CAIRO — Ambassador Moushira Khattab, Egypt’s candidate for the post of UNESCO director general in the elections scheduled for 2017, said she is hoping an agreement on a single Arab candidate can be reached, following reports of a face-off between Cairo and Doha over leadership of the UN agency. Qatar announced in March its candidate for the post, Hamad Bin Abdulaziz Al-Kuwari, while Khattab’s nomination was declared at an event held at Cairo’s Egyptian Museum July 21.

In an interview with Al-Monitor, Khattab said the opportunity for an Egyptian-Qatari reconciliation is still on the table given the historic relations between the two.

Khattab rejected talk of a conspiracy to undermine any Egyptian candidate for UNESCO’s top post, stressing that a candidate’s experience and platform are what determines whether or not he or she reaches the seat. Khattab told Al-Monitor that this lesson is most obvious in Egypt’s failing to win the chair in the past. According to Khattab, UNESCO is one of the most important international peacekeeping organizations given the soft weapons it has that can fight bigotry and terrorism, and she called upon the international community to support UNESCO’s increasing challenges.

Khattab’s career in diplomacy started when she served as an attache on Egypt’s permanent mission to the United Nations in New York where she was assigned to a committee on economic and social affairs. She then moved to Vienna to work at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization’s headquarters.