still far short of what public-health experts believe is necessary to cope with the AIDS epidemic, in particular, will help boost its fast-diminishing resources.

AIDS is currently killing about three million people a year, nearly 80 percent of them in Africa.

The bill provides some 321 million dollars for U.N. programmes, more than a third of which, 120 million dollars, is earmarked for the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF).

The inclusion of 71 million dollars for UNESCO marks the fulfilment of Bush's pledge to the United Nations in September 2002 -- in a speech devoted mainly to rallying U.N. support for a confrontational policy with Iraq -- to return to an agency from which the Ronald Reagan administration withdrew 20 years ago.

Many analysts saw Bush's unexpected commitment as a bow to multilateralism at a time when Washington appeared to be preparing to wage war; if necessary, unilaterally.

The Reagan administration originally ordered the pullout to protest what it called UNESCO's ''anti-U.S.'' politicisation and ''extravagant budgetary mismanagement'' under then-director-general Amadou Mahtar M'Bow of Senegal.

''UNESCO has extraneously politicised virtually every subject it deals with, has exhibited hostility toward the basic institutions of a free society, especially a free market and a free press, and has demonstrated unrestrained budgetary expansion,'' the State Department charged at the time.

After Washington's withdrawal, Britain and Singapore, citing similar reasons, also left the agency, effectively crippling its financial health. Britain, however, returned in 1997.

The administration of former Democratic president Bill Clinton (1993-2001) stated several times it believed UNESCO had reformed sufficiently to warrant Washington's return, but never made a formal request to the Republican-dominated Congress.

Lobbied by Reagan's former secretary of state, George Shultz, as well as by numerous U.S. scientific, educational and cultural organisations that had opposed the withdrawal in the first place, Bush decided to return, and late last year nominated Louise V. Oliver, a right-wing political activist, as his ambassador there.

Some of his aides have argued that UNESCO can be used effectively to promote more pro-western values in the educational systems of Arab and Islamic countries, a priority in the administration's "war on terrorism".

The president of the United Nations Foundation and Better World Fund, former Senator Timothy Wirth, Monday applauded Congress for fully funding Bush's request. "UNESCO plays a crucial role in promoting American values such as education, democracy and human rights around the world," he said.

"The organisation has been reformed, and America will participate fully in its mission to advance human rights and tolerance and learning," he added in a statement.

Congress' approval of 34 million dollars for UNFPA in 2004 was also widely hailed by family planning and women's rights activists, who called on Bush to honour Congress' decision and break with his past decisions to withhold the aid.

UNFPA, which has vehemently denied that it supports any of China's coercive programmes, is the world's most important provider of family-planning assistance, and its work has long been given high marks by U.S. public-health experts.

The agency's denials have been backed up by a number of independent investigations, including by a delegation of Muslim, Roman Catholic and Jewish experts and ethicists who travelled to China last year.

But Bush, who has justified his decision to withhold the money on a novel reading of the 1984 Kemp-Kasten amendment that bans U.S. funding for programmes that support "coercive abortion or involuntary sterilisation", has strong political ties to the anti-abortion movement.

Neither former Republican presidents Ronald Reagan nor George H.W. Bush ever contended that UNFPA violated the Kemp-Kasten amendment. Instead, they simply subtracted the amount of money UNFPA was spending in China from the total contribution to the agency approved by Congress.

UNFPA's congressional supporters succeeded this year in changing the language of the appropriation to make it more difficult for Bush to deny the funding. Instead of simply not spending the money, as he has been able to do in the past, the new law requires him to make an explicit finding that UNFPA is violating the amendment.

"Unlike last year, President Bush will be unable to quietly 'de-fund' UNFPA without fanfare," said Craig Lasher, senior policy analyst at Population Action International.

"We hope that he will take a really serious look at the facts on the ground, and if he does, we're confident that UNFPA will get the money that the United States Congress has appropriated."

*****

+UNESCO (http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php@URL_ID=15006&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html)

+UNFPA (http://www.unfpa.org/news/news.cfm?ID=411)

+Population Action International (http://www.populationaction.org)

(END/IPS/NA/WD/CR/PR/IP/ML/JL/ML/04)

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