FRANCE:FOR MORE than two decades, 250 historians and specialists laboured to produce the first six volumes of the General History of Latin America, an exhaustive work financed by Unesco, the UN organisation created to protect global culture and heritage.
Then, over the course of two years, Unesco paid to destroy many of those books and almost 100,000 others by turning them to pulp, according to an external audit.
Unesco director general Koichiro Matsuura said it was "completely incomprehensible and inappropriate" that some of the organisation's "most important and successful collections" were ordered destroyed, including histories of humanity and surveys of ancient monuments.
It was unclear who was responsible, he said. "We have launched an inquiry, consulting publications officers of the period, now retired," the audit report quotes him as saying.
According to the report, the destruction occurred in 2004 and 2005, when Unesco's overflowing book storage warehouses in Paris were relocated to Brussels. Rather than pay to move 94,500 books, auditors reported, Unesco officials ordered them destroyed.
The audit notes that some of the publications were out of date but it says that a "solution other than destruction" should have been considered, "such as free distribution to libraries". - ( LA Times-Washington Post service )