There is need for a wide compilation of information about four Genocide memorials that have been short-listed to be part of the World Heritage Sites if they are to be fully added to the global heritage list, an official at the National Commission for the Fight against Genocide (CNLG) has said.
Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Gisozi, Ntarama Genocide site in Bugesera District, Murambi memorial centre in Nyamagabe District, and Bisesero Genocide Memorial in Karongi District, were temporarily added to the World Heritage Sites list by UN cultural agency, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural organisation (Unesco) in 2012.
But CNLG officials say the addition was just one step in the relatively long process of enlisting sites as part of world heritage and the next step is going to require a lot of work to put together all the details describing the Genocide sites before Unesco can completely add them to the world heritage.
The short-listed Genocide memorial sites hold significant history about the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, a massacre in which more than a million people lost their life.
Jean Butoto, an official in charge of registering the memorials with Unesco at CNLG, told The New Times that a call will soon be out for all historians, engineers, sociologists, story tellers, witnesses, and anyone else who have information about the memorials to share it.
“It’s going to require each and everyone’s input. The research we (at CNLG) are doing will require the cooperation of every one and every institution,” he said on Tuesday.
Butoto said Unesco needs everything; from written and audio visual records of testimonies from Genocide survivors and photos of some Genocide victims to the demographic, historical, and topographic descriptions of the memorials.
“We will have to submit a book of hundreds of pages that describe the memorials in order to allow every citizen of the world to identify what kind of heritage they will be acquiring,” the official said.
“Once the sites we have been adopted as a world heritage, anyone anywhere in the world will be able to access the information about each site and know that what it has is a common global heritage.”
Sites that are under World Heritage have to be exceptional and entail a universal application. They so far include forests, mountains, lakes, deserts, monuments, buildings, or cities that are listed by Unesco as of special cultural or physical significance.
The New Times
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