At the age of 12, Robin Borremans dreams of becoming a helicopter pilot in the elite Belgian Special Forces. In Tyne Cot Cemetery, where 12,000 Commonwealth infantrymen are buried row after row, their vision of life and death, war and peace, is refined.
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“You stay very calm when you know what happened in this war,” he said as he paused after walking among the rows of dead. “It’s actually extraordinarily impressive. ” He and his group planned to stop at a cemetery of the Germans, who were once enemies, later that day.
It is for this reason that both countries need UNESCO to include the region in its list of prominent sites along the Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu in Peru and the Acropolis in Greece. A resolution on the matter is expected to be reached. will be taken around September 21 at the UNESCO World Heritage Committee assembly in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Canadian infantrymen march at the Canadian Vimy National World War I Memorial in Givenchy-en-Gohelle, France, April 8, 2017. Many memorials in Belgium and France will be identified as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo, File)
The domain has 139 sites covering western Belgium and northern France and has been a living history almost since the cannons, despite everything, fell silent in 1918. In nearby Ypres, “each and every night – each and every night and every night, each and every day since the 1920s, there have been a few other people honking from the Menin Gate,” where the names of 54,000 infantrymen who were never discovered in the chaos of war are etched into their walls. said Matthias Diependaele. Minister of Heritage of the Flemish Region of Northern Belgium.
“It’s the concept of commemorating each and every life lost in this war,” he said.
But this is necessarily sufficient to obtain such recognition, as UNESCO has already pronounced. To the dismay of both nations, it rejected their application in 2018 on the recommendation of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, marking its conclusions with comments such as “several questions. “”, “lack of clarity”, “too narrow and limited” and “gaps”.
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Moreover, it has long been thought that a site like the German Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz Birkenau in Poland would be a witness to horror and suffering on its own and not a precedent for a long list of wars.
That was five years ago and today Diependaele said: “I count on the fact that the concepts within UNESCO have been replaced and that now there is more context of openness. “And with the year and a half of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “the global has also been replaced since then. And maybe there’s a lot more understanding of the desire to protect peace. “
Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, several establishments related to memorials and cemeteries have presented projects to the suffering nation.
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As in the First World War, those affected also amount to tens of thousands, although fortunately the global figure is still much lower. However, the feeling of loss remains the same.
“We have a lot of other people coming here and making that connection to Ukraine simply because it’s so applicable right now,” said Erin Harris, a consultant at Tyne Cot. “And we see the same scenario occurring: with those two sides fighting endlessly. “
“And you get here to a position like this and you really see that happen,” Harris said. “And, you know, it hasn’t changed much. “