The Aalst Festival has been removed from the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list after a recent meeting in Bogota, Colombia. This rare event has made the Aalst Festival the first traditional cultural festival to be removed from the United Nations list.
The Carnival parade is the main annual event in Aalst, a small city northwest of Brussels, Belgium. During the festival, people gather, drink and participate in parades where they mock and ridicule everything around them with colorful effigies.
The image of the mannequin is said to defame the Jewish people.
And this year, one participant in the parade carried two giant effigies of Jews, with sideburns, strangely large noses and sitting on bags of money. Another group also marched in costumes with white hoods and robes of the Ku Klux Klan - a secret society that promotes white supremacy that has existed for more than a hundred years. With expressions of anti-Semitism and racism, images of this event quickly spread across social networks and continuously received accusations and criticisms of bigotry and inhumanity.
Ku Klux Klan costumes appear at this year's Aalst festival
Some critics have launched an international campaign to force UNESCO to withdraw its official recognition of the Aalst Carnival, with a petition of more than 8,000 people calling it a blatant appeal to racism and anti-Semitism. “It is unbelievable that one of Europe’s largest festivals would engage in such inhumane calls to discrimination,” said Daniel Schwammenthal, director of the American Jewish Committee in Brussels.
The UNESCO secretariat also said the event went against the organization's principles, including the clause promoting respect between communities. "They can continue to hold the festival. We have no objection to that. But we do not want UNESCO's reputation to be associated with a festival that, for many people, may be humorous, but for us, is a mockery of some communities!" said Ernesto Ottone, UNESCO's Assistant Director of Culture.
It is worth noting that this is not the first time UNESCO has received such complaints about this festival. In 2013, UNESCO condemned a performance dressed as a Nazi officer carrying weapons reminiscent of the painful history of Jews in concentration camps.
Therefore, up to this point, the decision to remove the Aalst Festival from the list of Intangible Cultural Heritage has been officially issued from the high consensus of many member countries. The Belgian government also voluntarily requested to remove the festival from the UNESCO list after these complaints.
Some pictures mocking events that happened over the years
The Aalst Carnival has its origins in the Middle Ages and has grown into one of the largest events in Europe over the past two centuries. Each year, more than 40 local groups pool together between 50,000 and 100,000 euros to organize the festival and create the effigies and costumes. The Aalst Carnival was recognized by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010. On its official website, the event is described as celebrating the unification of the Flemish-speaking town.
