Newly-appointed Secretary General of the Guyana National Commission for UNESCO, Inge Nathoo has begun the process of trying to get Guyana’s nomination back on track for the World Heritage list as the project has been dormant in recent years.
In a telephone interview with Stabroek News Nathoo said that before Guyana could be nominated there are a number of things that must be completed in terms of upgrading and rehabilitating some facilities. In addition, there must be an enabling environment such as adequate legislation to ensure that certain historical sites and monuments are preserved accordingly.
At the time of the interview she was unable to pinpoint what exactly had to be done but said that she has begun to familiarize herself with the procedure and was in talks with the National Trust of Guyana as well. She was also offered assistance from her counterpart in Barbados in the initial stages
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In view of the time that has elapsed, she said that much of the work done by former National UNESCO Chairman Carmen Jarvis around the foundation that was laid has been undone. Jarvis retired in 2004 after working on the project to have Guyana listed since 1998.
Nathoo said that it was on her work plan to pursue the issue of having the Kaieteur National Park listed having been nominated once before and refused and historic Georgetown. She said the one thing that was not in her favour was institutional memory but admitted that it was a challenge she was willingly undertaking and may be calling on persons who would have worked on the project before to assist.
In the interest of transparency and accountability, she said that she was clearing up some liabilities the office incurred while at the same time she was working on accessing funds from the UNESCO office in Paris to restart the nomination process and other projects the office will have to execute. “At present I am working with a ‘zilch’ budget,” she said while trying to strengthen the staff and operations.
Guyana’s attempts at nominating historical sites to the UNESCO World Heritage Site began in the mid-1990s. Three sites – Kaieteur National Park, Shell Beach and Historic Georgetown, were considered. Work on Kaieteur National Park began in 1997 and in 1998 work on Historic Georgetown started.
Guyana submitted the Kaieteur National Park, including the Kaieteur Falls, to UNESCO in 2000 as its first nomination. The proposed area and surroundings have some of Guyana’s most diversified life zones with one of the highest levels of endemic species found anywhere in South America.
The Kaieteur Falls is the most spectacular feature falling a distance of 226 metres. The nomination was unsuccessful, mainly due to the area being seen as too small by the evaluators, especially when compared with the Central Suriname Nature Reserve which was nominated shortly before as a World Heritage Site in 2000. The dossier was returned to Guyana for revision.
A ‘Tentative List’ indicating an intention to nominate Historic Georgetown was submitted to UNESCO in December 2004 and a small committee, which has not been functioning, was formed to complete the nomination dossier and the management plan for the site. Two Dutch experts, including Dr Ron van Oers, who also worked with Suriname in preparing the country’s successful nomination, assisted in preparing Guyana’s dossiers
In April 2005, two Dutch experts in conservation spent two weeks in Georgetown supervising architecture staff and students of the University of Guyana in a historic building survey of the selected area. This is part of the data collection for the nomination dossier.
Meanwhile, as a result of the Kaieteur National Park being considered too small, there is now another proposal to prepare a nomination for a ‘cluster site’ that will include the Kaieteur National Park, the Iwokrama rainforest conservation site and the Kanuku mountains, all of which are rich in rare bio-diversity. (Miranda La Rose)
