For the first time, Unesco deletes an Intangible World Heritage Site: the cause is anti-Semitism

UNESCO, for the first time in its history, has deleted an entry from the Intangible World Heritage of Humanity: it is the Carnival of Alost, Belgium, which became part of it in 2010. The Flemish town’s carnival is held annually during the three days preceding the beginning of Lent and is a festival under the banner of “exuberance and parody,” as UNESCO’s description of it puts it, with dances, processions of satirical masks, the symbolic election of the “Carnival Prince” as mayor of the town of Alost (or Aalst in Flemish), who has to hand over the keys during a ceremony in which politicians in the local government are mocked, and the parade of men dressed as women. An event with six hundred years of history, attracting one hundred thousand spectators each year, “an expression,” the Unesco description still reads, “of a collective effort of all social classes, and a symbol of the city’s identity in the region.”

The problem lies in the fact that, in the last edition, there was a float where some Jews were rendered as grotesque caricatures, standing among sacks of money and guarding a heavy safe: the float, which was accused of anti-Semitism, provoked the wrath of the Belgian Jewish community, not least because it would not be the first occurrence of a depiction judged negatively (critics pointed the finger especially at the 2013 edition, when a caricature of a Nazi convoy of deportees was made: heavy controversy had been raised then, too). Shortly after, a petition had also been launched on change.org to ask UNESCO to withdraw the Alost carnival from the World Heritage list (over 22 thousand signatures collected). The mayor of Alost, Christoph d’Haese, of the right-wing Flemish independence party Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie, had claimed, on the part of the event, the right to “make fun of anyone.” In October, d’Haese had told Agence France Press that the carnival “mocks the Church, kings, Jews, international politics, Muslims. It is freedom of expression in its broadest interpretation.”

Rationale, however, evidently did not sit well with UNESCO, which decided at its meeting in Bogota last week to remove carnival from the Intangible World Heritage of Humanity: the Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, reads an official Unesco note, “based its decision on the fact that recurrent reiterations of racist and anti-Semitic representations are incompatible with the fundamental principles of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, and in particular with Article 2, according to which ’only intangible cultural heritage that conforms to existing international instruments relating to the rights of the human being, and to the need for mutual respect among communities, groups and individuals, shall be considered.” Unesco, the note further reads, “is faithful to its founding principles of dignity, equality and mutual respect among peoples and condemns all forms of discrimination, including racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and xenophobia.” And as a result, it deemed the Alost carnival a manifestation contrary to its values.

For the first time, Unesco deletes an Intangible World Heritage Site: the cause is anti-Semitism

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