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What is world heritage? The answer seems to be simple: something natural or man-made which is so valuable that it is not important to just one country or one region but to the whole world. However, it can be difficult to say what these things of such value are. To one person, a grassland may be a wonderful example of natural beauty; to another it may look like a great place to build houses or shops. Governments are constantly having to resolve such matters, and very often big business wins out over conservation. The situation is even more difficult if the valuable place belongs to more than one country or is affected by activities in another country. A nation may want to build a dum on a river, even if it damages an important site in another country downstream. Some countries may not be able to care for their heritage, or groups there may even want to get rid of it. In 2001, two huge Buddha statues of Bamiyan in Afghanistan were deliberately destroyed by the Taliban.
It was to handle situations like this that the World Heritage Committee was set up by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 1972. However, the idea for a World Heritage List goes back to the 1950s, when the Abu Simbel temples in Egypt were being threatened by a dam. At that time, the Egyptian government did not seem concerned, so UNESCO started a worldwide campaign that saved the temples by relocating them to higher ground.
While officially UNESCO is concerned with protecting world heritage, in most countries nowadays, it is seen more as an organization for promoting it. Nations strongly demand that their important places be added to the list of World Heritage Sites. This means that a site can receive some money from UNESCO's preservation fund, but the real reason is that it gains media attention and more tourists start coming.
Indeed, becoming a World Heritage Site is not always good for a place -sometimes it can be the very worst thing that could happen for its preservation. After Beijing's Forbidden City became a World Heritage Site in 1987, the city government destroyed a large area of traditional buildings around the City and replaced them with heritage streets full of hotels and restaurants for the tourists visiting the Forbidden City. The Angkor temples in Cambodia, which became a World Heritage Site in 1992, now attract more than two million visitors annually and the nearby Siem Reap, which was once barely more than a village, is by some counts now Cambodia's second-largest city.
Cleary, UNESCO has helped with the preservation of less famous sites, particularly in poorer countries, by providing money and expert
assistance, and also placing pressure on governments to protect them. But with the more famous sites, which would have been protected anyway, it has unintentionally encouraged tourist development which may ultimately destroy them.
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