We live in troubling times. Recent events portray a period where the intentional destruction of cultural property by some radical religious groups is becoming a pattern. This pattern stands in contrast to a clear evolution of human society over thousands of years in which the protection, not the destruction, of cultural property became the value to be subscribed to. This chapter seeks to put the current practices of destruction in their legal, historical and social contexts, and thus show that the challenge to confront this current plague is one we must all engage with at multiple levels including law, markets and education.
First mentioned in the archives of Mari in the second millennium BCE, Palmyra was an established caravan oasis when it came under Roman control in the mid-first century CE, as part of the Roman province of Syria. It grew steadily in importance as a city on the trade route linking Persia, India and China with the Roman Empire, marking the crossroads of several civilisations in the ancient world.
A grand, colonnaded street of 1,100 metres (3,600 feet) in length formed the monumental axis of the city which, together with secondary colonnaded cross streets, linked the major public monuments including the Temple of Ba’alshamin, Diocletian’s Camp, the Agora, Theatre, other temples, urban quarters, the remains of a Roman aqueduct, and an immense necropolis.
The outstanding universal value of Palmyra was recognised by the international community in 1980, when it was added to the list of World Heritage Sites. Palmyra, with its recognised integrity and authenticity, was recognised as having unparalleled excellence in three respects. First, as a masterpiece of human creative genius, whereby Roman, Greek and Persian influences combined to form a cosmopolitan city on the edges of the Syrian desert. Second, for its developments in architecture or technology, monumental arts, town planning and landscape design. Finally, as an outstanding example illustrating a significant stage in human history. The great temple of Ba’alshamin was considered one of the most important religious buildings of the first century in the East and is of unique design. The carved sculptural treatment of the monumental archway through which the city is approached from the great temple was recognised as an outstanding example of Palmyrene art.1
Palmyra was captured in the middle of May 2015, by the forces of Daesh. Daesh is a social and revolutionary movement. It began as an offshoot of al-Qaeda, and has emerged as one of the dominant insurgent groups participating in the conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya. Daesh is also linked to terror attacks all over the world. Today, Daesh is considered to be an unprecedented threat to local, regional and global security. It is radical, uncompromising, highly skilled at electronic media and publicity, and has no regard for social or legal considerations outside of its own interpretations of the Quran.2 Soon after taking Palmyra, Daesh began systematically blowing up the key parts of the ensemble, including the Temple of Ba’alshamin and the monumental archway. Parts remaining have been used as video backdrops for the filming of war crimes involving the execution of Syrian soldiers.
Timbuktu was founded in the fifth century. As the gateway, and thus crossroads, to the Sahara desert, the city is one of the most well-known historic areas of Africa. From the fifteenth century onwards, it became an important area for the scholarship and diffusion of Islamic culture. Three mosques, unparalleled examples of earthen architecture from the sixteenth century when the city was at the height of its power are of importance. The Djingareyber, Sankore and Sidi Yahia are amongst the first universities of Africa. These are supplemented by 16 mausoleums (of the famous men, saints and scholars, often Sufi, who had made the city great, dating back to the tenth century) and holy public places. Collectively, the three mosques and the holy places were recognised as holding outstanding universal value for their essential role in the spread of Islam in Africa at that period; as exemplars of the golden age of Timbuktu; and as outstanding witnesses to the urban establishment of Timbuktu as a commercial, spiritual and cultural centre of Africa.3
When Timbuktu was captured in a civil war in 2012 by the Islamist group Ansar Dine, which is aligned to al-Qaeda, the destruction began. The group’s target was the mausoleums, of which they intended to destroy them all because they considered them idolatrous, ‘without exception’.4 Fourteen of the mausoleums were totally destroyed, along with two others at the Djingareyber Mosque. The emblematic El Farouk monument at the entrance of the city was also razed. Over 4,200 ancient manuscripts were destroyed, and over 300,000 were exfiltrated.
Problems were evident in this area of Afghanistan from the 1990s, when the Taliban began shelling and/or looting Afghanistan’s libraries, museums, archaeological sites and cultural institutions. Rare books and manuscripts became part of an illicit antiquities trade that was second only to opium smuggling. What was not sold was destroyed. An estimated 2,500 pre-Islamic artefacts in the collection of the National Museum in Kabul were destroyed as young, uneducated Taliban soldiers performed acts such as bursting into libraries and training their machine guns on any works that were not in accordance with their world view. The high tide mark of the Taliban’s cultural destruction occurred on 4 March 2001. On that day, the New York Times confronted its readers with a front-page photograph of the Taliban’s destruction of a pair of colossal statues of the Buddha that had watched over Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley for 1,500 years, after being created around the year 550 by a Buddhist community that existed in the region until the thirteenth century.
These two statues, which were roughly 40 and 55 metres (130 and 180 feet) high, were inset within niches in a 90-metre-high (300-foot) cliff. The Bamiyan Buddhas had withstood the invasions of both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, only to be destroyed at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The destruction of the monuments was announced in advance by the Taliban who, in full control of the Bamiyan province (so they were not in a war zone at the time) and under the orders of Mullah Muhammad Omar, decreed the destruction of all pre-Islamic sculptures in Afghanistan.
The destruction was carried out despite worldwide appeals, which ranged from the United Nations General Assembly to Islamic clerics who did not share the same interpretation on iconoclasm. Mullah Omar, when faced with the storm of international concern, replied, after noting that Buddhists had not existed in Afghanistan for over 700 years, ‘we do not understand why everyone is so worried […] all we are breaking is stones’.5
Although the international community was outraged, the Bamiyan Buddhas had not been listed as items of World Heritage before the event. It is debatable whether this would have made any difference at all to the Taliban.
When the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003, and before they could secure a number of the important cities, Saddam Hussein’s regime completely fragmented. In the chaos, the Iraqi National Archive, National Library, National Museum and the Library of the Qadiriya Mosque were looted, as well as at least 27 major archaeological sites. Soon after, the UN Security Council demanded in its Resolution 1483:
[A]ll Member States shall take appropriate steps to facilitate the safe return to Iraqi institutions of Iraqi cultural property and other items of archaeological, historical, cultural, rare scientific, and religious importance illegally removed from the Iraq National Museum, the National Library, and other locations in Iraq since […] 6 August 1990, including by establishing a prohibition on trade in or transfer of such items and items with respect to which reasonable suspicion exists that they have been illegally removed.6
This recommendation by the Security Council in 2003 was unique. Previously, the need to protect cultural property had not achieved such prominence. This need became heightened even more in the following years, as the Americans found themselves involved in having to suppress a series of uprisings in which, although they attempted to show some restraint around the cultural sites in their midst, most of the forces on the ground they fought against failed to show the same respect. When the important Shia mosques and shrines including Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, and the gold-domed Imam Abbas Mosque in Karbala, were attacked by bombs, rockets and/or explosives between 2003 and 2007, it was clear that a new level of sectarian iconoclasm was underway. This was despite the United Nations General Assembly, in its 2001 Resolution 55/254 condemning the destruction directed against religious sites and calling upon all states to exert ‘their utmost efforts to ensure that religious sites are fully respected and protected in conformity with international standards’.
Five years later, the issue re-emerged in Mali, as a civil war involving similar belligerents as those engaged in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan widened, killing civilians and destroying cultural sites in the process. In 2012 the UN Security Council condemned, in Resolution 2085, and amongst other crimes, ‘the destruction of cultural and religious sites’. The following year, the Security Council, in resolution 2100, mandated peacekeepers, inter alia, ‘To assist the transitional authorities of Mali, as necessary and feasible, in protecting the cultural and historic sites in Mali, in collaboration with UNESCO’. Two years later, in 2015, the topic reappeared in Iraq and Syria. This time, Resolution 2199, in condemning trade and adding further sanctions upon al-Qaeda, Daesh (ISIL) and the al-Nusrah Front (ALF), stated that the Security Council:
Condemn the destruction of cultural heritage in Iraq and Syria particularly by ISIL and ANF, whether such destruction is incidental or deliberate, including targeted destruction of religious sites and objects;
Notes with concern that ISIL, ANF and other individuals, groups, undertakings and entities associated with al-Qaida, are generating income from engaging directly or indirectly in the looting and smuggling of cultural heritage items from archaeological sites, museums, libraries, archives, and other sites in Iraq and Syria, which is being used to support their recruitment efforts and strengthen their operational capability to organize and carry out terrorist attacks;
Reaffirms its decision in paragraph 7 of resolution 1483 and decides that all Member States shall take appropriate steps to prevent the trade in Iraqi and Syrian cultural property and other items of archaeological, historical, cultural, rare scientific, and religious importance illegally removed from Iraq since 6 August 1990 and from Syria since 15 March 2011, including by prohibiting cross-border trade in such items, thereby allowing for their eventual safe return to the Iraqi and Syrian people and calls upon the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, Interpol, and other international organizations, as appropriate, to assist in the implementation of this paragraph.
For those with an interest in safeguarding cultural property generally, but not directly involved in the regions of these conflicts, two steps are recommended. The first step, and directly related to the UN Security Council Resolutions noted above, is through the potential discovery of illegally taken artefacts from one of the war zones.
Fortunately, there are a number of tools available which can help to identify illegally obtained material from these regions. Professionals in this area should stay aware of the work of the UNESCO International Coordination Committee for the Safeguarding of the Iraqi Cultural Heritage, and the International Observatory for Syrian Cultural Heritage. The foremost tools in this area are:
All of these tools facilitate the work of police, customs officials and other professionals concerned with the protection of cultural property worldwide, by helping to identify objects and the categories of objects that are particularly vulnerable to illegal purchase, transaction and export.
The Red Lists classify the endangered categories of archaeological finds and/or antiquities, objects or works of art in the most vulnerable areas of the world, in order to prevent them being sold or illegally exported. From 2000 onwards, there have been Red Lists for Africa, Peru, Latin America, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Central America and Mexico, Haiti, China, Columbia, Egypt and the Dominican Republic, as well as both Syria (2013) and Iraq (2015).
Each of these Red Lists has helped in the recovery and restoration of objects wrongfully taken from their country of origin. In the case of Afghanistan, due to the Red List an estimated 8,000 objects were returned to their national museum. In one instance, and thanks to the Red List, English customs officials at Heathrow were able to intercept 3.4 tons of stolen goods from Afghanistan, representing over 1,500 pieces. Similarly, in the case of Iraq, dozens of archaeological objects have been returned, following their emergence in Western art markets.
The second step is to use positions of influence and/or access to the wider public, to engage in debate about iconoclasm and the intentional, un-justified by military necessity, destruction of cultural property.
There are two options here. First, showcasing how cultural diversity is manifested, both nationally and internationally. The foremost examples under the World Heritage Convention are a good start, as recognised heritage of importance to all humankind, because the cultural sites and artefacts represent the creativity and genius of all humanity and not just those resident or previously resident in the particular region.
This should be buttressed with examples of where the heritage, although not of recognised universal value, is of importance regionally or nationally, as each site and/or artefact embodies the history, values, beliefs and skills of the people who created it.
Education and communication should also show how cultural diversity, and the artefacts which constitute it, are under threat. Such destruction is cultural cleansing at the global, regional and/or local level, aimed at destroying the dignity and identity of the people who view this heritage as a reflection of their identity.
Finally, these types of horrendous act need to be clearly shown to be not merely a localised problem wrought by some militant Islamist groups, but as running directly and disastrously counter to the long-term trend of what humanity has evolved to reflect as a common standard of civilisation. The foremost site at the moment that the readers of this book may wish to visit is UNESCO’s #unite4heritage.7
The final consideration that the reader may wish to engage with, as part of the importance of education, communication and debate, is the history of iconoclasm. Translated from Greek, the word ‘iconoclasm’ means, literally, ‘image breaking’.8 In the modern world, iconoclasm has come to include not just images, but also intentionally destroying structures and associated forms of property of other cultural groups, be they religious, ethnic or social.9
The current problem, highlighted in this chapter, is iconoclasm by radical Islamist groups, such as Daesh in Syria and Iraq, Ansar Dine in Mali, or the Taliban in Afghanistan. However, as the following brief history shows, this is not a problem related only to groups associated with Islam. Moreover, civilisation has evolved over 4,000 years to make the support and respect for cultural diversity and associated heritage a common goal shared by all.
Before humanity left written records, they left ruins. Often these ruins related directly to the cultures that disappeared. For example, archaeology reveals the existence of tens of thousands of tablets in ancient Sumer in the temple of the fearsome goddess Eanna, in the city of Uruk. Whilst a few were intact, the majority were in fragments, burnt or pulverised from an incident that occurred between 4100 and 3300 BCE. This discovery contains one of the great paradoxes of the Western world, namely, the discovery of the earliest books also establishes the date of their earliest destruction. This act was neither an accident nor nature at work. It was a premeditated act of war which often overlapped with the uncontrolled looting of enemy territory. One of world’s first would-be imperialists, Lugalzagesi, some 4,000-plus years ago, who was the king of Umma in South Mesopotamia, gave us the first recorded example of going further than pillage, and moving towards destruction of cultural property when not justified by military necessity. When Lugalzagesi over-ran the competing city of Lagash, one of his concluding acts was to burn its temple. Everything of value that his troops could not carry off, such as the shrine and temples of the enemy, he had committed to the flames.
In centuries to come, the Hymn to Ishbi-Erra, recorded in around 1750 BCE during the Third Dynasty of Ur, defined the objective of an attack ‘[b]y order of Enlil to reduce the country and the city to ruins […] he had as their destiny the annihilation of their culture’.10 Such thinking was not unusual, repeated many times before the direction was given in the Bible in the book of Exodus 34:13, that in times of conflict, ‘ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves’. Judges 16:30 added how the prophet Samson, a model for future generations of suicide bombers, said: ‘“Let me die with the Philistines”. Then he pushed with all his might, and down came the temple on the rulers and all the people in it. Thus he killed many more when he died than while he lived.’ Such actions in times of war were followed by similar rules in times of peace. Thus, Exodus 20:4–5 stated: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.’
Each civilisation followed the same pattern, with all forms of cultural property of the other, temples, libraries and official buildings, destroyed. Very little remains from this period, bar fragments, tales of loss and extensive lists of what each civilisation took from the others. Even within a society, when there was a change of direction, acts of destruction were common, burning the teachings and temples of heretics. The great Egyptian monotheist Akhenaton, fourteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, was the first to introduce the practice of book burning and the destruction of heretical elements within his own culture.
The exceptions were the rulers who declined to destroy the cultural property of the defeated opposition, seeking to rebuild it, to show that their power was greater than destruction, whilst at the same time winning the hearts and minds of the defeated. The Persians sometimes utilised this approach, sometimes not. Moreover, from this epoch, the first-ever instance of the return of cultural property is recorded when the Assyrian king Sennacherib 2,700 years ago destroyed Babylonia, in 689 BCE: the statue of Marduk, looted nearly 900 years earlier by the Hittites, was returned to the original owners.
Outside of the questions of destruction during times of warfare, the Greeks had a very good approach to protecting the cultural property of fellow Greeks, but had a mixed record when dealing with non-Greeks. The Persians and Celts responded in kind. The collective losses of this epoch were so great that, as well as all of the destroyed temples and public buildings, about 75 per cent of Greek literature, philosophy and science has also been lost.11 The Romans had no qualms about taking everything of value of the defeated enemy, to the benefit of themselves for the adornment of Rome or, rarely, for restoration to its original owners (if the original owners were allies).
On the question of destroying the cultural property of the enemy in times of war, as the cultures of the Jews through to the Celts came to feel, they took a very active approach, leaving centuries of devastation through intentional, negligent or reckless acts. However, when the killing had stopped, they considered, to quote the historian Polybius from the second century BCE, that ‘to deface temples, statues and such like […] must be regarded as an act of blind passion and insanity’.12 Despite such praiseworthy words, in reality, the Roman practice was patchy. Thus, whilst they were good with the Greeks, with the Phoenicians their hatred was such that they destroyed 99.9 per cent of their existence, as the rubble of Carthage testified.
When the Roman Empire became Christian, the enthusiasm of the new rulers and their subjects led to widespread destruction of multiple forms of non-Christian, pagan cultural objects. Temples, manuscripts and, uniquely, people were all destroyed as the ‘instruments of idolatry’ were removed, either by intention or by turning a blind eye, by zealots trying to create a ‘pure’ world in which there were no distractions.
When at war with pagans, such as when Byzantium fought the Zoroastrian Persians, both sides would take turns, taking large destructive bites out of the cultural heritage of the other whenever the opportunity arose. Uniquely, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian would take the opportunities of conquest to repatriate the cultural property of others, when found in the possession of the defeated.
Nonetheless, even when not fighting traditional enemies, the quest for religious purity within the Byzantine (or Eastern Roman) Empire led to the development of iconoclasm, which began when Emperor Leo III, in the eighth century, prohibited all images. This led to an unprecedented destruction of hundreds of thousands of pictures involving human portrayal, from those on stucco through to illuminated manuscripts.
When the western side of the Roman Empire collapsed beneath the weight of repeated barbarian invasions, motivations of booty, pillage and prize reigned as all that could be plundered was, and what could not be moved was often mindlessly destroyed, as the Vandals exemplified, closely followed by the actions of Goths, Vikings and other marauders. The exception was Totila, King of the Ostrogoths, who, having taken Rome, was persuaded, by the advocacy of Belisarius, to save the city and all of its cultural monuments rather than turn it to rubble as he planned. Belisarius argued, in 550:
Fair cities are the glory of the great men who have been their founders, and surely no wise man would wish to be remembered as the destroyer of any of them […] Slowly and gradually each succeeding age has reared its monuments. Any act, therefore, of wanton outrage against the city will be resented as an injustice by all men of all ages: by those who have gone before us, because it effaces the memorials of their greatness; by those who shall come after, since the most wonderful sight in the world will no longer be theirs to look upon […] If you should prove to be the conqueror, how great will be your delight in having preserved the most precious jewel in your crown. If yours should turn out to be the losing side, great will be the thanks from the conqueror for your preservation of Rome, while its destruction would make every plea for mercy and humanity on your behalf inadmissible. And last of all comes the question what shall be your own eternal record in history, whether you will be remembered as the preserver or the destroyer of the greatest city in the world.13
As the Barbarians were running amok through Europe, in the sixth century in the Middle East the Prophet Muhammad was laying the seeds for one of the world’s great civilisations. On the question of cultural property, Muhammad ended many ancient rituals at the Kaaba in Mecca, but continued to let worshippers perambulate around the granite cube. Despite this tolerance for a number of existing practices, the Quran stated in section 4:36, ‘Worship Allah and associate nothing with Him’, and in 5:90, ‘O ye who believe! Strong drink and games of chance and idols and divining arrows are only an infamy of Satan’s handiwork. Leave it aside in order that ye may succeed.’
Subsequent Muslims interpreted these words, and associated cultural objects, differently. Thus, whilst the founders of Cairo in the tenth century were content to leave the Pyramids alone, others took a different view. For example, in 642, Omar I, Muhammad’s second successor, allegedly instructed his general, who was pondering what to do with the museum library of Alexandria: ‘With regard to the books you mention, here is my answer. If the books contain the same doctrine as the Koran, they are useless because they merely repeat; if they are not in agreement with the doctrine of the Koran, there is no reason to conserve them.’14 The practice of the Islamic armies was, at least initially, to show respect to the cultural properties of fellow ‘people of the book’, namely Christians and Jewish peoples. In this regard, many famous churches and Biblical sites were not destroyed when they fell under Muslim control. Despite this, in some high-profile instances (primarily within Jerusalem), over four thousand churches or temples (Christian, Egyptian and Persian) of non-Islamic groups were destroyed, as were a further four thousand that were converted into mosques, in the first centuries following the birth of Muhammad. As Islam descended into civil war between the Shia and the Sunni, each side came to see opposition as heretical, and their property in need of desolation.
This enthusiasm then began to play out, between Christians as well as Muslims, in the Reconquista of Spain, and the Crusades in the Middle East, with the great cultural properties of all sides, from temples to libraries, being looted, destroyed or converted to other purposes. Restraint in the destruction of the cultural property of others was rare.
These efforts were overshadowed by the Mongols, who destroyed, en masse, cultural property in Orthodox Russia, Buddhist Korea and Muslim Baghdad. Of the latter, their destruction of Baghdad in 1258 swept away five centuries of Islamic history. These losses of cultural property were only matched by the Latin Christians, when they sacked Constantinople, an Orthodox Christian city in 1204.
That Christian forces had difficulty restraining themselves when encountering the cultural heritage of Islam in this period was not a surprise, as within Europe restraint in the protection of Christian heritage was hard enough to achieve. Despite clear injunctions from the Church, the temptations of loot were always great in times of either civil or regional war, progressing up to the time of the inter-Christian sack of Rome in 1527.
In all of these centuries, the goal was not the destruction of the cultural property of the defeated, but rather its acquisition and sale. This approach was very different to when the Spanish forces landed, and then conquered, the empires of the Aztecs and Incas in the sixteenth century, where entire civilisations were destroyed and built over, whilst the valuable items of movable property were melted down to retrieve the gold and precious stones they held.
Back across the Atlantic, as the fires for the Thirty Years’ War began to catch alight in the early seventeenth century, the opposing belligerents replicated the practices of the armies operating in the Americas, which were busy looting valuables and destroying the properties which were ideologically offensive. Within Europe, the destruction of opposing churches and associated cultural materials was undertaken on a large scale in what became a tit-for-tat process in multiple domains. Martin Luther in his Against the Jews and their Lies argued, in 1543, ‘first their synagogues or churches should be set on fire and whatever does not burn up should be covered or spread with dirt so that no-one may ever be able to see a cinder or stone of it.’15
The iconoclasm that Luther called for against the Jews in time spread against the Catholics too. The foremost example of this was in the English Civil War of 1642–51, within which churches, coloured images and windows were smashed, choir stalls burned, painted interiors whitewashed, screens and railings broken and vestments torn. The Vatican responded not by destroying Protestant property (as there was little), but by trying to restrict the formation of new ideas that were contrary to Catholicism. For example, in 1559, the Index Librorum Prohibiturum was issued which forbade the acquisition, and directed the destruction (if already in possession) of, inter alia, all Bibles in the vernacular, in addition to works by Luther and other Protestant scholars, the Talmud, the Quran, and books about divination, superstition and sexuality.
Ironically, as iconoclasm was hitting new heights in England, a new and clear view was emerging arguing against the looting and/or destruction of the cultural property of others if not required by military necessity. Thomas More, Francisco de Vitoria, Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius and Emmerich de Vattel all came to the same conclusion. In the words of Grotius in 1642, to destroy ‘sacred edifices’ for any reason other than military necessity was nothing more than ‘brutal rage and madness […] [which] bespeaks a total disregard to the laws and ties of our common humanity’.16 Vattel stated it a little differently in 1758, ‘For whatever cause a country is ravaged, we ought to spare those edifices which do honour to human society, and do not contribute to increase the enemy’s strength – such as temples, tombs, public buildings and all works of remarkable beauty. It is declaring one’s self an enemy to mankind, thus wantonly to deprive them of these monuments of art.’17
The ideals of restraint in the destruction of the cultural property of the defeated, after the fighting was done, did not take seed in the revolution that swept France at the close of the eighteenth century. Whilst many churches and cathedrals were desecrated and closed or turned into Temples of Reason, manors and mansions, houses, castles and abbeys were often looted, destroyed and/or burnt. Libraries were torched in Paris, with over 26,000 ancient manuscripts being destroyed. Even bell towers could be toppled because they stood above the height of other buildings and therefore contradicted nascent ideals of equality.
Meanwhile, where the fighting raged in the early decades of the nineteenth century, liberal interpretations of military necessity saw the destruction of items ranging from individual libraries to entire cities, in locations from Washington to Moscow.
Nonetheless, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the great American legal scholar Henry Wheaton argued in 1846 that ‘temples of religion, public edifices devoted to civil purposes only, monuments of art and repositories of science, are exempted from the general operations of war’.18 Wheaton’s ideas, including this, later became part of the 1863 Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field (The Lieber Code).
Although this rule was adopted by one side in the American Civil War of 1861–5, its adoption was somewhat loose, as was the application of the same principle when France and Germany fought in 1870. However, the real challenge came, not between conventional enemies, but when the revolutionary Commune arose in Paris in 1871. The insurgents, when in control of Paris, began the systematic destruction of what they disagreed with. Thus, the Vendôme Column, 47 metres (155 feet) in height and erected by Napoleon in emulation of Trajan’s masterpiece of Rome, came crashing down in a deliberate act to divest the uprising of its past.
When they were not in control of the city, and the battle raged around them, the forces of the Commune set fire to an impressive list of buildings including the Tuileries Palace, a large part of the Palais-Royal, and the Palais de Justice. Whole sections of streets, such as the Rue de Lille and much of the Rue de Rivoli, were ablaze, as was the Ministry of Finance, housed in one wing of the Louvre. The priceless treasures of the Louvre were only saved by the rain that put out the fire in the Ministry of Finance, although parts of the Louvre library, with manuscripts dating back to 1512, disappeared in the flames. The Hôtel de Ville was consigned to the fire. Notre Dame cathedral was made ready for destruction, but it did not occur.
Such acts were viewed with increased disdain both domestically and internationally. It was in the same decade that, in Britain, William Morris formed the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and European cultures became increasingly interested in preserving their architectural histories. Thus, in 1882 in the United Kingdom, the Ancient Monuments Protection Act came into being. John Ruskin explained in Parliament, ‘They are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the generations of mankind who are to follow us […] [W]e have no right to obliterate […] It belongs to all successors.’19
Against this background, the 1874 Project for an International Declaration concerning the Laws and Customs of War recommended, in Article 8, to give protection to, inter alia, ‘buildings dedicated to art, science, or charitable purposes, […] provided they are not being used at the time for military purposes’. This was to be adopted in the Hague Conventions on the Laws and Customs of War on Land in both 1899 and 1907. The essence of this rule was then repeated numerous times throughout the twentieth century with, each time, the modalities around what, and where, military necessity applied being increasingly restrained, thus making it harder for commanders on the ground to argue that it was necessary to destroy cultural heritage for a military advantage. This began with the 1935 Treaty on the Protection of Artistic and Scientific Institutions and Historic Monuments, before the momentum slowed down after the Second World War when the topic of the intentional destruction of cultural property was not dealt with in much detail during the Nuremburg trials.
Where the topic did arise, the traditional view that destruction was permitted if justified by military necessity reappeared. This approach was broadly recognised in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. When the matter was debated during the formation of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, with the idea of the systematic destruction of cultural property being seen as ‘cultural genocide’, this notion was dismissed as the Convention was meant to focus on people, not objects.
As is discussed in more detail elsewhere in this volume,20 it fell to the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in Times of Armed Conflict (known as the Hague Convention) fully to address this issue, and to reiterate the traditional rule of neutrality for cultural property in times of conflict. This rule was further reiterated in the Additional Protocols in 1999, and extended to cover civil as well as more traditional conflicts between neighbours. Specifically, Article 16 of Additional Protocol II, dealing with non-international conflicts, added that it was ‘Prohibited to commit any acts of hostility directed against historic monuments, works of art or places of worship which constitute the cultural or spiritual heritage of peoples, [or] to use them in support of the military effort.’
Variations of these rules were then incorporated into the jurisdictions of the international criminal tribunals for Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia (which would convict Pavle Strugar, Miodrag Jokić and Jadranko Prlić for attacking the World Heritage Site of Dubrovnik and the Mostar bridge). They were also, again as discussed elsewhere in this volume,21 incorporated into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998 which states in Article 8(2) that ‘intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, […] provided they are not military objectives’ was a crime of war. Based on this provision, Ahmad Al Faqi Al Madhi would be brought before the ICC in 2015, for his contribution to the acts of cultural destruction in Timbuktu, Mali.
Ironically, in the last two centuries most of the significant intentional destruction to cultural property has been occurring outside of the traditional, large-scale conflicts. This is not to deny the damage that was done in the First World War, when military action destroyed a number of French and Belgian cultural icons. Similarly, during the Second World War, and although there was sometimes awareness and restraint in some theatres on the ground, large-scale destruction of cultural property from the air occurred in all conflict areas. From China and Japan, through to the widest corners of Europe and Russia, as the means of warfare such as bombing raids from the air became increasingly large and either intentionally, recklessly or negligently targeted, only a few open cities, such as Paris, Rome and Kyoto, survived the carnage.
Outside of the First and Second World Wars, gaps became apparent in revolutionary wars or periods, when belligerents with radical views sought to break away from established or current trends and destroy the cultural heritage of those they fought, as the symbolism of what it represented was considered by them so abhorrent that it had to be destroyed. In the Middle East, the forces of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, which had been gestating in the Arabian Peninsula in the early part of the nineteenth century, progressively struck out against the Ottoman state and its increasing inter-Islamic tolerance. In their initial uprisings they destroyed Iraq’s important Shia shrines at Najaf and Karbala. When in the 1920s they took over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, they destroyed the graves of the Prophet Muhammad’s companions, wives and family, as they were places which had, to their minds, wrongfully attracted worship. Muhammad’s own grave was only just spared.
During the Russian revolution, which began only a few years earlier in 1917, many of the symbols, from buildings to art, of the Russian monarchy and its supporting Church and aristocracy were destroyed by the Soviets. The same pattern, but on a lesser scale, occurred around the same time in Ireland as revolutionaries sought independance from British rule.
In Germany, Adolf Hitler came to power. The newly empowered Nazis sought to ‘cleanse’ their own state of what they saw as impure cultural intrusions. What began with the burning of books that carried an ‘un-German’ spirit in 1933 later moved to the banning of ‘degenerate music’, ‘degenerate art’ (Cubists, Expressionists and Surrealists), and finally, ‘degenerate people’ – of which the Jewish peoples were at the forefront. For these groups, everything, from their temples to their children, could be consigned to the flames.
After the Second World War, although the destruction of the cultural heritage of opposing groups during these decades was not the preserve of communist regimes, it was these regimes in China and Cambodia that created horrific examples of unrestrained iconoclasm in a political context. In China, the goal of the Cultural Revolution was to end the ‘Four Olds’: old thoughts, old culture, old traditions and old customs. The influence of ‘Confucius and Co.’ was to be eliminated, as the destruction of temples, libraries, works of art and books attempted to achieve. Although the Forbidden City was spared, most of Beijing’s remaining monuments and museums were not. In Tibet, the Cultural Revolution continued a practice of destruction which dated back to the Chinese occupation and the ongoing obliteration of large swathes of Tibetan culture, from monasteries to manuscripts, frescoes, paintings and statues.
In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge specifically executed educated Cambodians and led a frontal assault on both modern and large parts of traditional culture. Ultimately, conditions were created in which the physical destruction of everything from cities to books became standard, as cities were left to rot, religious buildings were systematically flattened or turned to new agrarian uses, and learned scholarship, including some 80 per cent of written works in the Khmer language, was used to light fires. Conditions were particularly severe with the Islamic communities, which saw destructions of up to 95 per cent of their mosques and some two thirds of their manuscripts.
For the purposes of this chapter, one of the most remarkable features of the last decades of the twentieth century was that the international community suddenly awoke to both the value, and the need to protect, cultural property from a diversity of threats, outside of the risks of war. The end result is that the idea of cultural heritage, as something of value to be protected and enhanced, has clearly emerged as an international norm of a cosmopolitan, and global, population.22 It is this norm that the actions of the iconoclasts, religious or secular, need to be juxtaposed against.
At the individual level, Article 27 of the 1976 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights affirmed the rights of persons belonging to ‘ethnic, linguistic or religious minorities […] to enjoy their own culture’.23
At the state level, the process to support such thinking began with the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Cultural Property. Article 1 defined cultural property as, ‘property which, on religious or secular grounds, is specifically designated by each State as being of importance for archaeology, prehistory, history, literature, art or science’, and which belonged to one of 11 identified categories.24 The preamble to the 1970 Convention asserted ‘that cultural property constitutes one of the basic elements of civilization and national culture, and that its true value can be appreciated only in relation to the fullest possible information regarding its origin, history and traditional setting’.
The signatories also recognised, in Article 2, that the illicit import, export and transfer of ownership of such cultural property ‘is one of the main causes of the impoverishment of the cultural heritage of the countries of origin of such property’. Accordingly, a regime was created in which the consent of the state of origin to the sale and/or transfer of such property was required, for specifically recognised property.
This was later buttressed in 1995 by the UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects, which helped establish more facilitative mechanisms for the return and restitution of cultural objects that had been unlawfully taken.
The 1972 World Heritage Convention suggested in its preamble that ‘the deterioration or disappearance of any item of cultural or natural heritage constitutes a harmful impoverishment to all nations of the world’.25 The signatories recognised the importance of preserving ‘exceptional combinations of natural and cultural elements’. Accordingly, a regime was created in Article 4 for each Party to the Convention to ensure ‘the identification, protection, conservation, presentation and transmission to future generations of the cultural and natural heritage’ for which the Convention applied. Each Party must commit ‘the utmost of its own resources’. In addition, whilst fully respecting the sovereign nature of each piece of World Heritage, the other Parties to the Convention recognised in Article 6 that such heritage constitutes a valuable asset for the entire world so that for its protection it is the duty of the international community as a whole to cooperate and offer assistance.
The protection of such tangible heritage under the World Heritage Convention was supplemented in 2003 with the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. This Convention recognised in its preamble ‘the importance of the intangible cultural heritage as a mainspring of cultural diversity and a guarantee of sustainable development’ as practised by all communities, and indigenous communities in particular.26
Finally, in 2005 the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions was agreed. The 2005 Convention was built around the recognition that ‘cultural diversity is a defining characteristic of humanity’ and forms ‘a common heritage of humanity’ that should ‘be cherished and preserved for the benefit of all’.27 The Parties to the 2005 Convention agreed, in the first Article, ‘to protect and promote the diversity of cultural expressions, and create conditions for cultures to flourish and freely interact in a mutually beneficial manner’, and ‘to promote the respect for the diversity of cultural expressions and raise awareness of its value at the local, national and international levels’. It was added that ‘cultural diversity, flourishing within a framework of democracy, tolerance, social justice and mutual respect between peoples and cultures, is indispensable for peace and security at the local, national and international levels’.
The general principle of equal dignity and respect for all cultures was then affirmed in the second Article: ‘The protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions presuppose the recognition of equal dignity of and respect for all cultures, including the cultures of persons belonging to minorities and indigenous peoples.’
It is against all of these recognitions of the values of cultural heritage, and the need to protect it both inside and outside times of war, that the acts of iconoclasts need to be measured and judged. Such acts of destruction are the antithesis of the accepted international norms of a cosmopolitan, and global, population that has taken nearly four thousand years to evolve.
Professor Alexander Gillespie, of the University of Waikato’s School of Law in New Zealand, has published 16 books and also written over 40 academic articles. He has served as lawyer/expert on a number of international delegations, advised the New Zealand government on multiple matters of international concern, and was the first New Zealander to be named Rapporteur for the World Heritage Convention.