Thousands of books destroyed by UNESCO

For more than two decades, 250 historians and specialists labored to produce the first six volumes of the General History of Latin America, an exhaustive work financed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), created to preserve global culture and heritage. Then, over the course of two years, UNESCO paid to destroy many of those books and nearly 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 organization’s “most important and successful collections” were ordered destroyed, including histories of humanity and Africa, 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, in order to discover the reasons which led them to take this decision and not to consider other options,” the audit report quotes him as saying. Read more in The Washington Post online.