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The Aalst Festival has been removed from the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage following a recent meeting in Bogota, Colombia. This unusual event makes Aalst the first traditional cultural festival to be excluded from this UN list.
The Carnival parade is the main annual event in Aalst, a small town northwest of Brussels, Belgium. During the festival, people gather, drink, and participate in the parade, where they mock and ridicule everything around them with colorful effigies.
The image of the effigy is considered to be defamatory to the Jewish people.
And this year, one participant in the parade carried two giant Jewish effigies, complete with sideburns, bizarrely large noses, and seated on money bags. Another group marched in costumes featuring white hoods and robes of the Ku Klux Klan – a secret society that has promoted white supremacy for over a century. With expressions of anti-Semitism and racism, images of the event quickly spread across social media and received continuous accusations and criticism for its bigotry and inhumanity.
Ku Klux Klan costumes were seen at this year's Aalst festival.
Some critics have launched an international campaign to urge UNESCO to withdraw its official recognition of the Aalst Carnival with a consensus petition of over 8,000 people. According to the petition, this is a blatant act of racism and anti-Semitism. “It is unbelievable that one of Europe’s biggest festivals would engage in such inhumane acts of discrimination!” – Daniel Schwammenthal, Director of the American Jewish Committee in Brussels, expressed his outrage.
The UNESCO Secretariat also stated that the event went against the organization's principles, including the provision promoting respect between communities. "They can continue to hold the festival. We don't object to that. But we don't want UNESCO's reputation to be associated with a festival that, while humorous to many, is, to us, a mockery of certain communities!" said Ernesto Ottone, UNESCO Assistant Secretary for Culture.
It's worth noting that this isn't the first time UNESCO has received such complaints about the festival. In 2013, UNESCO condemned a performance where people dressed as Nazi officers carried weapons reminiscent of the painful history of Jewish people in concentration camps.
Therefore, the decision to remove the Aalst festival from the list of Intangible Cultural Heritage has now been officially issued with the high consensus of many member states. The Belgian government also voluntarily requested the removal of the festival from the UNESCO list following these complaints.
Some images satirize events that occurred during those years.
The Aalst Carnival has its origins in the Middle Ages and has grown into one of the biggest events in Europe over the past two centuries. Each year, more than 40 local groups collectively raise between €50,000 and €100,000 to organize the festival and create the effigies and parade costumes. The Aalst Carnival was recognized as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010. On its official website, the event is described as celebrating the unification of this Flemish-speaking town.
