(1) Letter dated January 23rd, 1991
Mr. Director General,
I would like to extend to you my sincere thanks for sending me the texts of the statements you have made since the Gulf crisis. Your declarations bear testimony to your commitment to peace, which is the ultimate goal of UNESCO and of the United Nations system as a whole.
I appreciated highly your January 21st declaration on the dangers involved in the possible use of chemical and biological weapons. Coming from the prominent biochemist that you are, this appeal will no doubt have a great scientific as well as moral impact.
Given the latest reports on the bombing of Baghdad National Museum, to which UNESCO made great contributions when I was still Assistant Director General for Culture and which boasts unique and invaluable pieces of mankind's cultural heritage of all epochs and ages, I have no doubt that you will soon launch a pressing appeal to the warring powers urging them to observe the Hague convention on the protection of cultural property in case of armed conflicts which was ratified by 76 States. However, it is unfortunate that neither the United States nor the United Kingdom have ratified the convention and that they are not members of UNESCO for the time being. But this does not absolve them from observing international law.
This convention authorizes UNESCO to intervene and even empowers it to call through its Director General representatives of the parties to the conflict to meet on neutral territory. Such an initiative is warranted by the unprecedented conflict which is raging in the Gulf region and in which a country has come under a deluge of bombs which, combined, would make up 5 times the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
I think that UNESCO is the only organization empowered to take initiatives for the preservation of this part of the universal heritage.
Yours sincerely,
Mahdi ELMANDJRA
Former Assistant Director General for Social Sciences, Human Sciences
and Culture of UNESCO
(2) Letter dated January 29th, 1991
Mr. Director General,
Further to my fax dated January 23rd, 1991, of which you have not yet acknowledge receipt because we were on assignment in the United States, I was glad to hear from Mr. Henri LOPES, Assistant Director General for Culture, that you had sent to the countries involved in the Gulf conflict letters regarding the Hague Convention (1954) on the protection of cultural property in war times.
Enclosed herewith is a copy of an appeal which was published this morning by "Al Alam" newspaper and which you will be soon relayed to you by Moroccan and Maghrebian intellectuals.
Any information you might convey to the world press on the matter
will be highly appreciated the world over by cultured men and women who
are concerned about the fate of one of the richest lores of all mankind.
Yours faithfully,
Mahdi Elmandjra
Rabat, January 29th, 1991
* Al Alam, January 31st, 1991, Rabat