In turn, Unesco bears the brunt of the divisions caused within the international community by the war waged in Ukraine by Russia. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization decided, Thursday, April 21, in Paris, to postpone sine die a meeting of its World Heritage Committee, scheduled for June in the Russian city of Kazan, in because of the divisions that this appointment aroused. The decision was taken after long negotiations, which again reflect, as in New York, the difficulty that Westerners have in diplomatically isolating Moscow, which is also subject to massive sanctions.
UNESCO concerned about damage inflicted on Kharkiv and Chernihiv
In a press release published on March 3, Unesco was alarmed by the “damage inflicted on the city of Kharkiv, a Unesco creative city for music, as well as on the historic center of Chernihiv, inscribed on the tentative list of the World Heritage of Ukraine”. This list includes very few sites, and only five have been included for their architectural qualities. “Requests for registration are made first on the initiative of the States, explains Martin Duplantier, a French architect who has been teaching in Ukraine and developing projects there for many years. However, the Ukrainian authorities have never been very interested in heritage. I found myself several times trying to convince mayors not to destroy this or that building. The most complicated is the architecture of the XXand century, because its evocation immediately brings back memories of the Soviet period. »
This state of affairs explains why this heritage is so poorly known in the West. Ukrainian heritage, however, is not confined to Soviet architecture. The classified sites are in fact from earlier periods. The tserkwas, for example, the formidable wooden churches found on the Polish border were built between the 16thand and the 19thand century. Saint Sophia Cathedral in kyiv is an architecture of the XIand century of Byzantine influence and the monastic buildings that depend on it were built between the 17thand and the XVIIIand century. The monastic ensemble of the kyiv-Pechersk Lavra is an archipelago of partly underground churches and dwelling houses, the construction of which spanned between the 11thand and the 19thand century. The historic center of Lviv shelters, in a topography inherited from the Middle Ages, beautiful testimonies of Baroque architecture and later periods. The residence of the Metropolitans of Bukovina and Dalmatia which Unesco describes as a “outstanding example of historicist architecture” of the XIXand century – it recycles Byzantine, Gothic, Baroque motifs… – and a symbol of the power of the Orthodox Church at the time of the Habsburgs was built between 1864 and 1882 by the Czech architect Josef Hlavka in Chernivtsi. Located in areas where the Russian army has not penetrated, all these sites are currently intact.
The committee in question is, among other things, responsible for registering the most remarkable architectural or natural sites on the planet on the World Heritage List. On April 8, 46 states, mostly Western, had threatened to boycott the Kazan rally, planned well before the war to be held from June 19 to 30. ” It seems impossible to us to hold the 45and session of the World Heritage Committee in Kazan under Russian chairmanship”, indicated the letter signed by France, the United States or the United Kingdom: “The credibility of UNESCO and the 1972 Convention on the protection of the world’s cultural and natural heritage depends on it. »
However, an extraordinary session of the Heritage Committee was necessary to relocate the meeting, convenable at the request of two thirds of its 21 Member States. The four European states sitting there to date (Italy, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece) have not been able to gather as much support. At least four member states of the body, including India and Saudi Arabia, indeed abstained in New York, on March 2, during the vote on a resolution condemning the aggression of Ukraine by Moscow .
Treasures in danger
“The African and Arab countries, some of the Latin American countries did not want to follow in the footsteps of the Europeans against Kazan and the Russian presidency”, said a diplomatic source familiar with the matter. According to him, however, “on all subjects directly or indirectly related to war, the proportion of countries supporting the maximalist line supported by Westerners is decreasing over the weeks”.
To avoid a persistent blockage, or a massive boycott in June, the general management of Unesco undertook to find a compromise. After a few weeks of discreet mediation, she managed to convince the chairman of the World Heritage committee, the Russian ambassador Alexander Kuznetsov this year, to suggest an outright postponement of the controversial session. “This proposal, to postpone the meeting without fixing either the place or the date of the next one, was the only one that could succeed”, explains a diplomat. The modalities of the next committee must be fixed by the end of the year.
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