The United Nations on Wednesday announced the creation of a new kind of rapid reaction force to step in wherever art treasures are threatened by war or natural disaster.
The ”cultural blue berets”, as they are already being called, will initially be formed entirely of Italians and could include members of Italy’s paramilitary police, the carabinieri.
Wednesday’s move followed international outrage over the looting of priceless antiquities during the United States-led coalition’s invasion of Iraq last year.
But the absence of an internationally agreed plan for protecting mankind’s cultural heritage was also underlined last December when an earthquake struck the city of Bam in south-eastern Iran, severely damaging the nearby, 2 000-year-old mud-brick citadel.
The UN arts and sciences agency, Unesco, said it had signed an agreement with the Italian government for the ”safeguarding, restoration and protection of the natural and cultural heritage of countries affected by conflict or natural catastrophe”.
According to a report in the newspaper Corriere della Sera on Wednesday, the agreement provided for the involvement of engineers, architects, archaeologists, art historians, restorers, geologists, seismologists, book conservation specialists and experts in the illegal trafficking of art works.
The Paris-based organisation said in a statement it was the first such agreement with a member state.
The world body is hoping other countries will agree similar deals to make available even more expertise. But Italy alone can supply a vast range of skills and experience, and following the establishment of a provisional administration in Baghdad, Italy was given responsibility for protecting and restoring Iraq’s cultural heritage.
Italian officials have already worked with Unesco on projects requiring a swift response. Last year, a Pavia University professor, Giorgio Macchi, who had advised on the stabilisation of the leaning Tower of Pisa, was called in to help prevent the imminent collapse of a minaret at Herat in Afghanistan.
The Italian culture minister, Giuliano Urbani, said: ”The experience that Unesco and Italy have shared in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Egypt and the countries of the Maghreb is the plinth upon which this agreement has been erected.”
Unesco’s director-general, Koichiro Matsuura, said it was his agency’s job ”not only to prevent destruction, but also to contribute assistance for reconstruction”. Matsuura said Unesco was ”being called on more and more often to intervene as a matter of urgency”.
Under the terms of the plan, the government of the affected country will first contact Unesco. If officials in Paris judge the case to be sufficiently serious and urgent, they will then get in touch with Rome and ask for the setting up of an ad hoc team — to be called the emergency action group — to deal with the damage or threat.
Italian officials said that, depending on circumstances, the group could be made up of civilian experts, civil defence officials and/or members of the carabinieri’s specialist art works recovery squad.
Urbani said the coordinator of the UN’s cultural blue berets would be Giuseppe Proietti, a senior official of his ministry.
In May 2003, Proietti was made senior adviser to the office responsible for finding and restoring Iraq’s missing antiquities. As Baghdad fell to US forces the previous month, looters pillaged the National Museum, which housed one of the Middle East’s leading archaeological collections.
The terms of reference of Unesco’s emergency action group suggest it would not have been able to prevent the looting, however, since at the time there was no functioning government able to call on Unesco to act. – Guardian Unlimited Â