UNESCO expands list of World Heritage sites

The agency also renames Auschwitz death camp to emphasize Nazi Germany's role.

By Ray Lilley, Associated Press
09:10 AM PDT, June 28, 2007

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UNESCO revised its name for the Auschwitz death camp in Poland to emphasize Nazi Germany's role and designated a city in Iraq where mosques have come under attack as an endangered world cultural treasure.

The Sydney Opera House was named a world cultural site Thursday, along with the Iwami Ginzan silver mine in Japan, the Parthian Fortresses of Turkmenistan and the Red Fort in New Delhi, a 17th century sandstone complex built by Mogul emperors.

Auschwitz now will be known as "Auschwitz-Birkenau. German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945)," said Roni Amelan, a spokesman for UNESCO's World Heritage Committee. The camp had been listed on the U.N. agency's registry as the "Auschwitz Concentration Camp."

Poland, which was subjected to a brutal Nazi occupation, sought the name change to ensure that people understand it had no role in establishing or running the camp where the Nazis killed more than 1 million people, most of them Jews.

The camp was made a World Heritage Site by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 1979.

Among the new sites inscribed Thursday on the World Heritage List were archeological remains in the Iraqi city of Samarra. The committee did not mention the Iraq war in its announcement, but said the site was listed as "in danger."

Insurgents have repeatedly targeted holy sites in Samarra, a city 60 miles north of the Iraqi capital. This month they blew up the minarets of the Askariya shrine, and in February 2006, insurgents destroyed the Shiite shrine's golden dome, setting off deadly sectarian violence in the country.

The Samarra site stretches along the eastern bank of the Tigris River and includes the 9th century Great Mosque with its 170-foot-tall spiral minaret. The 26-mile-long site "testifies to the architectural and artistic innovations that developed there and spread to the other regions of the Islamic world and beyond," the U.N. committee said.

Other sites added to the list include the Lope-Okanda landscape of Gabon, the Richtersveld mountainous desert of South Africa, the rock carvings of Namibia's Twyfelfontein region and 1,800 fortified tower houses in China's Guangdong province.

The Teide National Park on the island of Tenerife and ancient beech forests in central Europe were also designated World Heritage sites, and a protected area of Switzerland's high Alps site of Jungfrau-Aletsch Bietschhorn was nearly doubled in size. The committee also listed the Mehmed Paa Sokolovic Bridge of Visegrad, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada's Rideau Canal and Greece's old town of Corfu.

The committee, meeting in the southern city of Christchurch, was considering up to two dozen other applications for addition to its list of more than 840 natural and cultural treasures.