Preface and Acknowledgments
In December 2016, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the J. Paul Getty Trust convened a meeting at the British Academy, London, to discuss an international framework for the protection of cultural heritage in zones of armed conflict. Our timing was compelled by the purposeful destruction of cultural heritage in Syria and Iraq, and by the recent conviction of Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi by the International Criminal Court for the war crime of attacking historic and religious buildings in Timbuktu.
Three months later, in March 2017, the United Nations Security Council passed resolution 2347, which condemned the “unlawful destruction of cultural heritage, and the looting and smuggling of cultural property in the event of armed conflicts, notably by terrorist groups, and the attempt to deny historical roots and cultural diversity in this context can fuel and exacerbate conflict and hamper post-conflict national reconciliation.” The resolution gave formal, international attention to the protection of cultural heritage and its links to cultural cleansing.
In October 2017, as cochairs of this project, we spoke at a meeting at UN headquarters in New York on the issue of “Protecting Cultural Heritage from Terrorism and Mass Atrocities: Links and Common Responsibilities.” The meeting was hosted by, among others, Angelino Alfano, minister of foreign affairs and international cooperation, Italy; Frederica Mogherini, high representative from the European Union; Irina Bokova, director-general of UNESCO; and Simon Adams, then executive director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. The consensus of the meeting was that cultural heritage is worthy of protection, not only because it represents the rich and diverse legacy of human artistic and engineering ingenuity, but also because it is intertwined with the very survival of a people as a source of collective identity and the revitalization of civil society and economic vitality after armed conflict.
Over three days at the Getty Center in May 2019, as volume editors we convened nineteen scholars and practitioners of different specialties and experience to discuss the topic “Cultural Heritage under Siege.” In one way or another, we had been discussing this topic for three years. The purpose of the convening was to begin to finalize the shape and substance of the book we decided needed to be written, the book that has become this volume: Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities. Although many of the participants in the convening have contributed essays in the pages that follow, all of the participants contributed to its shape and substance in one important way or another. We remain deeply grateful to everyone who attended that meeting. The presentations, discussions, and debates were inspiring, and the warmth of friendship was gratifying. Before the event’s opening dinner, Irina Bokova, who had recently stepped down as UNESCO director-general, set the stage for our convening with poignant and illuminating remarks. We are delighted that she has done the same here by contributing the insightful and thought-provoking foreword to this volume.
The development of this volume occurred via Zoom in June 2020 and February 2021, when abstracts and then final drafts were discussed by the authors and by other contributors. Due to the international COVID-19 pandemic, we missed the camaraderie and intellectual sparks that would have animated our discussions, but the commitment of our team of authors was still very much in evidence and contributed to the quality of the final drafts that now comprise the body of this text.
The design of this collection of essays reflects our own interpretations of the most pressing issues and necessary perspectives required to frame changes in policy- and decision-making about the protection of cultural heritage amid atrocities. In putting together this collection, we sought to better understand the origins, history, contributions, problems, and prospects of international efforts to protect the world’s immovable cultural heritage. This endeavor, we hope, will result in improved strategies and tactics in the coming decades. A better comprehension of the deficiencies of existing laws, norms, and organizations should lead to the identification of appropriate remedies.
At the outset, readers will find a lengthy list of abbreviations. Contemporary international problem-solving and conversations are bedeviled with acronyms and abbreviations. Institutions and parts of them, along with individual operations, treaties, and conferences, are almost always referred to by their initials. This may be off-putting to some readers, but it is a contemporary reality. To save space, contributors as well as public documents and media treatments use these short-cuts extensively, and so readers may need to consult the list with some frequency.
“Suggested Readings” follow each essay and are compiled at the end of the book, providing readers with our contributors' recommendations for the most authoritative and recent published sources on the subject matter of their essays.
A pleasant assignment after putting a book into production is to acknowledge significant contributions from many individuals. Kara Kirk and Karen Levine, respectively Getty Publications publisher and editor in chief, never once doubted the importance of our project and fully supported it from the beginning. Our editor at Getty Publications, Laura diZerega, worked most closely with us, our authors, manuscript editor Martin J. Burke, and designers to make this handsome and user-friendly text available to readers. Additional thanks are due to Greg Albers and Erin Dunigan for their expert management of our digital publication, Victoria Gallina, our production coordinator, and Jeffrey Cohen, our designer. But it is to Morgan Conger, senior project manager in the Office of the Getty President, and Lizzie Udwin, former executive assistant to the Getty president, that we owe our greatest debt. For over the years we worked on this project, they dealt tirelessly with the incorrigible habits and quirkiness of its coeditors, planning numerous meetings and making sure all of our Zoom trains ran on time. Morgan Conger managed the transmittal of our publication’s many components to our authors, editor, and copyeditor, and diligently ensured that all revisions were captured during the various stages of the editing process. It is no exaggeration to say that we could not have successfully completed a complex project of this type without their able helping hands.
This “Cultural Heritage at Risk” project is one of several related efforts by the J. Paul Getty Trust to address threats to the world’s cultural heritage. The Getty Conservation Institute’s work on the wall paintings at the Mogao Grottos, Dunhuang, China, for example, dates back to 1997. This was followed by the GCI’s Iraq Cultural Heritage Conservation Initiative, 2004–2011, and, in partnership with the Getty Foundation, the scientific analysis and conservation treatment of Roman-era mosaics in the Middle East and North Africa beginning in 2012. Most recently, the Getty Conservation Institute has developed an open-source software platform for cultural heritage management, and in 2017 the Getty Trust began publishing a series of Occasional Papers in Cultural Heritage Policy, which has formed the foundation of this book.
When we set out to edit this volume, our initial task was to find a diverse group of authors to write about the vast range of topics, cases, and perspectives in the thirty-two chapters that follow this preface and our introduction and precede our conclusion. Brief biographies are found in the list of contributors at the end of this book. All authors have researched and written extensively about the subject of their chapters or worked in a related field; many have done both. All are acknowledged experts working on the problems and prospects of protecting human beings and their cultural heritage. We will not be bashful: these pages reflect the distinctive products of a world-class team with expertise on the historical, legal, and humanitarian consequences of cultural heritage at risk from Asia to South America to the Mediterranean basin. For this we are grateful to all of our colleagues.
Sadly, there is one voice missing. Edward C. Luck, who had provided both of us with clear-headed guidance and advice from the outset, was working on his chapter about major powers in February 2021 when he died after a brave battle with lung cancer. Ed’s premature death deprives our intellectual and policy communities, and especially his family and friends, of his warmth, insights, and humor.
JC and TGW
Los Angeles and Chicago
December 2021
We had just put the finishing touches on this three-year-long research project when Russia invaded Ukraine and thereby upset the (admittedly weak) basic principles of a rules-based international order that had been evolving since 1945. The tragic events in Ukraine have reminded us yet again why we initiated this effort to explore the links between mass atrocities and the destruction of cultural heritage.
Early on, the most publicized and horrific reports emerged from Bucha, where bodies lay piled in the streets and more than one hundred people were buried in a communal grave at the city’s cemetery. The numbers grew more tragic in the weeks immediately following: at least four thousand civilians killed, more than fourteen thousand deaths total, over five million refugees, and perhaps twice as many internally displaced Ukrainians.
At the same time, as we wrote in the Wall Street Journal in mid-April, Russia was systematically destroying Ukraine’s national heritage. The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) continued to update its list of damaged and destroyed Ukrainian religious sites, historic buildings, museums, and monuments. These included the Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum, with its collection of folk art and paintings by the self-taught artist Maria Prymachenko; the Holocaust memorials in Drobitsky Yar, on the outskirts of Kharkiv, and Babyn Yar, in Kyiv; a Gothic revival building in Chernikhiv that had once served as a museum and is now a library; and a museum in Mariupol dedicated to the nineteenth-century landscape painter Arkhip Kuindzhi.
Still at risk, even as we write these words, are seven UNESCO World Heritage Sites dating to the Byzantine era, including Kyiv’s Saint Sophia Cathedral and its related monastic buildings, architecture built between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries and intended to rival Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia in a “new Constantinople.” Not only a tragedy, such assaults on cultural heritage are a step toward what then UNESCO director general Irina Bokova first termed “cultural cleansing” in 2015—actions intended to destroy a society by eradicating its history and memory. Bokova’s words figure in her foreword to this volume and throughout its chapters.
We’ve been here before, unfortunately. The following pages contain analyses of the destruction of the Mostar Bridge in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, shrines and libraries in Mali, Uyghur mosques in China, and the Great Umayyad Mosque of Aleppo in Syria. All represent one ethnic or religious group’s efforts to make another “disappear.” These atrocities, in fact, resemble Russia’s campaign, ongoing since 2014, to eliminate Tatar traces in occupied Crimea with the aim of eradicating any evidence of the Ottoman Empire.
The 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict has been the primary means of protecting the world’s cultural heritage. Its distinctive “Blue Shield” is attached to buildings and sites as a warning to combatants to respect those sites covered by the convention. But that is not enough.
The war in Ukraine has made our own conclusion at the end of this volume even clearer: it is now essential to lay the foundations of an independent international consortium of art museums, cultural institutions, universities, intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies—including, for instance, the US Departments of State and Defense—to raise consciousness about the vulnerability of tangible cultural heritage and those who work to preserve it. Such a consortium would be modeled on the World War II Monuments Men—military and civilian personnel who worked to safeguard and, in some cases, rescue cultural heritage.
The consortium’s mission would be twofold. The first part would be to ensure the enforcement of public international law vigorously and across the board. Since the entry into force of the Rome Statute in 2002, the International Criminal Court in The Hague has successfully prosecuted the destruction of cultural heritage as a war crime. It convicted Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi for destroying, in 2012, nine mausoleums and a mosque at one world heritage site. But the unprecedented scale of destruction in Ukraine poses significant challenges in terms of evidence gathering, documentation, and the like. Without the assistance of an outside entity such as the consortium we propose, there’s the danger that many of these crimes could go unpunished. This cannot be allowed to happen.
The second part would involve dedicated military personnel. Their mandate would be similar to that of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) personnel in Kosovo and the UN’s forces in Mali. In addition to safeguarding humans and fostering rebuilding, peacekeepers in these locations protected cultural heritage. Such efforts can constitute a “force multiplier” by removing hazards, suppressing looting, and deterring politically motivated attacks. In fact, NATO insiders speak increasingly of the “security-heritage nexus.”
The international entity for the protection of cultural heritage and museum professionals that we envision would help mitigate the grave threats to cultural heritage in conflict zones. At present, officials in both the private and public sectors are expressing concern, and museums and other entities in the United States and elsewhere are working with their Ukrainian counterparts on these issues. But the network is loose-knit and ill-prepared at best. This consortium would mobilize and foster cooperation among the various actors tasked to protect cultural heritage in political crises with significant humanitarian dimensions similar to those in Ukraine. While the temporary relocation of cultural objects remains fraught, the protection of trained and knowledgeable local cultural custodians is less so. Aided by an established network of organizations to assist with documentation, travel, and placement, cultural heritage workers could continue to carry out their duties with temporarily stored treasures, even while displaced.
It is worth repeating a quote found in our introduction from the nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine, words also employed by Raphael Lemkin, the proponent of the term “cultural genocide”: “First they burn the books, then they burn the bodies.” The war crime of destroying cultural heritage is yet another reason to oppose Russian recolonization. It is also the reason why the analyses and recommendations in the pages that follow make for even more essential reading now than when we finalized them.
JC and TGW
May 2022