Argentina and Uruguay, embroiled in a clash over the birthplace of the great tango crooner Carlos Gardel, have kicked aside their differences to persuade Unesco to give tango protected cultural status.

A United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization committee meets this week in Paris to consider their petition to add the music and dance to the intangible cultural heritage list, alongside India's Vedic chanting and Japan's Kabuki theatre.

The committee, which works with a secrecy reserved for choosing a pope, will decide which applications to forward to the full Unesco body for a final decision in September. Applicants get decisions at the end of the week if they are to go forward.

'In the middle of tense situations in other areas, we wanted to show that there are no pickets in culture,' said Mauricio Rosencof, cultural director for the Uruguayan city of Montevideo.

The designation comes with no money. But an international seal of approval would help the governments of Argentina and Uruguay justify using public funds to preserve their most famous export next to beef.

Both countries have proposed creating a Rio de la Plata tango orchestra, named for the river basin the two countries share, cataloguing thousands of unregistered songs and possibly establishing official tango academies throughout the world to keep that dance and music an art form uncorrupted by fad.

Tango, born in the late 1800s in the Buenos Aires and Montevideo slums, is growing in popularity throughout the world, thanks in part to the Broadway hit 'Forever Tango' and TV's 'Dancing With the Stars'.

The popular image - willowy, spike-heeled women spinning, kicking and lunging across the floor in the arms of tuxedo-clad men - is known as show tango. The kind danced in milongas, or tango dance halls, is more waltzlike, but equally as sensual. -- AP