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In
reprinting this report, we hope this document will be used to focus
attention on what is happening in the Holy City, in terms of the
changes, forgeries and falsifications of the civilizational heritages of
different cultures over the thousands of years of the city's history…
Foreword
The following
report by UNESCO expert Mr. Leon Pressouyre addresses with depth and
objectivity, changes in Jerusalem wrought by the Israeli authorities,
especially in the archeological and historical sites that give form to
the city. The political dimension has dominated Israeli efforts to
renovate and rehabilitate historical sites in the old city in order to
conform to their overriding political interests.
In
reprinting this report, we hope this document will be used to focus
attention on what is happening in the Holy City, in terms of the
changes, forgeries and falsifications of the civilizational heritages of
different cultures over the thousands of years of the city's history. We
believe that the human history of the city should be preserved in a
scientific, objective and human way, so that the traces of those
nations, which have passed through the city, are not lost or demeaned.
This report
observes particularly the tragic situation of the Old city, surrounded
by an alien civilization, and whose archeological and historical
monuments are dealt with chiefly in terms of Israeli political
considerations.
Honesty and
objectivity are the special characteristics of this report, and have
prompted us to present it to all those concerned with peace. What does
peace mean to a city that is a gathering of different world cultures?
Doesn't its
heritage deserve preservation as an enduring testament to all humanity?
Ministry of
Culture and Information
General
Conference
30th Session, Paris 1999 30 C
30 C/ 12
5 October 1999
Original: French
Item 4, 3 of the Provisional agenda
JERUSALEM AND THE
IMPLEMENTATION OF
29C/RESOLUTION 22
OUTLINE
Source:
29C\ Resolution 22
Background:
In this resolution the General Conference, recalling UNESCO'S previous
decisions and resolutions on the safeguarding of the cultural heritage
of Jerusalem, invited the Director-General to continue his efforts to
secure the implementation of these decisions, and decided to include
this item in the agenda of its 30th session.
Purpose:
Pursuant to 156 EX/Decision 3.5.1, adopted by the Executive Board at its
156th session, the Director-General appointed an internationally
renowned expert, namely professor Leon Pressouyre, former Vice-Rector of
the University of the Sorbonne, Professor Emeritus of Medieval History,
former evaluator of world heritage sites for the International Council
on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and Chairperson of the Commission to
Preserve National Monuments in Bosnia and Herzegovina established
pursuant to Annex 8 of the Dayton peace Accords . At the end of his
mission in Jerusalem from 1 to 10 September 1999, Professor Pressouyre
submitted a report to the Director-General who, having read it, has
decided to communicate it to the General Conference.
Leon Pressouyre
Report to Mr. Federico Mayor
Director-General of UNESCO
On the safeguarding of the urban and
monumental heritage of Jerusalem
(Mission from 1 to 10 September 1999)
Definition of the mission:
In 156
EX/Decision 3.5.1, the Executive Board invited you "to appoint an
eminent expert on the subject to present a report on the question
covering all the aspects mentioned in the relevant resolutions and
decisions of UNESCO, and to submit it to the General Conference at its
30th session".
Following your
request, I agreed in principle to undertake a mission to Jerusalem from
1 to 10 September 1999.
The mission's
terms of reference specified that, in close collaboration with the
Director of the Cultural Heritage Division (CLT/CH), I should:
· Study the
situation in accordance with the relevant resolutions and decisions of
UNESCO on the subject;
· Make contact
in Jerusalem with the authorities involved in safeguarding the cultural
heritage of the Old City;
· Submit to
you, by 20 September 1999, a confidential report, which you alone would
decide whether to submit to the General Conference.
However, after
July substantial changes occurred in the conditions initially envisaged
for the mission, which made an already difficult task still more
arduous.
In letters
dated 6 August 1999 (CLT/CH/99/JER/154 and 155) and in accordance with
your instructions, Mr. Hernan Crespo-Torral, Assistant Director-General
for Culture, officially informed the accredited representatives of
Palestine and Israel to UNESCO of the mission with which you had
entrusted me. Only Mr. Ahmad Abdelrazek, Ambassador, Permanent Observer
for Palestine, replied to the letter. He agreed to receive me on 31
August 1999 and gave me a list of eminent Palestinians to meet during
the mission.
The Culture
Sector informed me at the end of August that Mr. Avi Shoket, Ambassador,
Permanent Delegate of Israel to UNESCO, had repeatedly opposed my
mission. I expressed the wish to meet his successor, H.E. Mr. Uri Gabay,
but his secretariat refused to make an appointment for me to see him.
I thus never
received, either directly or indirectly, an official list of eminent
Israelis to contact during my mission. Context and methodology of the
mission:
The mission
took place in a favourable context, the signing of the Sharm-el-Sheikh
agreement (4-5 September 1999) coinciding with my visit to Jerusalem
(1-10 September 1999). Despite the attacks that followed the historic
negotiations on 5 September 1999, and although the question of Jerusalem
is still not on the agenda of forthcoming meetings between Israelis and
Palestinians, the hope of a just and lasting peace seems gradually to be
gaining ground, as I realized during my official and unofficial meetings
with local personalities.
Placed in the
difficult position of an envoy mandated by an international
organization, but in fact denied access to half of those concerned as a
result of the attitude of two successive representatives of Israel to
UNESCO, a simple choice faced me:
· either
simply to aknowledge the situation, meet the Palestinian representatives
mandated by H.E. Mr. Ahmad Abdelrazek only, and give you one-side
report,
· or, out of
intellectual honesty, to make contact with high-level Israeli colleagues
on a personal basis and consult them unofficially.
I chose the
second option, making clear to my Israeli contacts on the one hand that
the authorities of their country did not approve of my mission and, on
the other, that I could not guarantee that my report would be kept
confidential. Four of them, whose fields of competence cover
archaeology, cultural heritage, town planning and sociology,
nevertheless agreed to answer my questions, provide me with information
and visit sites with me, under a seal of secrecy. I would like to take
this opportunity to express particular gratitude to them, since this
report owes much to their sincere and disinterested love of Jerusalem.
At the end of
my mission to listen, obtain information and observe, and given the
positive developments in the peace process, I felt it necessary to
formulate four observations:
The Old City
is becoming a prisoner of the urbanization of its surroundings. Changes
in its social composition are affecting the consistency of the urban
fabric and of the built heritage in the Old City.
Archaeology
and the conservation of monuments in the Old City and its surroundings
continue to be approached on an essentially political basis.
The
celebration of the millennium makes consideration of questions
concerning the Christian sites and monuments of Jerusalem a matter of
urgency.
1. The Old
City is becoming a prisoner of the urbanization of its surroundings
Anyone returning
to Jerusalem after an absence of several years will, first of all,
notice the transformation of the urban landscape and the environs of the
Old City . Large-scale redevelopment work is taking place in front of
the Jaffa Gate to join up with David's Village; huge developments are
being erected to the northeast, such as the hotels below Derech Schechem
Street, not far from the Tomb of the Kings and the Church of St. George.
Large housing schemes in the northeastern and southeastern outskirts
have now been added to the resolutely modern buildings of West
Jerusalem, which began to spring up in 1948 . They have different
names-quarters or colonies depending on their geographic or
administrative location, but still correspond to one and the same
definition, forming a vast belt of suburbs equipped with radial and
peripheral communication systems.
The latter
network prefigures increased urbanization and the gradual disappearance
of the intervening landscape.
With the
epicenter of the city gradually shifting towards the east, the Old City
is no longer in the outposts of the desert but in the heart of an area
undergoing urbanization. This change, which began when Mr Teddy Kollek
was Mayor of Jerusalem, has been actively continued under his successor,
Mr Ehud Olmert, since 1994 . It features prominently in the works of
Israeli town planners, the latest of which, by Amir Cheshin, (Municipal
Policies in Jerusalem), (Jerusalem, Passia, 1998), is particularly
informative inasmuch as its author was one of the official advisers of
the municipality from 1948 to 1994 .
During the
discussions, which I had with them, Palestinians and Israelis were
unanimous in denouncing the risks that the "Greater Jerusalem" project
entails for the urban landscape: much imagination is now required to
see in Jerusalem the "town in which the desert dwells" as in the 1983
song by Shmuel Trigano. One of my Israeli interlocutors spoke
apprehensively about the near future in which protected areas, such as
the valley of Kidron and Gehenna, would be to Jerusalem what Central
Park and Fort Tryon Park are to New York today, that is natural and
cultural reserves that are strictly delimited and enclosed in an
enormous city with shifting boundaries. The same interlocutor – without
calling into question the validity of the "Jerusalem Law" voted by
Knesset on 30 July 1980 – wondered about the pernicious effects of an
urbanization policy, which was leading to the indisputable degradation
of heritage values. In this respect, he welcomed the decision taken on 6
July 1999 by Minister Haim Ramon to stop work on a Jewish colony being
built in the Arab quarter of Ras- al- Amud, in East Jerusalem, as a
first positive measure, which symbolized the road that the government of
Mr Ehud Barak would take.
But everyone
did not share this confidence during my tour of inspection. The
statement of principle by Israeli Prime Minister, to the effect that his
government would not build new colonies in the West Bank, but would not
demolish exiting ones (11 June 1999), seems to be at variance with the
facts: the network of existing colonies would appear to be spreading and
branching out, even into sensitive areas. I myself went to Maale Adoumim
on 9 September where I observed that large-scale construction work was
still going on. This, as we know, is the largest communal settlement in
East Jerusalem and the number of its inhabitants is now thought to
exceed 60,000.
In my opinion,
it is in the context of the urban Planning of a " Greater Jerusalem"
that the roads built around the Old City – to which substantial and
particularly painstaking parts of Professor Lemaire's report were
consistently devoted – should be put. For such redevelopments, which
have serious consequences for an environment that is increasingly being
invaded by structures, approach ramps and retaining walls whose
carefully dressed masonry does not succeed in masking their technical
function, do not stem from a desire to landscape the outskirts of the
historic center, but from the ever-growing need to establish selective
relationships between the center and a periphery to which the town
planners are giving special attention.
2. Changes in
its social composition are affecting the consistency of the urban fabric
and of the built heritage in the Old City.
The
traditional distinction between four major quarters, the Jewish Quarter
in the southeast, the Armenian Quarter in the southwest, the Christian
Quarter in the northwest and the Muslim Quarter in the northeast, can
still be seen in the Old City. But the cultural characteristics of these
historic quarters are changing, not without unfortunate consequences for
the consistency of the urban fabric and authenticity of the buildings.
The radical
changes which affected the southeastern sector may be mentioned here by
way of information: after the destruction of the Maghrebi Quarter in
1967, followed by the redevelopment of the esplanade of the Wailing
Wall, the reconstruction of the Jewish Quarter was a scenario which was
much discussed in the 1970s in all town-planning institutes. The choice
made, that of full-scale rebuilding, with structures often being raised
above others, left little place for the restoration of old buildings,
although that had been envisaged in the classic work by the architect
Arieh Sharon, prefaced by Teddy Kollek, Planning Jerusalem (Jerusalem,
Weidenfeld and Nicolsoy, 1973). To a great extent, the discovery of the
Byzantine Cardo, its partial anastylosis and its transformation into a
shopping arcade, which made it a tourist attraction known throughout the
world, supplied the belated alibi for a renovation policy, which was not
in keeping with the spirit of the Venice Charter.
What is at
issue today is the integrity of the Muslim Quarter, which is the only
one to have preserved, over a very extensive area, its system of
highways and its traditional buildings. It is faced with many dangers,
the most visible of which are overpopulation and changes in social
composition.
Overpopulation, due to a recent influx of Muslim families which is
difficult to quantify, risks creating the insalubrious conditions which
could be used, as in the past, to justify action by the authorities who
are always in favour of " slum- clearance", a slogan used everywhere in
the 1970s to justify arbitrary destruction.
Attention must
be drawn here to the very positive field work carried out by an NGO, the
Welfare Association, which since 1994 has been carrying out a programme
to rehabilitate the Old City which, in addition to a series of carefully
planned major actions, includes urgent rescue work aimed at ensuring
minimum health-and-safety conditions in overpopulated or unhealthy
housing areas.
The changes in
social composition concern what the Palestinians call the " Jewish
Settlements". These housing units are visually characterized by raised
structures and, above all, by the presence of Israeli flags which can be
seen from elevated observation points such as the top of the Austrian
Hospice, at No. 37 on the Via Dolorosa. A private overpass system, which
links one block to another at terrace- level, was established recently.
This system is found in other areas of the Mediterranean world, such as
Ghadames (Libyan Arab Jamahiriya ) and Mesta on the island of Chios (
Greece ) , but it does not clearly form part of the architectural
tradition of Jerusalem and the authenticity of the Old City cannot but
suffer from these redevelopments, which are an expression of the
segregationist logic generated by the situation.
Another danger
is threatening the Old City: the "open spaces" which are likely to tempt
property developers. To give a single example, I should like to draw
your attention to the very sensitive Zone of Burj al- Laqlaq, which is
situated in the northeastern corner of the wall of Suleyman the
Magnificent.
On 6 May 1998,
the site was occupied by a group of Israeli "squatters" who wanted to
establish a settlement there. In a climate of very great intercommunal
tension, reflected in the letter 157/5/98 which was sent to you on 2
June 1998 by Mr Faisal Husseini, excavations carried out by the Israel
Antiquities Authority (cf. 155 Ex/11, para. 8). The excavations have
just ended, in the summer of 1999, but their results have not been
published. In the spirit of your letter DG/4.6/151 of 9 July 1998, I see
it therefore as a matter of urgency that UNESCO should once again
express it.
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