USCBS News

UN agency plans assessment after water recedes in affected areas

By Naveed Ahmad, Correspondent Published: 00:00 August 18, 2010 

Islamabad: With another massive deluge looming in the northern region of Kashmir, Gilgit and Baltistan, three of the country’s best known archaeological locations face a high risk of flooding.

Out of six World Heritage Sites in Pakistan, remains of 3rd millennium BC-old Mohenjo-Daro along the river Indus, the Buddhist monastic complex of Takht-i-Bahi in Swat region and 14th century remains of Thatta have been vulnerable to the ongoing “super floods” across Pakistan with southern Sindh province bearing the brunt of the floods.

Irina Bokova of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) is holding a special meeting in Paris today to discuss the ongoing situation.

Dr Warren Mellor, Unesco Director and Representative in Pakistan, confirmed that the high level meeting, chaired by Bokova and attended by Assistant Director General for Culture, will be focusing on mobilising additional personnel and technical resources for the calamity-hit country.

“Of the three high-risk sites, the ruins of the huge city of Mohenjo-Daro remain the most vulnerable due to soil conditions and the high water table in the area near the raging River Indus,” he told Gulf News in Islamabad.

Mohenjo-Daro was built entirely of unbaked brick in the 3rd millennium BC. “The acropolis, set on high embankments, the ramparts, and the lower town, which is laid out according to strict rules, provide evidence of an early system of town planning,” reads Unesco World Heritage Site’s brief about the ancient location.

Damage

The Unesco team is waiting to rush for assessment of damage as soon as the water recedes and the emergency phase is over, said the Unesco country representative.

Dr Mellor, however, said there was no substantive damage so far that Unesco is aware of. Local residents in Swat region report that heavy rains and flooding have caused some damage to the Buddhist monastic complex of Takht-i-Bahi (Throne of Origins), founded in the early first century.

Well-preserved

Though owing to its location on the crest of a high hill, it escaped successive invasions and remains exceptionally well-preserved, eye witnesses report some damage.

However, no experts are ready to comment or authenticate any such random assessment. The ruins of Sahr-i-Bahlol, a small fortified city dating from the same period, are also located in the same area.

Thatta, the southern city of Sindh, capital of three successive dynasties and later ruled by the Mughal emperors of Delhi, dates back from the 14th to the 18th century. The remains of the city and its necropolis provide a unique view of Sindh civilisation.

Unesco is concerned about the issue of culture and cultural livelihood, such as the artifacts, which “females prepare indoors that not only become sources of livelihood but also a way of preservation of the local heritage,” said Dr Mellor.

About month-long monsoon rains have so far affected 20 million people in Pakistan, costing over $4 billion (Dh14.68 billion) according to conservative estimates.

Food crisis looms

The United Nations warns that unless farmers in hard-hit Punjab and Sindh provinces manage to plant their winter crop of wheat in mid-September as normal, there might be food shortages in the region and the nation as a whole.

In the north, where the floods began nearly three weeks ago, fruit farmers are also hurting.

Last year, cherries, peaches and apricots in the Swat Valley rotted on the trees because of an army operation against Taliban militants. This year, roads and bridges have been washed away so crops cannot be carried to the rest of the country.
http://gulfnews.com/news/world/pakistan/floods-threaten-unesco-world-heritage-sites-1.669657
With input from AP

On February 5th, 2010 USCBS president and founder Cori Wegener initiated a meeting of US organizations interested in helping salvage and preserve Haiti’s cultural heritage in the wake of January’s devastating earthquake.  The resulting Haiti Cultural Recovery Project is a successful partnership of the Smithsonian Institution, the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, and the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield.  For more information on this unique project go to http://haiti.si.edu/

By Jacqueline Trescott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 23, 2010; C01

When Richard Kurin heard about the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti last January, he was heartbroken. As point man for decades for the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival, he knew the Smithsonian had to do something.

In 2004 about 100 Haitian artists came to the Mall as an official centerpiece of the festival, marking Haiti’s 200 years of independence from the French. So, Kurin said, “we knew the cultural workers.” His immediate concern for the safety of individual artists morphed into worries about the condition of the nation’s paintings, musical instruments and art galleries.

Once he started hearing from artists who had survived and he saw televised images of injured people pulling art from the rubble, Kurin developed a plan to get the Smithsonian involved in the recovery. “Culture is important as a basic part of people’s survival. The Smithsonian had the context there and we had the tools,” he said.

When the Folklife Festival opens Thursday, the Smithsonian will showcase one aspect of its Haiti initiative. It has expanded the core programs by inviting Boukman Eksperyans, a Grammy-nominated group, to perform its Haitian-Caribbean fusion sound Saturday.

Two Haitian visual artists, Mireille Delisme and Levoy Exil, will also participate in the festival. Delisme will show how she incorporates voodoo designs into sequined flags. Exil will discuss how the Saint Soleil school of painting emerged from a mountain community. In the tented festival marketplace, paintings, metalwork, baskets and statues representing the crafts of 77 Haitian artists will be sold, with all proceeds helping the island’s artists and art cooperatives.

This year, at the 10-day, 44th annual Folklife Festival on the Mall, the focus will be on the cultures of Mexico and Asian Pacific Americans and on Smithsonian workers, such as the keepers of the fossils. The outdoor festival runs Thursday through Monday and then resumes July 1-5. Though most activities end at 5:30, the Smithsonian and the National Park Service sponsor evening concerts and dance parties.

The festival’s programs are selected by curators doing research on a topic or country, or on a particular anniversary. This allows the coordinators to dig deep into cultures and present a diversity of languages, music, food, dance and crafts.

This year, in the tented areas, the small businesses of Mexico, celebrating the nation’s 200th year of independence, will be represented by a candymaker from Xochimilco, instrument makers from Nayarit and Veracruz, and beekeepers from Campeche. The Asian Pacific Americans section, representing the roughly 30 Asian American and 24 Pacific Island American groups, will emphasize traditional dances and songs, including fusion styles. A local women’s performance group, the Veiyasana Dance Troupe, will feature Fijian and Indian dances and island songs.

In a second push to help Haiti, the Smithsonian is leading an international effort to preserve thousands of artworks that were rescued from collapsed structures. The Smithsonian has secured a 7,500-square-foot, three-story building, which formerly belonged to the U.N. Development Program, and is equipping it with generators, imported from Canada, and the supplies needed to repair broken frames, tears in canvases and water damage. Machines will also be used to rid the artworks of dust.

“The conservators went down with three suitcases of supplies. These are art and cultural humanitarians. They are caring, living under harsh conditions,” Kurin said during an interview in his office in the Smithsonian Castle. “We are essentially setting up a base, like we do in Antarctica.”

A folklorist and author, Kurin has been an official at the Smithsonian for 25 years and oversees the complex’s art museums, among other divisions. Officially, he’s the Smithsonian undersecretary for history, art and culture. Unofficially, he’s a champion for world cultures. A tall man with salt-and-pepper hair, a mustache and beard, Kurin is a rapid, robust talker.

He said he was shocked when he got to Haiti in early March. “It was almost overwhelming. I went to the Catholic cathedral, which had these beautiful stained-glass windows, and I’m Jewish, and I just had to cry. The earthquake has taken the guts out of people,” Kurin, 59, said. The Musée d’Art Nader in Port-au-Prince, which had 9,000 to 10,000 paintings, was flattened.

Kurin knew that Haiti’s organizational resources were few, and that the infrastructure had collapsed, but he also understood that the local art community would tackle, and even survive, the most horrific hurdle. “The Haitian people have this resilience. It is not easy, but people have a lot of pride, and they have always had to look inward to get strength,” Kurin said. “From the earliest time, [their] art expressed many feelings. It was a way of decoding nationhood and freedom.”

Liberation from the French in 18o4 and scenes of everyday life have been themes of a bold, colorful and intricate art style that stretches back five centuries. Since the earthquake, artists have created works out of twisted metal. In addition to Haiti’s presence on the Mall, nearly 100 works of art created by the children of Haiti after the quake are on display at the S. Dillon Ripley Center until Oct. 17, under the sponsorship of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.

Collaborating with the Smithsonian in the Haiti recovery project are the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, the Broadway League, UNESCO and the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, a non-governmental organization. The Broadway League has donated $276,000 for rent and other costs. The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services have each donated $30,000. The project is being coordinated with Haiti’s Ministry of Culture and Communication and the country’s reconstruction commission. That partnership is key, Kurin said, because the longer goals of the recovery program include training Haitians in conservation methods and museum skills.

The outreach, Kurin said, will show that Haiti has not been defeated, and “this is a lively, ongoing, living tradition.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/22/AR2010062202858.html

USCBS, the Smithsonian Institution, and the American Institute for Conservation are working to salvage and stabilize cultural heritage in Haiti.  We have opened the Haiti Cultural Recovery Center in Bourdon.  Keep up with USCBS in Haiti on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/group.php?gid=63752022657&ref=ts

Episcopal News Service - By Mary Frances Schjonberg, May 27, 2010

http://www.episcopal-life.org/79425_122550_ENG_HTM.htm

Some of the world-famous murals that adorned the walls of the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti’s Holy Trinity cathedral prior to the Jan. 12 earthquake, and gave Haitians of all faiths a vision of their place in the stories of the Bible, could be preserved and possibly even restored.

That’s the assessment of a team of art experts who have surveyed artworks and other cultural artifacts that were damaged in the magnitiude-7 quake. However, they said, decisions about the murals’ fate need to be made soon.

“The murals are running out of time,” said Corine Wegener, a curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and president of the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, which is dedicated to the protection of cultural property worldwide during armed conflict. A retired Army officer, she was posted to Iraq just after the looting of the Iraqi National Museum.

“They’re really, really at risk and there are going to have to be some decisions in order for us to move forward,” Wegner said of the murals. “What nobody wants to have happen is that while we are making these decisions, a small aftershock [occurs] and they’re gone.”

Richard Kurin, Smithsonian Institution undersecretary for history, art and culture, echoed those concerns. “If we leave them in their current state, they will indeed suffer increasingly more damage,” he said. “They are not going to last for a very long time.”

Episcopal Diocese of Haiti Bishop Jean Zaché told ENS by phone from Haiti May 27 that “it is so important that we keep them and preserve them, so even though we will rebuild the cathedral where it was” the question is, indeed, how to protect the remaining murals in the meantime. Duracin said he envisions the survivors being incorporated into a new cathedral.

“When we have the design of the plan of the [new] cathedral, we will protect them,” Duracin said. Meanwhile, he said, he believes the murals can stay in place due to work that has already occurred to begin to stabilize them.

Duracin hopes to convene a meeting in Port-au-Prince soon to discuss rebuilding plans with representatives of the many groups that cherish the cathedral and are eager to help in its rebuilding. One of those representatives is Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe Bishop Pierre Whalon, whom Duracin asked earlier this year to help guide those efforts. Duracin said that an architectural firm is already helping the diocese in the planning process.

“It is the will of Haitian people to rebuild the cathedral because the cathedral has been for us our mother church here in Haiti,” he said.

The cathedral is still operating on the site, albeit without walls in what Duracin calls the “open-air cathedral.” It consists of plastic sheeting stretched over a frame of two-by-fours that shelters some pews rescued from the cathedral ruins.

The diocese will celebrate Trinity Sunday at the site on May 30 and take up its second diocesan-wide offering for the rebuilding effort.

“That will be our second symbolic but very important effort to rebuild the cathedral,” he said.

The first offering, collected during the diocese’s April 6-8 synod meeting, netted $6,000.

Kurin, who returned from Haiti on May 25 after negotiating a cultural-heritage recovery plan with Haitian government officials, told ENS that he had not seen the Holy Trinity murals prior to the earthquake, despite having been in Port-au-Prince many times.

“It was incredibly striking and sad and in some ways strangely uplifting to see those murals in their current state,” he said. “When you see the ruins of those walls and the murals still standing, they are standing there proudly amidst the destruction.”

Kurin said he was also struck by what he called the “Haitization” of biblical stories portrayed in the murals. “In that fact, there’s a respect for the people of Haiti in those murals … the art of those murals incorporates Haitians in that story and that’s very moving,” he said. “Those murals represent a coming together of different cultural traditions and making them particularly and especially Haitian. They’re unique; they’re beautiful.”

Kurin and others hoped to include the murals in the Smithsonian’s Haiti Cultural Recovery Project. The project will operate in a 7,500-square-foot, three-story air-conditioned building in Port-au-Prince that once housed the United Nations Development Programme, according to a Smithsonian news release. It will be a place where objects retrieved from the rubble can be assessed, conserved and stored. Haitians will be trained to take over the conservation effort in a few years.
 
The effort is being conducted in partnership with the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities with assistance from three U.S. federal agencies: National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Additional money is coming from the Broadway League.

Both Kurin and Wegener said that the cathedral murals’ importance reaches far beyond the diocese.

“Of all the Haitians I’ve spoken to about some of the most at-risk and most-important cultural heritage, without exception the Holy Trinity murals are mentioned time and time again as such a critical part of Haiti’s cultural identity and heritage,” Wegener said.
“Whether you’re Episcopal or not, everybody realizes that that was such an important moment in the development of Haitian art and that those have to be preserved if we can do it.”

Holy Trinity was established in Port-au-Prince on Pentecost, May 25, 1863. Its church building has since been destroyed six times, often by fire and once by an earthquake in the 1920s. The paintings, completed in 1950-51, portrayed biblical stories in Haitian motifs and were crafted by some of the best-known Haitian painters of the 20th century.

“It has been said that Bishop [Alfred] Voegli had his Bible in his hand with the painters and he explained the Bible to them and asked them to how to put the Bible in the Haitian context,” Duracin told ENS. To do so meant that elements of Voodoo, so pervasive in Haitian culture, were included, and Voegli was severely criticized at the time.

“Many people had left the church because they could not understand that,” he said. It took years for people to realize the value of the murals, he added.

Some progress has been made toward stabilizing the murals in the ruins, according to Kurin, Wegener and Susan Blakney, an art conservator from Skaneateles, New York, who trained in emergency conservation efforts after Hurricane Katrina.

Wegener said that during her first visit to the site in early March, the murals were free-standing and exposed to the elements. By her return in late March, she said, Haitian artist and architect Patrick Vilaire had purchased materials and erected scaffolding around some of the murals and draped some of the remaining walls.

“The murals right now are very fragmented. There was one mural that was very tightly buttoned up with a blue tarp. I climbed up to look at it, but they had closed it up so tightly that I couldn’t even peek in,” Susan Blakney told ENS, describing her early May visit to the cathedral with the Smithsonian team.

“What we’ve got now is fragments” of varying sizes, Blakney said, ranging from the relatively intact Baptism of Christ and Last Supper murals to more roughly damaged murals to piles of rubble. Parts of some of the murals, which are painted on an approximately one-inch thick coating that had been applied over rough walls “have already started to delaminate or shear” from the walls, she said.

However, she added, “what’s there could be saved” and there are many options for that work.

The three conservators said that the walls and their murals could remain in place, possibly with a shelter built around them in which on-going conservation and/or restoration work could be done. They could be removed, requiring a not-impossible but very complicated effort that would combine engineering with art conservation. They could then be taken offsite for additional work.

Part of the decision, they said, depends on whether the diocese wants to restore the murals to their pre-Jan. 12 state, preserve the murals in their current state as relics of the quake, forego any work with an eye to creating new murals in a new cathedral building or consider some combination of those choices.

“We have to have those decisions from them before we can go forward,” Wegener said.

Even at a time when Haiti is still struggling to house and feed earthquake survivors in the face of the oncoming hurricane season, Kurin said efforts such as the Smithsonian’s project is humanitarian work.

“Culture feeds the soul,” he said. “Things that stir and inspire the soul are part of being human.”

– The Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg is a national correspondent for the Episcopal News Service and Episcopal News Monthly editor.

USCBS President Corine Wegener, American Institute for Conservation Cultural Emergency Response Team members Susan Blakney and Vicki Lee, and Smithsonian Institution conservator Hugh Shockey team up in Haiti! 

Kate Taylor, New York Times, May 11, 2010 

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Susan Blakney, a paintings conservator from New York, scrambled up a mound of rubble left by the collapse of the Episcopal Holy Trinity Cathedral here, searching for small shards of the cathedral’s murals.

The cathedral is a cherished part of this country’s cultural heritage and most of its murals were destroyed in the earthquake that struck here in January. Two from the north transept, though, one depicting the Last Supper and the other the baptism of Christ, remain largely intact.

“It looks like there are some chunks underneath here,” Ms. Blakney, 62, yelled to colleagues working with her last Thursday in an effort to save thousands of works of art damaged in the quake.

The rescue is being organized by the Smithsonian Institution, which is to open a center here in June where American conservators will work side-by-side with Haitian staff members to repair torn paintings, shattered sculptures and other works pulled from the rubble of museums and churches.

Haitian artists and cultural professionals have been conducting informal salvage operations for the past four months. But the Americans are bringing conservation expertise — there are few if any professionally trained art conservators in Haiti — and special equipment, much of it paid for by private money.

The initiative, in its swiftness, its close collaboration with a foreign government and its combination of private and government financing, represents a new model of American cultural diplomacy, one that organizers believe stands in stark contrast to the apathy Americans were accused of exhibiting during the looting of Iraqi artistic treasures in 2003.

“Mistakes have been made in the past, in times of great tragedy or upheaval, by not protecting and prioritizing a country’s cultural heritage,” said Rachel Goslins, the executive director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, which has been involved in finding money for the project. “I think this is a huge opportunity for us to say, ‘We get it.’ ”

The initial financing is coming from three federal agencies and the Broadway League, the trade group for theater owners and producers. Smithsonian officials say the project will cost $2 million to $3 million over the next year and a half, after which the center is expected to be turned over to the Haitian government.

Ms. Blakney traveled here last week with two other conservators, a museum curator, and a group of engineers and planning experts from the Smithsonian. The conservators’ task was to assess precisely what kinds of damage the art had sustained, not just from the earthquake but from subsequent exposure to rain and sun and from improper storage both before and after the quake. Based on that information, they will decide what specialized equipment that they, or whoever the Smithsonian ends up sending to work at the center, will need.

Restoring the most compromised art will not be a job for beginners. If the Episcopal Church decides to save the surviving murals from Holy Trinity, which were painted in the early 1950s by some of Haiti’s most famous artists, they will probably need to be removed from the damaged building — a feat of engineering as much as conservation that would involve gluing a piece of fabric to the face of each mural and attaching the mural to a secondary support structure of plywood or steel before chiseling it away from the wall.

In her search through the rubble, Ms. Blakney found some small pieces of painted concrete that have now been brought to the Smithsonian for an analysis that will help to determine the right adhesive to use.

The American conservators will spend part of their time training Haitians in conservation, in preparation for turning the laboratory over to them.

The rescue operation came together largely because of the efforts of Corine Wegener, a curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and a retired Army major who served in Iraq shortly after the looting of the Iraqi National Museum, and Richard Kurin, the under secretary for history, art and culture at the Smithsonian Institution. Three weeks after the earthquake, Ms. Wegener convened a meeting of art professionals and State Department officials in Washington about how to provide cultural assistance, and invited Mr. Kurin, who already had ties to Haiti from organizing programs on Haitian art and culture for the Smithsonian’s Folklife Festival in 2004.

Ms. Wegener, who also made the trip last week, said she had been horrified by what had happened at the Iraqi National Museum, where she worked as a liaison between staff members and American officials during her deployment. “It was so disturbing for me as a museum professional to see the staff so completely in shock,” she said. “How would I feel if I came to work one day and found 15,000 objects had been looted?” She was determined not to see history repeat itself in Haiti, she said, and believed that the sooner conservators arrived on the ground, the more artworks could be saved.

Mr. Kurin conveyed the need for help to Ms. Goslins of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, a group that includes the heads of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, as well as well-connected art patrons like the Broadway producer Margo Lion. The three agencies ended up committing $30,000 each, while the Broadway League, of which Ms. Lion is a member, contributed $276,000.

As for the rest of the money that’s needed, Ms. Goslins expressed confidence that it would materialize once the center was operating.

“We’ve been having conversations with both the federal and the private sector about further support,” Ms. Goslins said, “and I’m optimistic that once we get through the initial urgent phase of getting this up and running, we’ll be able to see the project through.”

The conservators and Ms. Wegener spent four days here, visiting museums, churches and libraries, accompanied by Olsen Jean Julien, a former minister of culture and communication, who is acting as an intermediary between the Smithsonian and the Haitian government.

They visited the ruins of the Musée d’Art Nader, a private museum that before the earthquake housed 12,000 paintings and sculptures by 20th-century Haitian masters like Hector Hyppolite and Préfète Duffaut, thousands of which were either destroyed or badly damaged when the museum collapsed. They also saw what was left of the Centre d’Art, a workshop where many of those artists trained in the 1940s and 1950s, which also collapsed. In the weeks after the earthquake, volunteers pulled thousands of paintings from the wreckage, which were stashed inside two storage containers parked in the sun in front of the ruined building.

Some of the Haitian officials and cultural professionals with whom the group met were hearing about the conservation center for the first time, and responded with relief and many questions, like when it would be open and how much money was being set aside.

The American aid is “fundamental for us,” said Patrick Vilaire, a sculptor, who took the lead in saving the collections of several damaged libraries after the earthquake.

A few, however, expressed frustration that aid had not come sooner and a worry that foreign experts were better at conducting visits and assessments than providing real, practical help.

At a meeting with Daniel Elie, the head of the government agency in charge of preserving Haiti’s national heritage, the discussion in front of the plywood shack from which he and his staff have operated since January turned momentarily tense when his colleague and translator, Monique Rocourt, said she was fed up with hosting visiting advisers who came and did nothing.

“If I bring another team of experts to Jacmel,” she said, referring to a city in southern Haiti that was seriously damaged in the quake, “we will look in front of the population like we’re just bringing foreigners to look at disasters. It’s cynical, but that’s what people will think.”

Ms. Wegener is sensitive to such concerns, she said on another occasion. She noted that this was her third trip to Haiti since the earthquake. “We’re showing a constant presence,” she said, “and now we’re bringing people who are specialists.”

At the same time, Ms. Wegener and her colleagues appeared anxious not to seem like cultural imperialists, frequently repeating that they wanted to know first what the Haitians wanted to do.

Occasionally, their efforts clearly seemed like overkill to some of the people they encountered. When Ms. Wegener suggested to two members of a foundation that supports voodoo art that they write a proposal outlining what the Americans could do to help, one of the two practically rolled her eyes.

“Everyone is coming here and asking us for a proposal,” the woman, Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique, said. “You write us a proposal.”

Ms. Wegener, anxious to explain, said that they did not want to create the impression “that we’re telling you what you want.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Ms. Beauvoir-Dominique’s husband, Didier Dominique, interrupted, adding with a smile, “We know what we want.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/arts/design/11restore.html?pagewanted=print

March 17, 2010

USCBS President Corine Wegener recently traveled to Port-au-Prince, Haiti with a U.S. delegation headed by Dr. Richard Kurin, Under Secretary for History, Art, and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution.  Click the link below for a PDF of her trip report (note this is a large document and may take a moment to download.)

http://www.uscbs.org/documents/uscbs_haiti_trip_report.pdf

UNESCO laid the foundation for an International Coordination Committee (ICC) for Haitian culture at a meeting on 16 February in Paris, opened by Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO. The meeting was chaired by Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassègue, Haiti’s Minister of Culture and Communication, and Françoise Rivière, the Organization’s Assistant Director-General for Culture.

Addressing the Minister, Ms Bokova said, “Our goal is to define the most effective means that will allow UNESCO to help prepare and implement a comprehensive programme for the benefit of Haitian culture, by drawing on the vast capacities of your country’s cultural community, which has already mobilized its efforts, and by calling on internationally renowned experts.”

The Committee, which will be similar to those established by UNESCO for Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iraq, will be officially created once it receives final approval from UNESCO’s Executive Board at its next session (30 March – 15 April).

Having recalled that the earthquake on 12 January killed 230,000 people and displaced another half-million, the Haitian Minister stressed that her country had also “just lost 100 years of architecture”. The purpose of the meeting, she continued, was to “set up this programme to inventory, safeguard and rehabilitate all the assets and remains linked to Haitian heritage.”

The 150 participants included representatives from UNESCO Member States and organizations including Interpol, Blue Shield, the World Customs Organization, the International Council of Museums (ICOM), International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), and museums including the Quai Branly (France) and the Smithsonian Institution (United States).

The first part of the meeting focused on assessing the damage the earthquake inflicted on tangible as well as intangible heritage and on cultural industries. The most urgent measures to be taken - at the same time as the creation of the CIC – were examined.

UNESCO will provide institutional support to the Haitian Ministry of Culture in order to establish with utmost urgency the inventory of sites and collections to be safeguarded. A fund to support artists and help them to continue their work is also being considered.

The Haitian delegation stressed that all of the emblematic buildings in Port-au-Prince had been damaged, particularly the cathedral, National Palace, Palace of Justice, Dessalines barracks, Alexandre Pétion school, Trinity, Saint Anne and Saint Joseph churches, justice and culture ministries and Saint-Louis de Gonzague school.

Jacmel was among other cities struck by the earthquake. On Haiti’s Tentative List of properties to be proposed for inscription on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, Jacmel has sustained extensive damage, particularly downtown.

In Leogane, close to the epicentre, damage is also considerable although the wooden colonial houses are relatively intact. The Institute for the Preservation of National Heritage (ISPAN) has not yet completed a detailed inventory of the town’s devastation.

In addition, numerous museums and art galleries, both public and private, libraries and national archives have been severely damaged and risk looting. UNESCO Director-General On 27 January, Irina Bokova wrote to Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, calling for safeguarding measures “to ensure, as far as possible, the immediate security of the sites containing these artefacts.”

Ms Bokova will go to Haiti on 9 March to meet with Port-au-Prince authorities to examine the implementation of UNESCO’s assistance, not only in culture but also in education and science.

17.02.2010
Source: UNESCOPRESS

To see the original story on the UNESCO website click here

January 29, 2010 

UNESCO is launching a campaign to protect Haiti’s moveable heritage, notably art collections in the country’s damaged museums, galleries and churches, from pillaging.

The Director-General of the Organization, Irina Bokova, on Wednesday wrote to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, asking for his support in preventing the dispersion of Haiti’s cultural heritage.

“I would be most grateful,” she wrote, “if you would request Mr John Holmes, your Special Envoy for Haiti and Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian affairs, as well as the relevant authorities in charge of the overall coordination of UN humanitarian support in Port-au-Prince – the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) and the Department of Peace Keeping Operations (DPKO) – to ensure, as far as possible, the immediate security of the sites containing these artefacts.”

Ms Bokova further asked Mr Ban to consider recommending that the Security Council adopt a resolution instituting a temporary ban on the trade or transfer of Haitian cultural property. The Director-General also suggested that institutions such as Interpol, the World Customs Organization (WCO) and others assist in the implementation of such a ban.

The Director-General is also seeking to mobilize the support of the whole international community and of art market and museum professionals in enforcing the ban. “It is particularly important,” she urged in her letter, “to verify the origin of cultural property that might be imported, exported and/or offered for sale, especially on the Internet.”

Referring to UNESCO’s previous experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Director-General said she intended to draw on national and international experts to orient and coordinate the assistance required to protect Haiti’s cultural heritage. “This heritage,” she insisted “is an invaluable source of identity and pride for the people on the island and will be essential to the success of their national reconstruction.”

It is important to prevent treasure hunters from rifling through the rubble of the numerous cultural landmarks that collapsed in the earthquake. Among them are the former Presidential Palace and Cathedral of Port-au-Prince, along with many edifices in Jacmel, the 17th century French colonial town Haiti planned to propose for inscription on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

The one property already inscribed on the List – the National History Park - Citadel, Sans Souci, Ramiers - with its royal palace and large fortress appears to have been spared by the quake. As were the country’s main museums and archives.

UNESCO has already helped salvage the exceptionally rich historical archives of George Corvington, the historian of Haiti. It is also contributing to attempts to rescue whatever panels or significant fragments remain of the remarkable painted murals that decorated the Episcopal Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Port-au-Prince.

29.01.2010  Click here to go to UNESCO site

This bulletin serves to inform the IFLA community about the current situation of libraries in Haïti and the many aspects of support that needs to be provided in the aftermath of the earthquake of 12 January 2010.

There are two IFLA members in Haiti: The Bibliothèque Nationale d’Haïti and the Fondation Connaissance et Liberté (FOKAL), both located in Port au Prince.

Damage

On 15 January 2010, the director of the national library reported: “the building of the National library is safe, the shelves and holdings have shifted…we will prevail … our building is the only one standing in the whole area. I have not yet been able to locate all the personnel,1/2 of them are safe we keep on checking. We will keep you posted.” Later reports made clear that the building may still be standing, but both the building and the collections and other materials are heavily damaged. 

The FOKAL headquarters which holds the Monique Calixte Library, one of the most used libraries of Port au Prince, is still standing. The gardens and parking lot in the back have been transformed into a refugee camp for the neighborhood and library employees. At the peak time 600 people took refuge there. All FOKAL employees are accounted for, but most of them have lost their homes.

Saint Martial College in which there is the Bibliothèque Haïtienne des Pères du Saint Esprit collapsed. This is the oldest library in Port au Prince. The curator Patrick Tardieu is alive and currently in Canada. The Library of Saint Louis de Gonzague is heavily damaged. Both those libraries gathered very old collections (from the 16th century). Several manuscripts were brought by the missionaries who came from Europe. Other have been collected in the Caribbeans (notably, publications on the Haitian revolutions, transcriptions of oral voodoo traditions, personal documents from the 18th centuries).

Most of the university buildings were completely destroyed. The Library of the University Quisqueya is heavily damaged.
(Source: Bibliothèques sans Frontières - BSF)

Statements

On 15 January 2010, IFLA President Ellen Tise issued a statement in parallel with a Blue Shield statement.  In addition to the English original, we have also made available translations in Arabic, Chinese, German, Russian and Spanish.

In addition, the CfI (Comité français IFLA) issued a statement of support on the same date.

Danielle Mincio is IFLA’s Haiti liaison for the Governing Board. 

Relief Initiatives

ABINIA (Association of Iber-American National Libraries), the National Library of the Dominican Republic, ACURIL (Association of Caribbean University, Research and Institutional Libraries) and the Graduate School of Information Sciences of the University of Puerto Rico are joining efforts to consider the protocol, the best strategies to assist libraries and archives. A joint inspection mission to Haiti, consisting of staff of the Dominican National Library, led by Mrs. Barbara Perez-Eguren was held on 21-22 January 2010.

Blue Shield initiatives include a special Haïti 2010 website requesting professional colleagues to register experts for hands-on support activities and consultancy. Additional news and correspondence will also be be made available through Facebook and Twitter. 

National Committees of the Blue Shield (US, France, Germany) are working with their partners over the next couple of weeks to establish a volunteer team to go to Haïti when circumstances allow and if needed.

Prince Claus Fund/CER (Cultural Emergency Response) has worked closely with IFLA on occasions like the Iraq war (2004) and the earthquake in Sichuan, China (2008). Their partner in Haiti is Fondation AfricAmerica.  CER is considering how to support the libraries sector in Haïti in its recovery efforts.

Next Steps

IFLA will give full support to relief initiatives for destroyed or damaged libraries in Haiti, focusing on collaboration with Blue Shield committees, ACURIL, ABINIA and the National Library of the Dominican Republic.

IFLA will promote Blue Shield initiatives to register experts and encourage IFLA members to provide expertise and consultancy where possible. Special attention will be paid to help for our two IFLA members in the country.

IFLA will seek collaboration with the CER of the Prince Claus Fund in Amsterdam, Netherlands in finding emergency assistance to libraries in Haïti .

IFLA has made the Stichting IFLA Fund available for any donations for Haïti libraries and will announce further information on how to donate.

IFLA will encourage all IFLA Officers to widely disseminate information to their constituencies on how to make expertise available, to consider volunteering for professional assistance and on how to make donations.

IFLA President Ellen Tise and President-elect Ingrid Parent are considering a visit to Haïti to meet with members; tentative dates are set for June 2010.

1 February 2010 http://www.ifla.org/en/news/news-and-developments-regarding-libraries-in-ha-ti