CULTURAL VISIT TO TUNISIA BY
EXECUTIVE BOARD
Tunis, October 30 (No.2000-108)
- The Executive Board, chaired by Sonia Mendieta de Badaroux (Honduras), carried
out a cultural visit to Tunisia from October 26 to 29, with stops in Carthage,
the Medina of Tunis and Kairouan, sites inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage
List.
The visit, at the invitation of
the Tunisian government, was an opportunity to underscore the close relations
between Tunisia and UNESCO. On Saturday, October 28, the Board members met the
President of Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who awarded the National Order of
Merit to the Chairperson of the Executive Board, Sonia Mendieta de Badaroux, and
to Ahmed Sayyad, Assistant Director-General for External Relations and
Cooperation, who represented UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura during
the visit. On that occasion, Ms Mendieta de Badaroux and the President discussed
advances and the status of women in Tunisian society. The Chairperson awarded
the Gold Carthage Medal to the President of Tunisia in the name of the members
of the Executive Board.
Already at the very start of
the visit, when she addressed the Tunisian Academy of Sciences, Letters and the
Arts, Ms Mendieta de Badaroux spoke of Tunisia’s role since the Punic era as a
crossroad: “Geography and history appear to have joined forces to make Tunisia
a crossroad of the Mediterranean.” Quoting historian Jean-Jacques Aillagon,
she added: “It is on this ground that the universal ideas of the modern West
first blossomed. The development of Tunisian antiquity constantly refers us to
our own culture, a culture which has come to us from our common past, from our
shared Roman past, from our common Christianisation.”
The Chairperson of the
Executive Board also said: “Our Oriental dreams have often taken us to
Carthage, Phoenician Carthage, where we have found new images, unexpected
feelings, and dizzying emotions. Almost all of the city founded by the Princess
of Tyre has been dispersed: Carthage is now everywhere, under our feet, in our
eyes, in our dreams.”
Beside Carthage - the site for
which UNESCO launched a major preservation campaign in 1972 - and its museum
which houses most of the objects discovered there, the Executive Board visited
other major sites. It notably stopped in Kairouan, the most important Muslim
city in the Maghreb and a leading Arab Muslim cultural centre for five
centuries. The Board also toured the Medina of Tunis, the area around the
Azzaitouna Mosque, the Bardo National Museum and its unique collection of Roman
mosaics. With visits to the new Town Hall of Tunis, which expresses the will to
rehabilitate the Medina, and to the National Remote Sensing Centre for the
treatment of satellite data, the present and future also featured in the
cultural visit, alongside the remnants of Tunisia’s prestigious past.
Tunisia’s modernity and
UNESCO’s contribution to modernisation was also present in the words of the
Executive Board’s hosts. Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Tunisia’s Representative at
the Executive Board and President of the Academy of Science, Letters and the
Arts, thus spoke of development projects and stressed that leading undertakings
- such as the use of sea water for irrigation, the fight against drought,
illiteracy - have been conducted in co-operation with UNESCO. He added that he
hoped to see “this partnership continue and take root”. The Minister of
Education and President of Tunisia’s National Commission for Education,
Science and Culture, Iadh El Ouederni, also spoke of the “particularly close
relations of Tunisia and UNESCO”. Before the members of the Executive Board,
the Minister referred to the consultations presently underway in his country to
reflect on the future of education, saying it was a contemporary example of the
will to open out to the world which has always been characteristic of Tunisia.
Foreign Affairs Minister, Habib
Ben Yahia, for his part, qualified relations between UNESCO and Tunisia as
essential, before adding: “We believe in the message of UNESCO to preserve an
equally rich and diverse cultural heritage.” He recalled that his country had
to convey “an eternal message, a message of tolerance, illustrated by the 1995
Carthage Charter”. The Chairperson of the Board also highlighted the role of
Tunisia, recalling the choice of Tunis by UNESCO to be the region’s cultural
capital in 1997, “an eloquent recognition of the role played by Tunisia in the
dialogue between civilisations.”
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