Dionisia Tabureguci
If you are from the Pacific region and thought that a project called ‘Memory of the World Programme’ (MOW) sounded like a plot straight out of a George Lucas movie, you may be forgiven.

Those who are involved with it will be quick to point out that it is not a very widely known project in this part of the world despite it being a 15-year old work in progress under the stewardship of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

UNESCO’s challenge on the aim of the MOW Programme, as it is normally referred to, is that it will “guard against collective amnesia calling upon the preservation of the valuable archive holdings and library collections all over the world ensuring their wide dissemination.”

“Documentary heritage reflects the diversity of languages, peoples and cultures. It is the mirror of the world and its memory. But this memory is fragile. Every day, irreplaceable parts of this memory disappear forever,” says the introductory notes to the project.

Simply put, UNESCO’s MOW Programme aims to preserve documentary items of significant value to countries in the world.

Only last month, its International Advisory Committee met in South Africa to review over 50 requests from 38 countries and the International Committee of the Red Cross, to recommend documentary heritage properties for inscription on the MOW Register.

The result of that meeting was 38 new inscriptions, among them some of the most telling documents in the world today, such as the 30 manuscripts of the Rigveda from India, which dates as far back as 1800 to 1500 B.C. and is known to be the oldest Vedic texts to exist in this age.

From South Africa came a document titled: ‘Criminal Court Case No. 253/1963  (State versus N. Mandela and Others)’ which contains ‘proceedings of the trial of the leaders of the African National Congress (ANC), during which Nelson Mandela stood in the dock and proclaimed the goals of the ANC, before his incarceration on Robben Island until 1990.

Egypt now has the ‘Persian Illustrated and Illuminated Manuscripts’, a collection of 71 rare manuscripts that illustrate the evolution of royal ateliers from the 14th to the 19th century.

Closer to home, another fragment of Australia’s national memory was inscribed via ‘The Convict Records of Australia’, a written account of the deportation over 80 years (1788 to 1868) of some 165,000 convicts from the United Kingdom, who founded the Australian Commonwealth.

The diverse list of documents spanned over thousands of years to recent human history and took to 158 the number of inscriptions that are now on UNESCO’s MOW Register.

Yet, an observer from the Pacific region is likely to note the absence of documents from Pacific islands countries.
With the rest of the world now advancing with initiatives to consolidate their national memories through the MOW project, why has there been a glaring lack of participation from Pacific islands countries?

Apia-based Abel Caine, UNESCO’s Adviser for Information and Communication in the Pacific, told ISLANDS BUSINESS that efforts to get the Pacific to participate in this project have matured and resulted in the launch last year of a Pacific MOW Register.

“The MOW Programme is a list of documentary items of significant heritage value,” Caine explained.

The register attributes list is extensive: name, type, location, owner(s), status, etc. The programme aims to preserve both the memory of the list as well as the items on the list.

Preservation includes physical aspects (cleaning, climate-control display/storage, chemical preservation, limited access, etc) and digital (scanning, online publication, etc).

While the MOW programme is not as well-known as UNESCO’s World Heritage Programme for monuments and sites, the official MOW Register is still a very prestigious and lengthy list with many new additions biennially. 

There are currently no items from the Pacific and the purpose of the Pacific MOW Register is to build awareness for the global programme and to have up to six Pacific items inscribed on the global list during the next UNESCO medium term (2008 to 2013).

Spearheaded by the Communication and Information sector of UNESCO’s Apia office, the Pacific region will be pitching for inclusion in the global MOW project as a collective body of countries.

The Pacific Register was completed in 2006 and the Apia Office will be working with the Australian MOW committee to build a website, said Caine.

So far, the Pacific MOW register has identified over 300 national documents from 14 Pacific islands countries as having historical significance.

While it may be argued that Pacific islands nations should be the ones to make the decisions on what documents qualify as having historical and national significance, the level of awareness on the need to preserve memory and the UNESCO MOW Programme is very low, according to Caine.

“Ideally, each Pacific islands country should form a national IFAP (Information For All Programme) Committee who would agree on the list and priority ranking,  ultimate ownership/custodianship of the item, as well as work to inscribe the item of the global MOW register. The committee should consist of all national stakeholders and infostructures.”

As this was not often the case in the Pacific, the task of locating and digitising documents on the Pacific MOW register as well as the footing of costs involved are left in the hands of UNESCO Apia.

While progress has been achieved with the list of important documents from the region, PICs may as well suffer from historical amnesia as the existence of a number of those documents are not known and therefore, it is not clear whether they can be located for digitisation.

Documents relating to the election of Niue’s King in 1878 for example, or the sale of Micronesia to Germany by Spain in 1885, are among the many others from across the 14 PICs whose whereabouts are not known.

Caine said this formed part of the challenges in getting the Pacific MOW Programme together.

Most of the listed items have disappeared or there is only vague knowledge of the last location.

When there has been contact with the ‘owners’ or holders of the items, negotiation for the return of the items have been hampered by either the purchase or ‘transfer fee’ or the owners’ real concerns of the ability of the country to properly maintain the items, he said.

Caine urged PICs to take ownership of this project and to see it as “a source of collective pride and joy from being able to remember their history and how it formed their identity”.