During a private meeting in Paris last September, an Indigenous Maasai lawyer from Tanzania encouraged leaders from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to remove northern Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area from the World Heritage List.
Despite the park’s commercial success, with visitors rising from around 679,000 in 2018 to 843,000 in 2023, Tanzania’s relocation of most of the 100,000 Maasai residents of Ngorongoro since 2021 has drawn criticism. Human rights advocates argue the removal violates international law, citing cuts to health services, school closures, and attempts to remove Ngorongoro from the voters’ register before local elections in Tanzania last November.
Maasai leaders said that UNESCO and its World Heritage Centre are complicit by prioritizing the site’s “universal value” over its human inhabitants, pointing to recommendations such as “addressing the issue of the resident pastoralist population” and referring to the Maasai’s impact on natural resources as “the most important and growing threat.” The Tanzanian government has also cited UNESCO in court when defending evictions.
“You can easily connect the dots and see the role of UNESCO in displacement happening, and the government saying, ‘Whatever we’re doing is UNESCO’s doing,’” said Joseph Oleshangay, the Maasai lawyer who attended the Paris meeting.
In recent years, UNESCO has faced backlash for its responses to mass evictions and violence at World Heritage Sites around the world, which notably includes the forced removal of around 10,000 families from Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple site. UNESCO maintains that it has never called for displacements and that it cannot intervene on sovereign soil. Still, questions remain about the organization’s role in human rights violations at World Heritage Sites and its failure to safeguard communities from violent government actions.
Scholars and activists popularized the term “fortress conservation” to describe a Western or colonialist image of pristine nature, emptied of former inhabitants. The World Heritage approach adds another layer of economic and racial power, said Anuradha Mittal, the founder of the Oakland Institute, a land rights organization that has advocated for displaced World Heritage communities.
Wealthy tourists visit sites where locals—who may have contributed to the heritage—have been displaced. “Can you imagine a group of Maasai would come into London, or come into New York, and declare it a heritage site, and tell the Londoners or New Yorkers to get the hell out of there?” Mittal said. “The whole approach—that institutions like UNESCO, governments, or conservation NGOs can do that—shows the white colonial supremacy that still continues and shows up in conservation.”
A UNESCO spokesperson wrote in an email that while World Heritage Sites are “primarily designated to protect cultural and natural heritage, it is crucial that their management respects the human rights and well-being of local communities.” UNESCO “has repeatedly declared that it considers forced eviction unacceptable” and strengthened relationships with civil society and Indigenous communities in recent years, they said.
When it comes to the Maasai, “we have always maintained that the community’s presence is at the heart of the inscription” of Ngorongoro, the spokesperson wrote, adding that UNESCO has required Tanzanian authorities to “pursue further in-person and on-site dialogue” regarding the “voluntary resettlement scheme” and awaits an invitation from the Tanzanian government to visit.
Publicly, UNESCO relies on stock language when asked about evictions. News posts on its website said that “at no point did it request, support, or participate in this programme” at Angkor Wat, nor “at any time asked for the displacement of the Maasai people” in Ngorongoro. Yet some UNESCO rhetoric in conservation reports and recommendations appears more aligned with fortress conservation. People facing eviction are “illegal occupants,” building “illegal constructions,” and causing “encroachment.”
One longtime World Heritage advisor, archaeologist Mounir Bouchenaki, repeatedly called Angkor Wat residents “squatters” in an interview with government-aligned media. Bouchenaki said residents complained their living conditions were impoverished and unsanitary. The Cambodian government promoted the clip online. (The UNESCO spokesperson said that Bouchenaki “is not a spokesperson for UNESCO and his comments are his own.”)
Describing thousands of families as squatters neglects Cambodia’s land claim complexities. When the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, private land ownership was abolished, and Cambodians were forced into deadly work camps. When Cambodian genocide survivors returned to their ancestral lands—including Angkor Wat—many struggled to prove their prior existence there.
Neither poverty nor hygiene legitimize forced evictions under international law, despite being frequent state excuses. Evictions are only permissible in “exceptional circumstances” with full legal justification, after exhausting alternatives, according to the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR), a sister agency of UNESCO. Angkor residents reported that authorities forced them from their homes and that police beat some protesters before relocating them to a site widely documented to lack plumbing, running water, and job opportunities.
Despite international scrutiny, it’s unclear what triggered Cambodia’s eviction campaign. UNESCO has insisted that it wasn’t involved, while former Prime Minister Hun Sen repeatedly blamed the U.N. agency. Evictions appear paused under current Prime Minister Hun Manet, as the government develops a new land management plan.
Such opacity about UNESCO’s precise role, or lack thereof, in government decision-making is typical, said Stephan Doempke, a former UNESCO consultant who has worked extensively on World Heritage in Albania. In 2014, Doempke founded the nonprofit World Heritage Watch—which reports on-the-ground information about sites—in part to encourage more transparency in UNESCO’s draft decisions.
“The common interest is that World Heritage is something fantastic, it’s great, it’s so beautiful, so wonderful, and everyone should see it. That is what they all agree on,” Doempke said, referring to states that have ratified the World Heritage Convention, affected states, and UNESCO.
However, some activists say that “universal value” incentivizes governments to prioritize some living things over others for tourism, harming the rest of the ecosystem. India’s Kaziranga National Park, for example, was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1985, partly because of its large population of Indian greater one-horned rhinos. Park guards developed a militarized approach to protecting rhinos and were, at one point, killing two people per month on average, according to a 2017 BBC report. As the park’s borders expanded, residents were forced out. Around 1,000 families currently face eviction, said Pranab Doley, an Indigenous activist from Kaziranga.
UNESCO has been quiet during the controversy, with a recent press release lauding Kaziranga as a “success story” for the one-horned rhino. A UNESCO spokesperson wrote that conservation efforts “can never be at the expense of the rights of local populations” and that UNESCO has monitored Kaziranga’s situation, but it “has never received information on this matter from a third party in accordance with the established procedure.”
“It’s not a zoo where you can say, like, ‘These are the chambers for animals,’ ‘These are the roads humans will use,’” Doley said. Conservationists need enforcement power to maintain the perception of control over nature, he said, including bureaucrats, international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and military.
Nonetheless, the fortress conservation narrative can oversimplify the power dynamics at World Heritage Sites. Fergus O’Leary Simpson, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Antwerp, studies the political economy of Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where thousands of Indigenous Batwa people were evicted in the 1970s before it became a World Heritage Site in 1980.
Located near Congo’s border with Rwanda, the park was gripped by civil wars during the 1990s, leading to competition for natural resources between paramilitary groups, government soldiers, eco-guards, local communities, and refugees. After some Batwa returned to the area in 2018, guards and soldiers killed and raped dozens of people, according to Minority Rights Group.
Since then, O’Leary Simpson’s research shows that some Batwa have participated in or even facilitated the illegal timber and charcoal industries—contrary to the stereotype of Indigenous people as stewards of the land.
So, what role should UNESCO and the World Heritage Committee play in human rights? Over the years, politicization has divided the committee—made up of 21 states typically serving four-year terms—into state and regional blocs, according to Doempke. This causes sites to receive varying levels of attention depending on their location and states’ political priorities.
Externally, the agency’s unique focus on culture has placed it at the center of broader political firestorms. In July, U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from UNESCO for the second time, criticizing its 2011 admission of Palestine as a member and claiming its “globalist” approach was at odds with his “America First” policy.
Some supporters of UNESCO’s overall mission would still like to see it rethink its approach to human rights. Though human rights are OHCHR’s explicit mandate, not UNESCO’s, critics argue that UNESCO uses this distinction to deflect culpability, despite publicly embracing the rhetoric of human rights. Doempke called this reasoning “shortsighted and unacceptable” and supports the creation of a mutual reporting system between OHCHR and UNESCO for human rights abuses at World Heritage Sites, along with a human and Indigenous rights position at the World Heritage Centre.
Because international law does not specify a human right to land, land rights are adjudicated across “piecemeal” U.N. bodies and treaties, said Namita Wahi, a lawyer who runs the Land Rights Initiative at the Centre for Policy Research. A right to land would help unify ideas of indigeneity and protection from displacement and land-grabbing, opening new avenues for NGOs and activists to defend themselves, Wahi said.
UNESCO has vigorously shielded itself from criticism. After Survival International, a human rights organization, reported on problems at six World Heritage Sites last year, UNESCO said that the report was “questionable” and the organization was “fighting the wrong battle.” Yet other U.N. agencies have raised concerns. Nine special rapporteurs raised concerns to UNESCO about the Maasai evictions in 2022, while five special rapporteurs condemned Cambodia’s evictions late last year, writing that Indigenous communities “should not become yet another casualty of conservation-resettlement in a UNESCO-protected area.”
To accommodate both World Heritage Sites and people, UNESCO has to shift away from its “1950s” thinking of conservation through colonialism, Oleshangay said. In the modern context, he noted, the racism embedded in the conservation industry has shifted from prioritizing white settlers to white tourists.
“If you were living in a World Heritage Site, would you want the health centers to be taken away, so that we comply with UNESCO policies?” Oleshangay said. “We need to protect mankind’s heritage, but not at the expense of human life and living.”
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