LAHORE: The facts related to the Orange Line Metro Train (OLMT) project presented by a Pakistani government delegation at the 41st Session of the UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee (WHC) earlier in the month were fully appreciated and reflected in the Committee’s decisions, said a press statement on Thursday.
The statement issued by the provincial government was in response to a press conference arranged by the Lahore Conservation Society on Wednesday.
It dismissed the LCS’s allegation that the government delegation at the WHC session had distorted facts and said that misrepresentation of facts was actually done by ‘our critics who were fully exposed and the WHC did not pay any heed to their assertions’.
It said the government was committed to conservation and protection of heritage sites along the project route.
The statement held that draft decisions of the World Heritage Centre – that serves only as the Secretariat of the Committee – had been based on ‘wrong information fed to it by the LCS’. It said that those who addressed the press on Wednesday were visibly frustrated since the Committee did not accept their point of view and rejected all unjustified draft decisions including suspension of work on the project, change in alignment in front of Shalamar Gardens and placement of the gardens in the list of endangered heritage sites.
The statement mentioned that while rejecting the Centre’s decisions, the Committee had requested the Pakistani government delegation to immediately complete and share with it the Visual Impact Study as decided in the Committee’s 40th session and to invite the Reactive Monitoring Mission to the project site for inspection immediately after the announcement of the Supreme Court of Pakistan’s decision in a petition related to the project.
Published in Daily Times, July 21st, 2017.
