Spanish diplomat: CEO Azoulay terrorizes UNESCO staff

The Spanish diplomat representing Madrid at UNESCO, Iñigo Ramirez de Haro, wrote a letter of resignation, accusing the Director General of the humanitarian organization, Frenchwoman Audrey Azoulay, of totalitarianism and terror by the leadership.

The diplomat called on his colleagues to raise the issue of the dismissal of UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay at a general conference in November 2023, Caliber.Az reports, citing Russian media.

De Haro is convinced that nepotism and arrogance rule at UNESCO, and the organization's employees are afraid to express their opinions in leadership for fear of being fired.

He made the remarks in an open letter to his colleagues.

"Dear Colleagues! Today is my last day at UNESCO. The Spanish Foreign Ministry offered me to stay, but I refused. I can't stay a day longer in an organization where there is NO freedom of speech.

At the last meeting of the Executive Council, I made a statement under item ‘216 EX/13. Strategy for the management of human resources’. A few minutes later, I again took the floor to retract what I had said earlier. Many of you might think that I have some kind of mental problem like bipolar disorder, but no, I am in perfect health.

The fact is that CEO Audrey Azoulay personally called the Spanish Ambassador to inform him that, if I do not retract my words, she has already written a message on WhatsApp, which she will immediately contact the Spanish Foreign Minister.

I was not going to become a ‘scapegoat’, so I immediately withdrew my application, so as not to be expelled from UNESCO on the same day, so as not to be left without a salary and a job.

Thus, Director-General Audrey Azoulay only confirmed that most UNESCO staff live in fear of becoming unemployed if they freely express their opinions in a leadership where nepotism and arrogance reign, which has never happened before in UNESCO, and dictatorial, despotic and irresponsible methods.

As in all dictatorial regimes, UNESCO employees are required to blindly obey and curry favour with their superiors. Thus, UNESCO cannot remain a laboratory of ideas.

And if we add to this the fact that the ‘general debate’ at UNESCO is not a debate at all and not universal at all, ‘strategic transformation’ has nothing to do with it, and so on, because a kind of ‘neolingua’ was created, where words do not mean at all what is defined in the dictionaries, in order to achieve complete subordination of both staff and Member States, we are in a very worrying situation.

Don't be fooled! The biggest danger facing UNESCO today is not geopolitical confrontation or other similar conflicts, but ‘irrelevance’ and all that.

The Secretariat, including the CEO and all managers, serves the Member States, not the other way around. It's time to say ‘Enough!’ and recall the words of Mandelstam: ‘Silence is a real crime against the human race.’

I would recommend that you, in order to restore and save UNESCO, consider removing the Director-General from his position already at the general conference in November 2023,” wrote Íñigo Ramirez de Haro.