Chapter 14
Cultural genocide.
Patricia Sleeman
14.1
Introduction
War throughout time has resulted in countless atrocities. Recent
history has been witness to incredible calculated violence and horrendous
crimes against humanity. Crimes such as planned and methodical
extermination, rape and genocide have been committed in the world
highlighting that man’s inhumanity to man is still very much in evidence. Is it
appropriate that we mention the destruction of archives in the same context
during times of war and occupation? It is. We must pay attention to and
understand the importance of memory, the archive, and the record to a
people, especially during a time of war and occupation. The destruction of
archives and records is a destruction of the unseen, not of flesh and blood but
that of the soul of a people.
Destruction is an inherent part of armed conflict. No war has been
fought without damaging private or public property at least collaterally.
However in many conflicts, attacking the enemy’s cultural property without
the justification of military necessity has become an instrument to destroy the
‘other’, in the same way that rape became an instrument to destroy identity.
Cultural aggression1 became a tool to erase the manifestation of the
adversary’s identity.
The conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and in Iraq have provided us
with examples of the destruction of archives and records as well as museums
and libraries. The destruction of museums or libraries often receives more
publicity than the destruction of archives. However the obliteration of many
archives and records of administration during conflicts has seen the
destruction of a people’s irreplaceable documentary heritage. Archives hold
valuable documentation about the accomplishments of a nation and a
government’s actions as well as of its people’s lives. To destroy an archive
destroys a people’s collective memory and identity. The protection of culture
is an integral part of human rights.
A number of treaties or treaty provisions are intended to limit the
destruction in wartime or occupation of irreplaceable cultural property and
thus to avoid the loss to the country of origin and to mankind as a whole of an
Defined as ‘the destruction and pillage of the adversary’s non-renewable cultural resources’
in Hirad Abtahi, ‘The Protection of Cultural Property in Times of Armed Conflict: The
Practice of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia’, Harvard Human
Rights Journal 14 (Spring 2001) available at
www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/hrj/iss14/abtahi_old.shtml, accessed 29 May 2005.
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important heritage. The treaties or treaty provisions oblige states to adopt
relevant national measures in peacetime. How effective has such legislation
been with regard to the protection of archives and records? How does it
protect the documentary evidence of this and other atrocities?
Throughout this article I will provide an overview of the destruction of
archives and records during times of conflict. I will look at why they are
destroyed and give an overview of the history of the destruction of archives
during various conflicts or occupations and then summarise the various
attempts by the international community to protect archives and all cultural
heritage during wartime and its effectiveness. I will also touch on efforts
made by the archival community to demonstrate solidarity with those
affected. I will also discuss the contemporary record of a nation both at war
and during peace time which is not protected by international law but
extremely vulnerable during regime change and during times of conflict and
important for not just for reasons of accountability and the rights of citizens.
How effective has such legislation been with regard to the protection of
archives and records? How does it protect the documentary evidence of this
and other atrocities?
14.2
Why?
Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human
beings.2
History has shown us that archives and records are intrinsic to the identity of
a nation. They act as evidence of a regime’s activities as well as the record of
collective memory. The deliberate destruction of an archive can be considered
as an act of mnemnocide – or the destruction of memory. While physical
security, clean water, food, medical aid and shelter are extremely important
for people’s welfare, people also have a need to remember, however painful,
as it helps them come to terms with traumatic experiences as an individual or
a member of a group. Alfred Grosser in his essay ‘Duty of Remembering’3
quotes Voltaire: ‘It is only memory that establishes one’s identity’ and
extrapolates from that to write ‘It is also “collective memory” that establishes
and maintains a group’s identity, be it social, religious, or national. The
memory of workers has served as the foundation for international
movements; and the memory of discrimination against women has been used
by feminist movements. Each person can have multiple identities and each
“Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.” Heinrich
Heine, Almansor (1821).
3 Alfred Grosse, ‘Duty of Remembering,’ in Roy Gutman and David Rieff, Crimes of War: what
the public should know, (New York, 1999), available at
www.crimesofwar.org/thebook/remembering-duty.html, accessed April 2006.
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group to which he/she belongs, wants him/her to privilege one memory
rather than another. Conflicts of identity are by and large conflicts of
memory.’4
However the goal of passing along a collective memory is often also
used to glorify the past. One is encouraged only to remember a nation’s
victories and moments of glory. Memory and its manipulation is the raw
material for nationalist, ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies, as poppies are
the raw material for heroin addiction … .If there is no suitable past, it can
always be invented. The past legitimizes. The past gives a more glorious
background to a present that does not have that much to show for itself.5 To
this, one should add: before inventing a new past, the old must be erased. The
destruction of a community’s past, of its institutions and records is, in the first
instance, part of a strategy of intimidation aimed at driving out members of
the targeted group. But it also serves another long-term goal. The buildings
and records in Serbia, for example, were proof that non-Serbs once resided
and owned property in that place, that they had historical roots there. By
burning the documents, by razing mosques and Catholic churches and
bulldozing the graveyards, the nationalist forces who have now taken over
these towns and villages tried to guarantee that there would be no future
claims by the people they have driven out and dispossessed.
It burned all night as drunken men in paramilitary uniforms fired
machine guns in the air. By morning Trebinje’s 500-year-old
mosque was ashes and a dark-eyed young man, Kemal Bubic, 29,
joined thousands of numbed people moving eastward. ‘At that
moment everything I had was burned down,’ he said. ‘It’s not that
my family was burned down, but it’s my foundation that burned. I
was destroyed’.6
14.3
Some examples of the destruction of archives and cultural property
One of the most outstanding examples of the destruction of archives
and cultural property during an occupation include the activities of the
People’s Republic of China in Tibet. The Government of Tibet in Exile and its
supporters claim that it is destroying ancient Tibetan culture and religion.
During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards invaded the central cathedral in
Lhasa and ‘for five days, scripture and documents were burned in the
courtyard’7. In all it was estimated that eighty-five per cent of the nation’s
Ibid.
OpenSociety News (Winter 1993).
6 ‘Killing memory: the targeting of Bosnia’s cultural heritage’. Testimony presented at a
hearing of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Andras Riedlmayer, US
Congress, April 4,1995, www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/killing.html, accessed 22 June 2005.
7 Rebecca Knuth, Libricide (Westport, Ct & London, 2003), p. 217.
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written materials and documents were destroyed. Some were ancient, dating
from the eighth century and written on palm leaves. However many were the
documents of simple families recording details of their personal history, their
births, their death, their marriages and details of their land. ‘What possible
use was their destruction to the Chinese? It was as though all your culture’s
old manuscripts written on parchment and with painted pictures in the
margins, Guttenberg bibles and Domesday books were burned. That’s what
happened in Tibet’.8
In 1987 the communists initiated a campaign against the Dalai Lama
and sent teams of officials to even the most remote monasteries and nunneries
to expunge references to the Dalai Lama from Buddhist texts. Again, books
and archives were destroyed.9 Supporters of the People’s Republic of China
argue that while wishing to stop secessionist activity in Tibet it does not
actively desire to see Tibetan culture eradicated.
14.4
Serbia
Bosnia-Hercegovina was, of all the republics in the former Yugoslavia,
that with the most cultural diversity, with large concentrations of Serbs,
Croats, and Muslims. These three ethnic groups had managed to live together
relatively well. Once Serbia and Croatia declared independence, Bosnia risked
being in a country dominated by Serbs or it could declare independence and
face collapse at the hands of both Serbia and Croatia. In March 1991, sixtyeight per cent of Bosnians voted for independence, with the Serbs abstaining.
Eastern Bosnia was then invaded by the Serbs. Hostility between Serbs and
Muslims was increased by propaganda by Serbian intellectuals and Serbian
folk epics cited a history of grievances that called for the slaughter of Muslims
and the destruction of Islamic culture. Ten per cent of the Muslim population
was killed and three quarters of a million people were pushed from the
Bosnian land which was seized by the Serbs.
A plan was in force to eradicate Muslim culture on many levels –
biological, psychological and symbolic. Executions of intellectuals and
educated professionals took place. Rape became an authorized tool to break
the spirit and then disrupt reproduction by dishonouring women and causing
a breakdown of Muslim families and culture.
All physical structures which symbolized Muslim culture were prime
targets for destruction. By 1993 one thousand mosques had been damaged or
destroyed. The Serbs were interested in destroying items that simply by
existing, confirmed the history of Muslim residency in Bosnia. In particular it
Vanya Kewley, Tibet: Behind the Ice Curtain (London, 1990) cited in Rebecca Knuth, Libricide,
pp 220–221.
9 Craig, Mary, Tears of blood: A Cry for Tibet (Washington, DC, 1999) cited in Rebecca Knuth,
Libricide, p. 223.
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was necessary to destroy documentation which demonstrated the validity of
Muslim historical claims to Bosnia because they contradicted the Serbian
expansionist claim that Bosnia had no legitimacy as a separate nation or
civilisation:10
An estimated 481,000 linear metres of record – the equivalent of a
row of document storage boxes more than 300 miles long – were
destroyed in attacks on historical archives and local registry offices
during the 1992–95 war. Lost in the flames were people’s births,
deaths, and marriages, their properties and businesses, their
cultural and religious lives, civic and political activities and
associations.11
Personal documents were also seized, including passports, driver’s
licenses, letters, prescriptions, and diplomas. Muslims were forced to hand
over property deeds in exchange for safe passage out of the region.
The Croats were also targeted, Bosnian Croats were also displaced and
evidence of their presence eradicated. Catholic churches throughout Bosnia
were also destroyed as were any records showing that Croats had historical
claims to lands coveted by the Serbs. Serbs shelled the Archives of
Hercegovina in Mostar and communal records of 800 Muslim and Bosnian
Croatian communities were torched.12
The most symbolic of all this destruction was the shelling and burning
of the National Library of Bosnia and Hercegovina in Sarajevo. Serbs cut off
the water supply and gunners shelled it with incendiary rockets. Devastated
Sarajevans did what they could, librarians and volunteers formed a human
chain to pass whatever holdings out they could gather despite sniper fire.
When asked why they were doing it the fire brigade chief said ‘because I was
born here and they are burning a part of me’.13 Around ten per cent of its
holdings survived the three days of burning.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, nationalism re-emerged as the new
ideology and Serbs tried to create a blank tablet on which to rewrite history
and legitimise their actions. The destruction of all links to the area, such as
homes, churches, mosques, written records and libraries reinforced their
ideology.
Rebecca Knuth, Libricide, pp 123–125.
Andras Riedlmayer, ‘Convivencia Under Fire: Genocide and Book burning in Bosnia’, in
Jonathan Rose (ed.), The Holocaust and the Book, (University of Massachusetts, 2001), cited in
Rebecca Knuth, Libricide, p. 279.
12 Andras Riedlmayer, ‘Erasing the past: The destruction of Libraries and Archives in BosniaHerzegovnia,’ Middle Eastern Studies Bulletin, 29:1 (1995) 7–11, cited in Rebecca Knuth,
Libricide, p 126.
13 Andras Riedlmayer, ‘Convivencia Under Fire’, p 274.
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[t]he emperors of today have drawn conclusions from this simple
truth: [W]hatever does not exist on paper, does not exist at all.14
13.5
Iraq
Until the 1980s, Iraq’s largest libraries and archives were relatively well
preserved. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the Gulf War, the uprising
that followed it and twelve years of UN imposed sanctions led to the looting
of a number of regional libraries, and the systematic bleeding of private as
well as public manuscript collections into the regional and international
market.
Although the slow destruction of Iraq’s cultural heritage after 1991 was
substantial, it does not compare with what has been lost since April 2003. At
that time the world saw the burning, looting and dispersion of the historical
record, Iraqi libraries and museums. Government ministries were looted and
burned and it is thought that much of the record of Iraq’s modern history has
disappeared. Certainly it is thought that any future government of Iraq will
have a difficult time rebuilding a country where records of property and
commercial transactions have vanished. In relation to the records of the
previous regime, some observers say valuable opportunities are being lost to
collect police and prison records in Iraq, records that could help identify
victims and killers.
Researchers for INDICT15 found prison floors still littered with police
files rummaged through by looters. The former regime kept detailed records
of who it imprisoned and executed but that evidence is not being secured.
Files are sometimes offered for sale in the Baghdad market, where Ba’ath
Party members are reported to be buying evidence that incriminates them.
The Iraqi Free Prisoners Organization, has set up an office in central
Baghdad and is trying to locate and preserve thousands of files about
executions allegedly kept by the Iraqi secret services. One of the group’s
directors, Najaf al-Arajee, said recently in Baghdad that the security services
removed many files to secret hiding places during the Iraq war in the spring,
with the hope of keeping them from being damaged and in expectation of
returning to work soon. The former prisoners are now trying to track those
files down. ‘Most of the files – for example, the archive of the internal secret
police service – were hidden in the Al-Mansur shopping center. We received
the information that the archives are located in this place, and we took them
Milosz, Czeslaw, The captive mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York, 1990), p. 224, cited in
Rebecca Knuth, Libricide, p.105.
15 INDICT was established in late 1996 to campaign for the creation of an ad hoc International
Criminal Tribunal – similar to those established for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda – to
try leading members of the former Iraqi regime on charges of war crimes and crimes against
humanity, including genocide and torture. www.indict.org.uk, accessed 22 June 2005.
14
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by force,’ al-Arajee said. The recovered files now await the scrutiny of judges
in what former political prisoners hope one day will be extensive trials of
their tormentors. But so far, the only announced new court in Baghdad is one
being set up by the Coalition Authority to try Hussein loyalists who have
committed crimes against US and British forces.16
The National Library and Archives, housed in the same building, were
the largest repositories of books, manuscripts and documents from Iraq’s
Ottoman and pre-Ba’thist history. The archives housed 450,000 documents
covering the period of the monarchy (1920–1958); the largest collection of
periodicals in Iraq; and archival materials dating from the Ottoman period for
the cities of Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra. The archives housed on the second
floor of the building appears to have suffered a devastating loss. The Library of
Religious Endowments held copies of documents recording information about
religious endowments made by wealthy donors as well as a number of old
Qurans and many manuscripts in the religious sciences (such as religious law,
exegeses, rhetoric, and theology). Its building was looted and burned.
According to one estimate, the library held close to seven thousand
manuscripts. Staff at the library managed to store a portion of the manuscript
collection before the war at an undisclosed location. UNESCO reports that
forty per cent of its manuscript collection and ninety per cent of its printed
books have been lost to fire and looters.17
And the Americans did nothing. All over the filthy yard they blew,
letters of recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands for
ammunition for troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks
on pilgrims, all in delicate hand-written Arabic script. I was holding
in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history. But
for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in
the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the
National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural
identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what
insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?18
In Iraq after years of sanctions and tyranny it seems that the people
themselves turned on themselves, looted their own museums, and burnt their
priceless National Library, went about destroying their own memory and
past. Ben Okri suggests that they had been dehumanised: they have been
broken by sanctions, crushed by tyranny and annihilated by the doctrine of
www.indict.org.uk/about.php, accessed 29 May, 2005.
The American Historical Association (AHA), www.historians.org, accessed 29 May, 2005.
18 Robert Fisk, ‘Library Books, Letters and Priceless Documents Are Set Ablaze in Final
Chapter of the Sacking of Baghdad’, Independent, 15 April, 2003. Also available at
www.robert-fisk.com/articles231.htm, accessed April 2006.
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overwhelming force.19 Okri goes on to say ‘We are now at the epicentre of a
shift in the history of the world. The war against Iraq has unleashed
unsuspected forces. The first signs are twofold. The need of the Americans to
protect oil fields, but not hospitals, museums and libraries. This is a
catastrophic failure of imagination and a signal absence of a sense of the true
values of civilisation. It does not bode well for the future.’20 The duty of
remembering is also invoked in the face of those who committed crimes and
inflicted suffering on others: ‘Remember what you have done’!
14.6
The development of International law and law protecting cultural
property. What kind of justice is there?
14.7
A brief history of the laws of war.
The roots of international law are long and ancient. Attempts to put
limits on wartime behaviour have been around since the beginning of
recorded history and there have been numerous attempts to codify the rules
of appropriate military conduct.
Archaeologists have unearthed treaties between two Mesopotamian
rulers dating back to 3100 BC Egyptian pharaohs also left records of treaties in
effect with neighbouring peoples. The ancient Chinese created what might be
called international law as early as 2500 BC. Of all ancient peoples, however,
the development of modern international law owes the most to the Romans.
From about 31 BC to the fifth century AD, almost the entire civilized western
world was politically united under the Roman Empire. To accomplish the feat
of controlling the lands conquered by its mighty armies, Rome developed a
central administration. Organization, military power, government and law
kept the empire at relative peace and so the whole era has been called Pax
Romana. To administer justice to diverse peoples, the Romans needed laws
that reflected the needs of the empire. Roman judges had to settle disputes
among people with different beliefs and languages. To do this, the Romans
borrowed from Greek philosophers and applied what has been called
‘universal law’. It is based on the idea that there is a law that applies to all
humans regardless of their culture or origin. The Romans believed all people
could discover principles of universal law through the use of reason. On the
basis of universal law, the Romans developed a system of law called jus
gentium (law of nations). It was international law used throughout the empire.
The power of Rome enforced the law.
14.7.1 The Middle Ages
Ben Okri, ‘The new dark age: The looting and burning of Iraq’s museums and libraries has
left us all losers’, The Guardian, 19 April 2003.
20 Ibid.
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With the fall of Rome and its empire, Pax Romana ended and what had
been Roman Europe fell into a period of upheaval and political instability.
Threatened by foes from the north and east, people looked for protection by
forming alliances on the local level. These unstable political conditions gave
rise to the early versions of feudalism, with kings and nobles exercising
control over relatively small areas.
In addition, drawing on Greek and Roman ideas, medieval
philosophers contended that there existed a body of legal principles and a
sense of right that applied to all peoples everywhere. They called this ‘natural
law’. Its rules could be discovered through the processes of pure reasoning. In
effect, natural law existed ‘in the air’, merely waiting for the embrace of rightthinking men, no matter what their position in life might be.
At this time, Christian theologians such as St Augustine of Hippo, and
later St Thomas Aquinas, developed ideas about what made a war just or
unjust. Augustine argued that only legitimate rulers could make war and that
it must be fought for the right reasons, mainly the desire to bring about peace.
Aquinas built on the ideas of Augustine. He held that war could only be just if
three conditions were met. A war must be waged by a lawful authority with
the power to wage war. A war must have a just cause. A war must be
intended to accomplish good or avoid evil. These concepts had great
influence on later thinkers.
14.7.2 The Early Modern Era
The Thirty Years War ushered in a new era with the birth of modern
states. The doctrine of sovereignty developed. It held that the highest
authority possible rested in the hands of the heads of theoretically equal
states. Each monarch, within his or her domain, held the mantle that once
cloaked popes and Roman emperors.
Although the notion of sovereignty did address the new political
reality in Europe, it also raised some thorny questions. If no higher authority
than that of individual states existed, what authority could regulate them
domestically or internationally? If quarrels arose among them, who would
settle them? Would mankind face a cycle of endless war with nothing to
determine who was right or wrong? Certainly, each monarch was answerable
to his own god, through the divine right of kings, but what if the same god
gave different messages? The first hint of an answer, philosophically at least,
came from the work of Hugo Grotius and other thinkers.
Grotius, a seventeenth century Dutch scholar, approached the problem
of war. Like Augustine and Aquinas before him, he argued that wars were
‘just’ or ‘unjust’. Unlike his Christian predecessors, he based his theories on
the ideas of the enlightenment. He identified factors such as the motivation of
the states and the cause involved to judge whether a war was ‘just’ or ‘unjust’.
More importantly, he argued for the principle that the actions of states were
9
not above law. Instead, just as individuals were bound by a natural law, so
were states. From this early ‘law of nations’ evolved some of our modern
ideas about international law. Grotius wrote On the Law of War and Peace21 in
1625, focusing on the humanitarian treatment of civilians.22
In the past century and a half there has been a qualitative jump in the
degree to which constraints have been placed on warring parties, and only
this century that an international body has been formed to police the nations
of the world. The first Geneva Convention was signed in 1864 to protect the
sick and wounded in war time. This first Geneva Convention was inspired by
Henri Dunant, founder of the Red Cross. Ever since then, the Red Cross has
played an integral part in the drafting and enforcement of the Geneva
Conventions. These included the 1899 treaties, concerning asphyxiating gases
and expanding bullets. In 1907, thirteen separate treaties were signed,
followed in 1925 by the Geneva Gas Protocol, which prohibited the use of
poison gas and the practice of bacteriological warfare.
In 1929, two more Geneva Conventions dealt with the treatment of the
wounded and prisoners of war. In 1949, four Geneva Conventions extended
protections to those shipwrecked at sea and to civilians. The Hague
Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property was signed in 1954, the
United Nations Convention on Military or Any Other Hostile Use of
Environmental Techniques followed in 1977, together with two additional
protocols to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, extending their protections to
civil wars. There is no one ‘Geneva Convention’. Like any other body of law,
the laws of war have been assembled piecemeal, and are, in fact, still under
construction.
14.8
A history of international guidelines protecting cultural property
International guidelines protecting cultural property against damage
and theft date back to the American Civil War. The carnage of that war led to
the 1863 Lieber Code,23 which gave protected status to libraries, scientific
collections, and art works. The code applied only to American troops but
influenced a series of international accords leading to the 1954 Convention for
the Protection of Cultural Property.24
The 1954 convention’s definition of cultural property is broad,
including significant architectural monuments, art works, books or
manuscripts of artistic or historical significance, museums, large libraries,
Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres, (1625).
Constitutional Rights Foundation web site, crf-usa.org/Iraqwar_html/iraqwar_home,
accessed 10 May 2005.
23 Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field (Lieber Code),
1863, www.icrc.org/IHL.nsf/INTRO/110?OpenDocument, accessed May 2006.
24 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, 1954,
www.icomos.org/hague, accessed April 2006.
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archives, archaeological sites, and historic buildings. The convention was
strengthened by the Additional Protocols of 1977, of which Article 53
prohibits ‘any acts of hostility directed against the historic monuments, works
of art or places of worship which constitute the cultural or spiritual heritage
of peoples.’ It is important to note that the protocols established protections
against the destruction of other types of civilian property not linked to
military actions or uses.
Article 53 also prohibits the use of cultural property ‘in support of the
military effort’—for example, using a national historical building as a
command centre. In such cases, destruction or damage of cultural property is
not necessarily a war crime. The 1954 convention states that the obligation to
not harm cultural property ‘may be waived only in cases where military
necessity imperatively requires such a waiver’. The phrase ‘military necessity’
is not defined in the convention, though it would likely apply, for example, to
a church damaged during a bombing raid on an adjacent weapons factory, or
a museum destroyed because it was being used as an arms depot.25
14.9 1954 Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of
Armed Conflict and its Protocols
In 1954 the international community adopted the Hague Convention
for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (CCP).
This protocol deals with cultural property during times of occupation and
was adopted at the same time as the 1954 Convention. Although the 1954
convention strengthens protection for cultural property, its provisions have
not been implemented consistently. To address this problem, a second
protocol to the 1954 convention (P2) was adopted on 26 March 1999. In
addition to these instruments, the1977 protocols additional to the Geneva
Conventions include provisions protecting cultural property (Protocol I, Art.
38, 53 and 85, and Protocol II, Art. 16). The ratification of each of the abovementioned instruments is essential ‘to preserve objects precious to all
humanity.’26
14.10 Systems of Protection
Parties to the convention discussed must protect all cultural property,
whether their own or that situated in the territory of other states parties.
14.11 The International Committee of the Blue Shield (ICBS)
Peter Maas, ‘Cultural Property and Historical Monuments’, in Roy Gutman and David Rieff
(eds), Crimes of War (London, 1999).
26 www.cicr.org/Web/Eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/5LWJP5/$FILE/Cultural_Property.pdf, accessed 9
May 2005.
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The Blue Shield is the cultural equivalent of the Red Cross. It is the
symbol specified in the 1954 Hague Convention for marking cultural sites to
give them protection from attack in the event of armed conflict. It is also the
name of an international committee set up in 1996 to work to protect the
world’s cultural heritage threatened by wars and natural disasters.
The ICBS covers museums and archives, libraries, and monuments and
sites. It brings together the knowledge, experience and international networks
of the four expert organisations dealing with cultural heritage: an unrivalled
body of expertise which is now available to advise and assist in responding to
events such as war in former Yugoslavia and hurricane damage in Central
America.
ICBS is international, independent and professional. Its mission is to
work for the protection of the world’s cultural heritage by co-ordinating
preparations to meet and respond to emergency situations. The vital work of
the ICBS was recognised in the Second Protocol to the Hague Convention
agreed in April 1999 by eighty-four countries. This gives ICBS a new role, to
advise the inter-governmental Committee for Protection of Cultural Property
in the Event of Armed Conflict.27
14.12 Has the legislation worked?
The Nuremberg trials after World War II marked the first time that
individuals were held accountable for cultural war crimes. Several Nazi
officials were sentenced to death for a panoply of violations that included the
destruction of cultural property.28 Hirad Abtahi notes that although The
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has
prosecuted and punished crimes relating to cultural property, ‘it has
encountered a number of psychological and legal challenges’.29 Because the
conflict in the former Yugoslavia centred on ethnicity and religion, most of
the crimes against cultural property related to religious or educational targets.
For a long time, existing indictments did not clearly cover other types of
cultural property, such as institutions dedicated to science or works of
science. Very recent practice shows the tribunal’s willingness to issue
indictments charging crimes against more secular components of cultural
property. As Abtahi indicates, the anthropocentric approach of law
psychologically confines crimes against cultural property to a less visible
position than other crimes.30 Even when crimes against cultural property are
addressed, it is because the perpetrators’ objective was to harm the
population whom the cultural property represented. Abtahi explains: ‘the
See icom.museum/emergency.html, accessed 11 May 2005.
Peter Mass, Crimes of War, p.112.
29 Hirad Abtahi, Harvard Human Rights Journal 14, available at
www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/hrj/iss14/abtahi_old.shtml, accessed 29 May 2005.
30 Ibid.
27
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ICTY addresses crimes involving the destruction of a mosque because they
harmed the Muslim population. The same reasoning applies to the
destruction of a Catholic monastery, which injured the Croat population, or of
an Orthodox church, which harmed the Serb population’.31 Anthropocentric
and ethnocentric approaches therefore require a link to be established
between cultural property and the group of individuals that it represents.
Abtahi points out that ‘as a result, in the hierarchy of international crimes,
there is often a tendency to place crimes against cultural property below
crimes against persons’.32 And while no one can dispute the difference
between destruction of a human being and the destruction of cultural
property, it remains important to acknowledge the seriousness the purposeful
destruction of cultural property. In addition, as countries such as the UK and
US have not ratified the Hague Convention it is difficult to see how the
legislation has real teeth.33
14.13 Conclusion
The targeting of archives and cultural property during wartime cannot
be construed as an expression of one side’s views in a two-sided political
dispute. It is a crime against humanity and a violation of international laws
and conventions. The latter include not only the 1948 Genocide Convention,
but also the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in
the Event of Armed Conflict, and the 1977 Protocols I and II Additional to the
Geneva Conventions of 1949. Historical archives which are safeguarded
within a repository are slightly less vulnerable than contemporary records
which usually remain in the office of creation, a government ministry for
example. Are these records protected by Geneva conventions? The seemingly
mundane records which verify who we are, when we were born, when we
died, are also key targets during war time or occupation. As Abtahi has
suggested, the decimation of a nation’s written records is a human rights
violation and damages not just the society within which they were created but
the world’s common humanity and cultural diversity.
Ibid.
Ibid.
33 Ibid.
31
32
13