The Old Town of Kotor and the bay area have been threatened with denying their UNESCO status for a certain period. The municipality and the state will do everything to keep the city on the list of protected world cultural and natural heritage, writes Dnevne Novine newspaper. National action plan has already been prepared for this purpose. The municipality president Vladimir Jokic emphasises that Kotor “has not required the government of Montenegro to ban construction in the city”.
Since 1979, when the natural and cultural-historical region of Kotor was declared UNESCO’s World Heritage site for its extraordinary universal values that are reflected in the harmonious relationship between the architectural heritage and the natural environment, the situation in this area has changed significantly, to the extent that the Government Montenegro has recently made the decision to suspend construction in Kotor for six months due to UNESCO’s announcement that the city will be removed from the list of world cultural heritage, if devastation is not prevented.
Minister of Culture Janko Ljumovic stated that this was a methodology that was directly contained in the decisions of the UNESCO Committee made in Istanbul in 2016, which was transformed into the government’s action plan aimed at keeping Kotor on the list of UNESCO’s protection
Minister of Sustainable Development and Tourism Pavle Radulovic said that the ministry had decided to stop the construction and the issuance of new building permits for six months to get long-term benefit. He noted that it was necessary to find a solution, present it to UNESCO representatives and ask them not to remove Kotor from the protected sites list.
Ljumovic and Radulovic invited the President of the Municipality of Kotor Vladimir Jokic to talk.
However, Jokic sees this government’s decision as a form of political pressure on the new local government in Kotor.
He told Dnevne Novine that there is not a single word in the UNESCO’s Istanbul decision related to Kotor requiring the government to ban construction in Kotor.
“This political pressure is best illustrated by the fact that in the draft decision of the World Heritage Committee in 2014 before the summit in Doha, UNESCO asked Montenegro to “suspend the construction or infrastructure projects in the area of Kotor until the necessary means of planning and managing are completed and applied”. In the decision made at the 38th summit in Doha, this item was removed from the list of requirements after lobbying of national delegations. After the construction ban was removed from the draft decision and left out in the decision after the 38th summit in 2014, it was not mentioned in any subsequent draft decision or decision from 2015 and 2016, in which the Heritage Impact Assessment (HIA) report was required,” Jokic said.
He announced that the local government in Kotor is to form a body that would look critically at national and local planning documents, present the need for amendments to these documents, the ways of their revision, providing plans and processes that should accompany such a complex task.
He reiterated that the communication with the ministries would take place at the official level, the exchange of formal letters. He added that they would insist on dismissing the director of the Institute for Protection of Monuments of Montenegro Anastasia Miranovic and require minister Ljumovic to act upon the submitted report concerning the construction on the Turski Trg as a competent appellate body.
