30/03/2016 11:35 Robert Bevan: By saving cultural monuments we are saving humanity | Comment | London Evening Standard Page 1 of 12 http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/robert-bevan-by-saving-cultural-monuments-we-are-saving-humanity-a2918521.html Pawn in the game: Khaled al-Asaad, who has been reportedly been beheaded in Palmyra by Islamic militants Comment › Comment ROBERT BEVAN | Friday 21 August 2015 | 0comments Robert Bevan: By saving cultural monuments we are saving humanity IS’s latest execution shows why we need a deeper understanding of the relation of people to their culture 68 shares News Football Going Out
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30/03/2016 11:35Robert Bevan: By saving cultural monuments we are saving humanity | Comment | London Evening Standard
Page 1 of 12http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/robert-bevan-by-saving-cultural-monuments-we-are-saving-humanity-a2918521.html
Pawn in the game: Khaled al-Asaad, who has been reportedly been beheaded in Palmyra by Islamicmilitants
Comment › Comment
ROBERT BEVAN | Friday 21 August 2015 | 0 comments
Robert Bevan: By saving culturalmonuments we are saving humanityIS’s latest execution shows why we need a deeper understanding of the relation of peopleto their culture
30/03/2016 11:35Robert Bevan: By saving cultural monuments we are saving humanity | Comment | London Evening Standard
Page 2 of 12http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/robert-bevan-by-saving-cultural-monuments-we-are-saving-humanity-a2918521.html
It’s like a horrible tale from the Brothers Grimm orScheherazade; the venerable guardian of an ancient temple isbeheaded then hanged from columns that he himself hadonce restored for refusing to divulge the location of itshidden treasures. Yet that is what happened to the man incharge of safeguarding the Syrian World Heritage Site ofPalmyra. The retired director of the ancient city’s antiquitiesoffice, 82-year-old Khaled al-Asaad, was beheaded bymilitants from Islamic State on Tuesday for alleged crimesincluding his role as keeper of its “idols”.
It is easy to reach for insults such as “nihilist” or “uncivilised” andthere is no doubt that there is a wide streak of base criminality andmurderous psychopathy running through IS. Yet there isconsidered purpose behind its actions too, and if we are to helpprotect the cultural heritage of the Middle East we need tounderstand this purpose not dismiss it as a clash of civilisations,with all the casual racism that infers.
The world watched in disbelief this summer after IS uploadedvideos showing its bulldozing of ancient Nimrud and Hatra in Iraq.This was not just iconoclasm inspired by a particularly narrowinterpretation of Islam that sees the “worship” of artefacts inmuseums as a form of idolatry. Beheading a man or a minaret isterrorism — an act of propaganda designed to provoke fear. And thedestruction of churches, Shia mosques and Yazidi shrines are partof a political and military process of conquest and genocide.
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30/03/2016 11:35Robert Bevan: By saving cultural monuments we are saving humanity | Comment | London Evening Standard
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While this violence is informed superficially by the religiousdoctrine that has its origins in Saudi Wahhabism, it is essentiallypolitical in nature, an ideology that seeks to challenge the post-colonial settlement — the illogical, externally imposed nationalboundaries and the corrupt, repressive regimes then backed by theWest and Russia. Such regimes, say their critics, have imposed awestern capitalist model on the region’s peoples only without itsfreedoms and with brutality, corruption, hopeless poverty andunemployment.
Hostility to this Western model of “civlisation” is encapsulated inthe name of Nigeria’s Boko Haram often translated as “Westerneducation is forbidden”.
To anti-Western idealogues the very idea of a universal heritage isan externally imposed notion. In 2001 the Taliban’s Mullah Omarteased the West that it cared more about the Bamiyan Buddhasthan it did about Afghanis dying of hunger. In Mali it is thought thatin Timbuktu a new round of shrine destruction by Ansar Dine inJuly 2012 was a response to resolutions by Unesco’s World HeritageCommittee meeting in St Petersburg. Why should Islamists beexpected to care about such universalism when the West’s
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Enlightenment project with its emphasis on the universal has onlybrought their region’s subjugation?
From Bosnia onwards bouts of cultural destruction have led to UNresolutions and inflammatory suggestions of armed intervention toprotect historic sites. But there has been precious little action. Nowthere are deluded proposals to fly out valuable artefacts forsafekeeping to the great museums of New York, London and Paris.
On the other hand, in the wake of the massacres in Bosnia, Darfurand Rwanda a variety of genocide early warning systems have beenin development to ward off such murderous episodes but not asingle one of these models includes material culture as a measurein determining whether a genocidal situation is emerging.
In some ways then, Mullah Omar was correct in his criticism — untilthe West can demonstrate that it understands that the fate ofpeoples and their culture are interlinked there will be noresolution to the ongoing attacks on both. These linkages need tobe made in international law that at present keeps crimes againstculture and crimes against humanity quite separate.
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who escaped the Nazis and went onto draft the 1948 Genocide Convention, was convinced thatgenocide consisted of both barbarity (attacks on people) andvandalism (attacks on culture as the expression of a people’sgenius). As eventually adopted by the United Nations, however, theconvention omitted Lemkin’s concept of cultural vandalism as anelement of genocide.
Cold War diplomatic hostilities and the fear of post-wargovernments that their indigenous peoples (and former slaves)could apply the law against their own government prevailed.Instead, the UN adopted the separate 1954 Hague Convention thataims to protect heritage in the event of armed conflict (aconvention whose latest version the UK Government has still yet to
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More about: | Iraq| Robert Bevan| United Nations| Middle East |UK Government
incorporate into UK law despite promises to do so). IS’s culturaldestruction has been called a war crime and in spirit this is true.However, the question remains whether the group’s destruction ofNimrud or Hatra in Iraq can be practically prosecuted under anyenforceable law; cultural destruction is not officially genocide andwhile such destruction counts as a war crime under the 2002Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court,Iraq has failed to sign up to it too. Indeed, like the US, Iraq isactively hostile to the very idea of the court and the notion that theactions of its generals and politicians should be held to account inthat forum. The West’s own “civilised” values are once againflexible.
International laws about crimes against humanity and culture willbe ignored by sociopathic zealots but they will help if they arefollowed up by action that values vulnerable people at the sametime as vulnerable monuments. “Burning books is not the same asburning bodies,” observed Lemkin in 1948, “but when oneintervenes … against mass destruction of churches and books onearrives just in time to prevent the burning of bodies.”
Robert Bevan is a member of the International Council onMonuments and Sites, which advises Unesco on world heritage. He iswriting in a personal capacity.
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