ICOMOS calls imperatively for the Romanian State to rescue the cultural heritage of outstanding significance from Roșia Montană and warns on the impending threat represented by RMGC mining operations

The heritage specialists participating at the annual session of the Executive and Advisory Committees and Scientific Symposium of ICOMOS (advisory body of UNESCO on world heritage), meeting from October 6 to 11th in San José, Costa Rica, adopted a new resolution on Roşia Montană.
Through this resolution, which follows a series of such position statements of the prestigious organization issued over the past decade, ICOMOS demands the Romanian authorities to fulfil their obligation to protect the outstanding cultural heritage of Roşia Montană, assumed by the adoption of relevant international conventions, and to transform the place in a model for the implementation of development policies and programmes which give precedence to cultural heritage.
In the motivation of this document, ICOMOS draws upon the fundamental positions on this matter of the Romanian Academy, the historic churches of Transylvania and the national and international professional bodies, such as UIA, OAR, UAR or ARA.
An assessment of the site in the context of the cultural heritage of the humanity is also requested, with a view on the demand during the recent public protests for the inscription of Roşia Montană in the World Heritage List.
Finally ICOMOS offers once more its support for the implementation of all these measures.
ICOMOS did not receive answers from the Romanian authorities to any of its previous appeals.

Read below the text of the new ICOMOS resolution:

Regarding the site of Roşia Montană, the ancient Alburnus Maior, an outstanding mining settlement and cultural landscape in Romania, now under imminent threat from an open-cast mining development

By the power of its Executive Committee meeting in San José, Costa Rica, in October 2013, ICOMOS resolves to:
1. Reiterate its deepest concern about the planned mining operations that threaten to continue the destruction of the Roşia Montană mining settlement while recognizing its outstanding historic significance as a cultural landscape which evolved over more than two millennia, and all as expressed in the annexed hereunder.
2. Call again, as several times in the last decade, for the Romanian Government and all the authorities in charge of the management, protection and conservation of Romania's Heritage to secure the appropriate protection of the site and stop immediately any adverse actions or administrative decisions.
3. Call for emergency measures for the salvaging, conservation and restoration of the heritage features of Roşia Montană, in accordance to the provisions of all relevant international charters and of international conventions adopted by Romania.
4. Call the Romanian authorities to evaluate the significance of Roşia Montană as a cultural landscape in the context of the cultural heritage of mankind, and invite the authorities to implement a model that ensures that precedence is given to the protection, conservation and enhancement of cultural heritage over industrial and construction pressures, according to all policies and provisions as annexed hereunder.
5. Express once again its willingness to collaborate with the above authorities and offer them the availability of its professional network to assist them in this work so as to make RoşiaMontană a model in developing and applying appropriate policies and practices in the conservation of historic places inter alia, via the involvement of ICOMOS Romania and the relevant ICOMOS International Scientific Committees and UNESCO Venise Centre and World Heritage Centre for that purpose.

Annex to Draft Resolution

The resolution has been made with reference to:
- Resolution no. 20 of the 13th General Assembly of ICOMOS held in Madrid, Spain, December 2002,
- Resolution no. 1b of the 14th Extraordinary General Assembly, held in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, October 2003,
- The Resolution of the ICOMOS Conference held in Pécs, Hungary, 22-27 May 2004,
- The ICAHM Statement on the mining concept at RoşiaMontană in Lyon, France, at the European Archaeological Association Conference on 9 September 2004,
- Resolution no. 8 of the 15th General Assembly of ICOMOS, meeting in Xi'an, China, October 2005,
- Resolution no. 4 of the 16th General Assembly of ICOMOS held in Quebec, Canada, October 2008,
- Resolution no. 22 of the 17th General Assembly of ICOMOS held in Paris, France, December 2011,

Taking note of:
-The outstanding significance of Roşia Montană-Alburnus Maior, as a cultural landscape which evolved over more than three millennia, encompassing vestiges of prehistoric mining, the unique Roman underground mining system, constantly developed and extended during the Middle Ages, Renaissance and the Modern Times, together with the vestiges of the mining hydro-technical system and the traditional mining town, inherited from the Habsburg times.
- The large scale open-cast mining development proposed by the Roşia Montană Gold Corporation (RMGC), overlapped onto the historic mining settlement and cultural landscape of RoşiaMontană, threatening to destroy the largest part of it definitively;
- The recent proposal by the Romanian Government [1] for a dedicated law to kick-start the RMGC mining project, now under evaluation in Parliament;
- The recent statements of Romanian officials -the Prime-Minister and the Minister of Culture, among others - promoting the RMGC mining project solely on conjenctural economic grounds, not paying attention to or minimizing its negative effects upon the cultural heritage;
- The potential for this case to trigger a chain reaction to affect other historic mining sites of the area, threatening the archaeological, architectural and historical heritage and the cultural landscape of the Apuseni Mountains - Romania's Western Carpathians, and perhaps to similar cases in South East and Central Europe,
Taking into consideration:
- The official position of the Romanian Academy and its most recent statement on this issue [2], as well as those of all religious communities involved [3], and the ones of professional bodies, such as the International Union of Architects [4], the European Council of Architects, the Romanian Chamber of Architects [5], Pro Patrimonio, ARA [6];

- The 2011 advice of the National Commission for Historic Monuments on the inscription of RoşiaMontană on Romania's Tentative List for the World Heritage [7];
- The recent inclusion of Roşia Montană on the list with the most endangered monuments and sites of Europe [8], within the "7 Most Endangered Programme" initiated by Europa Nostra in association with the European Investment Bank and the Council of Europe Development Bank;
- The wide support by the Romanian public, expressed by the ever increasing participation to the recent street protests dedicated to the rescue of Roşia Montană, organized in Bucharest and other cities across Romania and elsewhere around the world [9]; one of demands of the protestors being the inclusion of Roşia Montană on UNESCO's World Heritage List, and, as a first step, in the Romanian Tentative List for UNESCO;
- The deep concerns of ICOMOS about the planned mining operations that threaten to continue the destruction of the RoşiaMontană mining settlement and cultural landscape together with its surroundings.

[1] Draft law on certain measures related to the exploitation of the gold-silver deposits from RoşiaMontană and stimulation and facilitation of mining development in Romania, http://www.senat.ro/Legis/Lista.aspx?cod=17535
[2] 19 June 2013; http://www.acad.ro/forumuri/pag_forum_RosiaMontana.htm
[3] Position of the historic churches of Transylvania; position of the Romanian Orthodox Church, reaffirmed recently in a statement by the speaker of Holy Synod and by Metropolitan of Transylvania.
[4] http://www.oar.org.ro/upload/2008/Rezolutia_UIA_privind_Rosia_Montana_2008.pdf
[5] http://www.oar.org.ro/upload/2007/Rezolutie_Rosia_Montana_rom.pdf
[6] http://www.simpara.ro/RO/RO-109.htm
[7] Copies of the decision published by investigation journalist Mihai Goţiu, http://voxpublica.realitatea.net/politica-societate/jenant-ministerul-culturii-a-pierdut-documente-din-dosarul-afacerii-rosia-montana-daniel-barbu-le-poate-gasi-si-citi-aici-o-alta-lista-incredibila-de-minciuni-guvernamentale-98349.html
[8] http://www.europanostra.org/7-most-endangered/
[9] See "The Arab Spring, the Turkish Summer, the Romanian Autumn" and other reports at CNN iReport: http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-1032434, http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-1030279, http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-1036418