Nine candidates, including Bulgarian ambassador to Paris and former foreign minister Irina Bokova, are in the running as the process begins of choosing a new chief of the Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).
 
Egypt’s culture minister Farouk Hosny and European External Relations Commissioner and former Austrian foreign minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner are seen as front-runners.
 
However, voanews.com said, critics argue that Hosny should not be picked because of allegedly anti-Semitic remarks that he made in 2008. 
 
In May, three leading French intellectuals published an article in France's Le Monde newspaper, arguing that Hosny should not be chosen.
 
At issue are comments Hosny made during an exchange before the Egyptian parliament last year. He said he would burn Israeli books if he found them in Egyptian libraries.
 
Elie Wiesel, Bernard-Henri Levy and Claude Lanzmann said in the Le Monde article that "the international community must spare itself the shame of appointing Farouk Hosny to the post of Unesco director general".
 
Hosny has since expressed solemn regret for those remarks, saying on his website "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," and arguing that his statement was taken out of context.
 
"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," Hosny says.
 
Voanews said that other analysts suggest Hosny would help breach the cultural divide between the West and the Muslim world. Some say that Hosny has shown some openness, such as pledging to translate works by Israeli writers. A recent New York Times article reports Egypt is beginning to renovate its synagogues, as part of the country's heritage.
 
Apart from Bokova and Ferrero-Waldner, the other candidate from an EU country is Lithuanian ambassador to UNESCO Ina Marciulionyte.
 
Other candidates are Algerian former foreign minister Mohammed Bedjaoui and Russian former deputy foreign minister Alexander Yakovenko, Tanzania's Sospeter Muhongo and Benin's ambassador to Unesco, Noureini Tidjani-Serpos.
 
Bokova (57) attended the English-Language School in Sofia, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and the University of Maryland school of public affairs.
 
Her career includes having been foreign minister from November 1996 until February 1997, the final months of the Bulgarian Socialist Party government headed by Zhan Videnov, and currently she is ambassador to France and to Monaco and Bulgaria’s permanent delegate to Unesco.
 
In a detailed statement on her website of her vision for Unesco, Bokova – who has the official backing of the Bulgarian Government as a candidate to head Unesco – says: "The greatest challenge is to lead the world into a new era of peace and humanism, to create more inclusive, just, and equitable societies through sustainable economic and social development, based on science, innovation and new technologies that will serve mankind and will preserve the environment".
 
The Executive Board's 58 members will interview each of the nine candidates and then vote in a secret ballot. A maximum of five rounds of voting is allowed. The winning candidate will be confirmed in October by Unesco's general assembly, and will succeed outgoing Japanese head Koichiro Matsuura.