By MadaMasr –
In what many celebrated as a historic moment and a national achievement for Egypt, former Tourism and Antiquities Minister Khaled al-Enany was elected on Monday evening as director-general of UNESCO, the UN’s specialized agency for education, science and culture.
His election follows two years of intensive campaigning and crowns decades of similar attempts by a succession of Egyptian officials who have sought to secure the position, its prestige and what used to be a significant cachet of global cultural influence.
But it also comes amid skepticism among the community heritage and conservation experts and practitioners given Enany’s checkered track record between 2016 and 2022, when he was antiquities minister — a period during which fêted state-led urban and infrastructural development projects actively eroded historical sites across the country.
At the same time, Enany’s new position at the UNESCO — for which he faced little real competition — also revived questions around the fate of the UN body itself two years into Israel’s genocidal war, when the embattled bodies of the international community have shown limited capacity to exert pressure on states’ decision-making apparatus, whether on matters of life or death or of heritage and culture.
Long Quest to the UNESCO Helm
Enany is only the latest in a long line of Egyptian officials hoping to advance their career from national governance to the international stage via UNESCO.
Egypt has, in fact, made three previous attempts to win the UNESCO director seat, a source who worked on campaigns for previous Egyptian candidates told Mada Masr. Two of those prior attempts were under former President Hosni Mubarak, starting with Ismail Serageldin, founding director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and followed by Farouk Hosni, a former culture minister who became the first candidate to be formally backed by the state. Later, under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, former head of the National Council for Human Rights, Mushira Khattab made another state-backed bid.
“For anyone, any person, any nation, it is a great honor to be elected to this very high office and of course, because no Egyptian has ever been elected, it is a great thing,” American University in Cairo Egyptology Professor Salima Ikram told Mada Masr.
The step also secured a long sought-after boost to regional representation in the body that was founded as part of a Western-led effort at international consensus building in the wake of the world wars.
Stephen Doempke, chair of the World Heritage Watch, notes that “there is a general feeling” in UNESCO circles that Arab countries have been disregarded or even insulted.”
“Now,” he says, “this is all exacerbated by the Gaza conflict, which involves a lot of destruction of cultural heritage.” Ikram furthers that point, noting, “There have been other Africans but no one from the MENA region, so that’s also quite a triumph.”
Diplomatic Deals
Enany’s election victory came as a reward to over two years of campaigning that saw him travel to over 60 countries and draw on support from state backers ranging from the ambassadorial squad of the Foreign Ministry, who were at his side in Paris for election night celebrations, to state carrier, EgyptAir, which got a special mention in the former minister’s acceptance speech.
Outside Egypt, he had unanimous backing from Arab countries throughout his campaign, notes Nahla Imam, Egypt’s representative to the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and advisor to the Culture Ministry for Intangible Cultural Heritage.
“Before his nomination, the Arab League met and member states agreed that no Arab country would field a rival candidate, that they would all rally behind Khaled al-Enany as the single contender,” Imam says.
The source, who worked on previous Egyptian bids for the post, also notes the European backing for his nomination. Among them were France, which also awarded him the title of Knight of the Legion of Honor in the weeks leading up to Monday night — with the source noting that French support for his campaign later allowed him to win the backing of all key executive councils, such as in South Korea and Africa.
In the end, Imam says, Enany won with 55 votes. Just two went to his competitor, the Congolese national Firman Matoko, who entered the race as a veteran UNESCO employee.
Concerns at Home
The unanimous backing from Egypt’s government and the international community flies in the face of the sentiment among many heritage and conservation practitioners and activists.
Many of those who have long worked to safeguard Egypt’s historical heritage expressed concern about Enany’s track record, pointing to the public spaces and monuments across the country that were put in jeopardy during his tenure as antiquities minister.
His candidacy in itself was “a big mistake,” wrote Galila al-Qadi, research director at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD), in a Facebook post a few days before Enany’s victory. While serving as antiquities minister, Enany was responsible for “repeated crimes, committed with premeditation and intent, against Egypt’s architectural and urban heritage,” she said.
Qadi pointed to state development works at the Giza plateau, in Sinai’s St. Catherine monastery and Historic Cairo, particularly the demolition of dozens of tombs and burial grounds of notable figures and passed loved ones to make way for the construction of the Fardous Axis flyover, among other sites that she said were robbed of their “urban harmony” during his tenure.
His ministerial roles, starting with his appointment as antiquities minister in 2016 and with the tourism portfolio added to his ministry in 2019, came amid a general direction by the government to financialize government assets, a trend that heritage experts say has been executed at the expense of the historical value of the sites in question and community access to shared heritage.
The St. Catherine’s Monastery Controversy
One of the most notable of these “development” projects, described by Doempke as “monstrous” is the development of the lands around St. Catherine, a thousands of years old autonomous religious sanctuary in South Sinai.
Years of dispute over the development of the monastery playing out in court were compounded in 2022, before Enany exited government office, by his ministry backing a legal appeal that challenged the monastery’s exceptional status.
In a document reviewed by Mada Masr after its publication by Coptic Solidarity, a US-based organization seeking to support the Coptic minority in Egypt on the Monastery case, the organization likewise highlighted Enany’s role in the dispute.
The group says that the case against the monastery’s status quo was “expanded” to include the Tourism and Antiquities Ministry while Enany was still its head in early 2022, highlighting that the government’s objective at the time was to claim ownership of the monastery’s land and demand compensation for “historical exploitation.”
The legal dispute culminated in a ruling at the Ismailia Appeals Court earlier this year to evict the monastery’s archbishop from 14 land plots in South Sinai, a decision which sparked a division that tore through the religious community for months afterward.
A cultural preservation activist who spoke on condition of anonymity expressed concern regarding Enany’s election given his “direct role as an active participant in the court case that has so disastrously divided the monastery of St. Catherine.”
Cairo’s Vanishing Past
Enany was also in charge when many tombs in the historic Old Cairo burial grounds were gradually eroded by state-led infrastructure development reshaping the face of the Egyptian capital — despite many of them holding UNESCO backed heritage status.
He is also on record arguing against the type of heritage registration and protection that UNESCO endorses. In a 2021 House plenary session, he pushed back against the extensive use of protections, saying, “if I were to register every building that’s over a hundred years old, I’d end up registering half the country.”
According to the source who worked on previous Egyptian officials’ UNESCO campaigns, this led to deliberation among some voting members about the implications of UNESCO being steered by someone who, during his role as antiquities minister, was responsible for the destruction of a substantial volume of architectural heritage. The source said there was even lobbying against him during his campaign.
The implications stretch beyond “UNESCO is the UN agency with the mandate for freedom of expression,” says Courtney Radsch, director of the Center for Journalism and Liberty at Open Markets Institute.
“But how rigorously it pursues that mandate and how much space there is for critical reporting and robust advocacy on behalf of press freedom will be influenced by whoever is leading the organization.”
Radsch is a former program specialist in the communications and information sector at UNESCO. During her time at the organization, “under the leadership of a director who had relatively close ties to Russia,” she recalls how the leadership’s direction limited their impact.
According to Radsch, “there are a lot of politics at UNESCO that can prevent the organization from accurately or rigorously critiquing press freedom violations.”
“The mandate of journalists’ safety in terms of record keeping and speaking out has been circumscribed,” she continues, “to largely focus only on killing, missing a lot of other types of press freedom violations.”
The mandate remains crucial, however, and “continues to play a role in setting a standard on a broad wave of press freedom issues that are less susceptible to political interference,” she says.
A Weakened UNESCO in a Divided World
Along with their concern about Enany’s stewardship of Egyptians’ history, commentators responding to his Monday night victory also questioned whether UNESCO can still command the type of influence necessary to sway government policymaking at a time when the organization is riven by political and financial challenges.
The United States has announced that it will officially withdraw from UNESCO in 2026, a move anticipated to result in a shortfall in the organization’s budget of at least eight percent.
Behind its withdrawal is the national interest that has underpinned the Republican Party’s approach to the bodies of international politics under both Trump administrations. In its decision, the US cited UNESCO’s “globalist, ideological agenda for international development,” which the US argued in its statement is at odds with the country’s “America First” foreign policy.
It also described UNESCO’s inclusion of the state of Palestine as one of its member states as a “highly problematic” move that contributed to the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization, a stance echoed in Tel Aviv.
The US was the only party to abstain during Monday’s vote in Paris.
Doempke notes that it is true the body is now on the back foot, unable to be firm in taking actions to protect cultural heritage due to the imperative its founding convention places on multilateral consensus-building.
He argues the convention was drafted at a very different time, and is now decades out of date, in an era where sovereign decision-making has become king.
Gesturing to the huge shift in how countries approach the body, he gestures to an example: “Imagine: Gamal Abdel Nasser called UNESCO for help to save the Abu Simbel Temple. Rather than drowning the temple, he called the international community to help,” he says.
Outgoing UNESCO head and former French Culture Minister Audrey Azoulay has already taken measures to mitigate the impact of the funding shortfall, which is unlikely to be as severe as it was the first time Trump withdrew.
Can Enany Restore Credibility?
Enany, meanwhile, has said he will seek to cultivate good relations with all participating countries, mentioning specifically those “who didn’t vote.”
But Doempke cautions that at the funding level, supplementary financing from other countries would likely come from national voluntary contributions rather than the foundational statutory funding commitments.
Why does this matter? For Doempke, it’s that this alternative will allow states to exercise control over how the money is spent.
What we can guess of the outlook, says the World Heritage Watch chair, is that the core activities of UNESCO — heritage, education, and freedom of expression — may suffer against individual projects.
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By Aida Salem and Farah Fangary. Additional reporting by Emma Scolding
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