The idea of dismantling Esma – the largest torture center of the Argentine dictatorship – voiced by Victoria Villarruel, the ultra-Javier Milei’s candidate for vice-presidency of Argentina, has shaken the election campaign in the country that will vote this Sunday. But this center, converted into a museum of memory and whose candidacy Milei wants to convert into a school, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since last September. This award was not an isolated incident: it is part of the United Nations cultural body’s efforts to protect and disseminate the memory of the horrors of the 20th and 21st centuries. As of 2023, only two sites related to current wars have received the highest recognition an international memorial can receive: the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1979 and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in 1996.
However, at this year’s World Heritage Committee meeting in Riyadh in September, three sites linked to the first major conflict of the 20th century, as well as crimes against humanity and genocide, were named: “Museum and site of the Esma memorial – former secret Center for Detention, Torture and Extermination” in Argentina; “Genocide Memorials: Nyamata, Murambi, Gisozi and Bisesero,” in Rwanda; and “Burial and Memorial Sites of the First World War (Western Front)” from Belgium and France. And it is just the beginning of a much broader movement aimed at influencing the memory of the recent past to try to stop the horrors of the present.
Skulls of the victims of the Rwanda massacre at the Ntarama Genocide Church in Nyamata. Gianluigi Guerica (AFP)More information
With her criticism of the fact that Esma functions as a museum of memory, the MP Victoria Villarruel encountered not only a broad consensus about the past in her own country, but also the tendency of a very significant part of the international community to engage with it The search into the past deals with physical memories of horror, embedded in buildings, cemeteries and memorials, a way to open a debate about current events.
“The inscription on these monuments marks a new stage in the role of universal heritage around the world,” says a UNESCO spokesperson. This step, which represents a significant change in the didactic and protective role of the universal heritage, was taken after years of doubts, reports and public debates, reflected in numerous documents. The idea behind the desire to look to a much more recent – and more terrible – past is to force us to think about the present and the consequences of hate and violence.
“In 2018, Member States and heritage experts decided to launch a specific debate on this issue in order to determine whether the World Heritage Convention is really a relevant instrument for sites of remembrance related to recent atrocities and conflicts,” adds the UN spokesperson Body. “This dialogue ended in early 2023 and recognized that these memorial sites can have universal value and that they play a key role in peacebuilding, which is UNESCO’s primary goal.”
Gate of Death in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, the first place of remembrance to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Jakub Porzyck (Getty)
The aim of the World Heritage List, adopted by UNESCO in 1972, is to recognize monuments or places “that have outstanding universal value from a historical, artistic or scientific point of view”. This also includes exceptional natural areas such as Doñana Park. There are currently 1,199 registered locations in 168 countries (although 48 are cross-border), but only 21, just under 2%, correspond to locations associated with recent conflict and negative and controversial memories since slavery – the island of Gorée in Senegal, part of from which thousands of enslaved people emerged – to torture and extermination, like Auschwitz, Rwanda or Esma.
Unlike the sites traditionally included in UNESCO World Heritage, monuments or natural spaces of exceptional beauty that have left their mark on human history – in Spain there are, among many others, the Mosque of Córdoba and the old towns of Segovia or Cáceres, the Mudejar of Aragon or Cantabrian Paleolithic art – places of memory are in many cases spaces that reflect events that are almost always traumatic. In most cases these are “involuntary monuments,” as a UNESCO document states.
The first place listed was Auschwitz, the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp currently located in Poland, which was added to the list in 1979. As experts Olwen Beazley (Australian) and Christina Cameron (Canadian) explain in one of the previously prepared reports, the change in doctrine at UNESCO was a complex decision and was considered unique at the time. “At the meeting of the Heritage Committee in 1979, the principle of exceptionality was highlighted by the inscription of a unique site symbolizing many other similar sites,” they explain.
The next steps were taken amidst more or less intense controversy. For example, the naming of Hiroshima, the Japanese city on which the first atomic bomb in history was dropped in August 1945, raised concerns in China, which suffered the horrors of Japanese occupation, and in the United States, which was responsible for the bombing a city that was clearly a civilian target and immediately killed more than 60,000 people. In 2010, Bikini Atoll, where nuclear tests took place, was designated.
Former presidents of France, François Hollande, and the United States, Barack Obama, look at the beach at Omaha Beach during events marking the 70th anniversary of the Normandy landings. Kevin Lamarque (Portal)
But this year the big leap took place with the three awards and, above all, with UNESCO’s intention to continue on this path. There are currently ten locations, presented by as many countries, associated with the memory of recent conflicts, including the beaches of the Normandy landings in northern France. Spain has not submitted any for the time being.
In the case of Esma, for example, UNESCO’s argument refers both to the site itself and to its global value as a symbol of the repression of military dictatorships in Latin America. “The Esma Museum and Memorial is closely and materially linked to and highly representative of the illegal repression of armed and unarmed opponents and dissidents carried out and coordinated by Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s and based on the forced disappearances of people . in a climate of global geopolitical tensions between opposing worldviews about the world’s socio-political order.”
But as Victoria Villarruel’s statements show, one of the dangers of declaring places of remembrance as world heritage sites is that they can be used to divide and confront. And UNESCO has always been aware of this danger: one of the prerequisites for including a place of remembrance on the list is consensus. A location is never declared if other state objects exist.
At one of the meetings as part of the doctrinal change process in Paris in December 2019, the experts warned that “contrary to the objectives of UNESCO, the commemoration of memorial sites can lead to and give rise to disagreements and conflicts.” Websites associated with recent conflicts and other negative and controversial memories are particularly vulnerable to manipulation by political parties and other interest groups whose agendas foment divisions.” That’s exactly what just happened in Argentina.
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