As widely trailed, the UAE and France have plans for a new international partnership aimed at protecting cultural heritage during armed conflicts; and the initiative will be launched at a Safeguarding Endangered Cultural Heritage conference, to be held on 2 and 3 December at Emirates Palace, Abu Dhabi.
The signing will be done by François Hollande, President of France, and Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.
The conference has been organised by the governments of the UAE and France in response to the growing threats to some of the world’s most important cultural resources arising from sustained periods of armed conflicts, acts of terrorism and illicit trafficking of cultural property.
As Mohammed Khalifa Al Mubarak, chairman of the Abu Dhabi Tourism & Culture Authority, put it: “The deliberate destruction of cultural artefacts as an act of war reflects not only their symbolic importance to a nation’s collective consciousness but also underscores the urgent need to protect them.”
Held under the patronage of UNESCO, the conference will feature key players from private and public institutions involved in world heritage conservation. More than 40 countries will apparently be represented.
The aim: to define practical and sustainable goals in safeguarding endangered cultural resources effectively. We’re told this will involve “the development of concrete and innovative solutions as well as the creation of a global framework for immediate and long-term goals”.
The decision to hold the conference was originally made back in May at the G7 summit in Japan, on a proposal from Hollande.
France’s wish is to create a global movement similar to the one that was launched three decades ago to fight HIV/Aids, This involved UN agencies as well as public and private donors such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The destruction of the Mosul Museum and the ancient city of Nimrud in recent months provided the incentive for the project.
“Terrorism attacks men, women and children, but also the sites of our collective memory and civilisations,” Hollande said at the G7 meeting. “Terrorism wants to eradicate history, to wipe out any trace. It destroys works; sometimes it sells them, exploiting the dreadful traffic of humanity’s history.
“The international community must reply, and this is why I asked for this report from the Louvre.” That report was given to the G7 heads of state with a presentation from Louvre director Jean-Luc Martinez that listed 50 proposals to protect cultural heritage around the world.
Presumably most of the groundwork has been done on refining some or all of these, so it will be interesting to see exactly what the international community believes it can do to counter the large-scale depredations of ISIS on the one hand and the steady outflow of small artefacts from Iraq on the other.
The practical aspects will focus on “capacity building for professionals in conflict areas” and improving both the legal and funding frameworks for post-conflict rehabilitation as well as emergency protection.
Not much detail there, but we understand the conference will also launch a couple of specific and practical tools – a global network of safe havens for endangered works, and a financial fund for long term programmes to preserve cultural heritage. Both of these sound like projects that President Hollande has previously promoted – “shelters for cultural goods before they could be attacked or sacked, and record the memory of cultural sites, using all forms of media, to keep them alive and restore them one day” and a global fund of public-plus-private money to protect endangered heritage sites
Apparently Jack Lang, a former French minister of culture and the president of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, has been appointed as France’s special envoy to the project.
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