Introduction

James Cuno We are meeting less than three weeks after the Easter Sunday suicide bombings in Sri Lanka, which claimed more than three hundred lives. ISIS, which was said to have been totally defeated just two months before, claimed credit for the bombings and released a video of its leader, Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi, seen for the first time in five years, calling on his jihadist followers to rally around his vision for ISIS. “Our battle today,” he said, “is a battle of attrition, and we will prolong it for the enemy. And they must know that the jihad will continue until Judgment Day.” One of the Sri Lankan bombers, Jameel Mohamed Abdul Lathief, traveled to Raqqa, Syria, in 2014. There he trained with ISIS for three to six months, before returning to recruit others and to carry out the attacks. The Sri Lankan Islamist group Jamiyyathul Millatu Ibrahim recruited for ISIS and joined forces with the Islamist preacher Zahran Hashim, the alleged organizer of the Easter Sunday attacks. Days before, he is said to have organized attacks on Buddhist sculptures. As a result of those earlier attacks, police in Manawela arrested thirteen people.

The question many journalists have asked is, what relationship might there be between those two kinds of violent attacks, on cultural heritage and on the lives of those who profess a cultural identity with them and what they represent? The prime minister of Sri Lanka, Ranil Wickremesinghe, noted a few days after the suicide bombings, “We know that before the Buddhist images, there were attacks on Sufi mosques, so they seem to be going step by step. First their own Muslims, Sufis, then the Buddhists. And there was something in a small church near Kandy, Kandukuri, information that they wanted to damage the church.”

For the better part of three years, the Getty has organized meetings with a wide range of experts to help shed light on the meaning and consequences of and interrelations between attacks on cultural objects, structures, and monuments and attacks on civilian populations. To this end, we have published two Occasional Papers. The co-author of the first Occasional Paper, Tom Weiss, is my co-convener of this meeting; the author of the second, Edward Luck is participating in this meeting. The authors of the third Occasional Paper, Helen Frowe and Derek Matravers, are also here with us today.

Together, these three papers and our many meetings have convinced us that there is a profound connection between attacks on cultural heritage and attacks on civilian populations, a connection Heinrich Heine first identified in 1835 when he famously said, “First they burn the books, then they burn the bodies.” Such connections vary. They may be iconoclastic, like the ISIS attacks on Palmyra and the Islamist attacks on the mausoleums and tombs of Sufi saints in Mali; or they may be the result of targeted military attacks, like damage to the Umayyad Great Mosque of Aleppo, of which a local resident, Muhammed Marsi, standing with his son in front of it, said, shaking his head and sighing, “The destruction for the whole country is undescribable [sic], just like what happened to the mosque. If you knew the mosque before the damage and saw it now, it is like someone who lost a child or a part of his body.”

Such connections between attacks on cultural heritage and attacks on civilian populations caused the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to write of genocide, a term he coined in 1944, as not necessarily meaning the immediate destruction of a nation but rather as signifying a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the ultimate goal of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, of language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. This, in all but name, is cultural genocide.

Over the next day and a half, we are going to explore connections between violence perpetrated against objects, monuments, and institutions of culture and the people who identify themselves with or against them, whether in Iraq, Syria, Mali, Sri Lanka, or elsewhere. Our intention is to produce, with inputs from this meeting, a book that details, contextualizes, and provides research resources for the development of a legal and political framework for the protection of cultural heritage in zones of armed conflict. To that end, we encourage you to participate in this book, to make recommendations of other authors and suggest the most useful, important, and practical resources to advance the adoption and implementation of this crucial framework. Thank you very much for joining us.

Thomas G. Weiss I think we should begin with first principles. And the very first principle is that of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), namely, humanity or the sacred quality of human life. I want to pick up on Jim’s point that we see these issues, the protection of people and the protection of heritage, as intimately intertwined. The problem is going to arise, of course, that some humanitarians do not agree with us. They see a priority, and we can do one thing rather than the other. So part of the assignment will be to look at the question as to whether there are tradeoffs between protecting people and protecting heritage. Do you have to do one or the other, or can you, and must you, do both?

I begin with a puzzle: the onslaught against the heritage is overwhelmingly and universally condemned and thus is different from virtually every other issue that I study, in which there is always contestation, significant contestation, both in the public and in the private sphere. But that disparity does not exist for this issue. And moreover, there is no significant fault line between the politics of the North and the Global South, to the extent that you think those categories make sense.

So there is no sympathy, and yet there is little or no action. Non-state actors use the destruction to undermine governments and their authority, as well as the values, norms, principles, and institutions that constitute international society. We are hoping, at the end of the book, to come up with some policy solutions that may actually lead to more action. So I thought that I would give a quick reading of what I think the literature tells us to date. And I will start with the bad news, then move on to what I think is a little better news. What is driving the onslaught, the attacks, the onslaught against cultural heritage?

It seems to me that we are talking about six challenges. First, of course, we live with growth in the numbers, kinds, and level of arms of non-state actors. Second, picking up the pieces from civil wars is now the business of politicians, militaries, and humanitarians worldwide. This includes even NATO but also, obviously, the institutions and the international law we have built for interstate conflicts. The operational and legal challenges are totally different in Afghanistan or Yemen or Syria. Third, we suffer from the rise of toxic identity politics. The most recent issue of Foreign Affairs has referred to “the new nationalisms.” This is not a Western oligopoly. Tribalism is everywhere. And in war zones, mass atrocities and cultural destruction occur almost everywhere. Fourth, armed belligerents and governments are slugging away in urban areas. This creates certain problems, because there are legitimate military targets in places like Baghdad or Aleppo, but the same sites are also surrounded by civilians. So this is not an easy assignment, to figure out whether to protect the civilians or the sites and go after legitimate military targets. Fifth, we are confronting the prevalence of asymmetric warfare. Sixth, there is the ubiquity of media, in particular social media, that does the kind of made-for-TV or -YouTube destruction of symbols and decapitations. Irina Bokova mentioned last night keeping track of what was going on in Mosul from her office and not being able to watch the end of it.

There is a label, “new wars,” that is often applied to contemporary conflicts, so that in addition to the attacks on cultural heritage, our preoccupation, there are high civilian casualties, taxes on humanitarians, and illegal trafficking. This label is contested for a number of reasons, not least of which is that none of those factors, or the destruction of cultural heritage, is new. But I personally think that the fusion, the intensity of all these factors, presents a kind of quantitative change in the nature of war that effectively amounts to a qualitatively new challenge. So that’s the bad news.

What’s the good news? I hope that some of these elements encourage us to struggle in the course of this research project to find a better framework for thinking about better policies and norms and, we hope someday, action. The good news is, I think, relevant for someone like me and others who live and breathe in intergovernmental organizations like the UN or UNESCO. It is important that for immovable cultural heritage there is no clash between what I see as the cultural nationalists, who are pursuing a postcolonial agenda, and cultural internationalists or cosmopolitans, who are looking at the universal value of cultural heritage. This issue is really quite distinct from the vitriolic negotiations that surround movable cultural heritage, which is where the bulk of most previous analytical work on heritage has taken place. I do not see that sovereignty or the lack of consent from governments is the issue. The lack of consent from insurgents, yes; but from governments, no, it is not the main problem. It is the lack of political will or decision-making apathy.

So wanton non-state destruction facilitates, it seems to me, or should facilitate, conversations in intergovernmental fora, including those about counterterrorism, which is what has motivated the Security Council. There are other indications of international receptivity, however: the International Criminal Court (ICC) decision on al-Mahdi after Timbuktu; the insertion of a protection mandate in the Mali operation for the UN. So, the second piece of good news, I think, is the increased attention to protecting heritage, which I believe resembles the seismic shift that occurred in the 1990s with regard to protecting civilians. That was always an aspiration, but it suddenly became the central item in many conversations, intergovernmental and nongovernmental. At the outset of the decade, one looked at northern Iraq and Somalia as somehow exceptional, as aberrations. The first effort after the first UN operation since Korea, followed by the intervention in northern Iraq, was in Somalia. That was supposed to be sui generis; the resolution used the word humanitarian, the “H” word, eighteen times to suggest that we were not setting any precedents anywhere. The Commission on Global Governance actually made a recommendation that there should be a Charter amendment to permit the Security Council to act if there were humanitarian emergencies. Well, by the time their report was published, not only had those two exceptions taken place but also Rwanda and Haiti and, subsequently, Kosovo, the Balkans, and East Timor. Their recommendation was moot.

While the destruction of cultural heritage certainly is not new, as everybody around this table knows, I think we can apply the adjective new to the possibilities for perhaps reframing this issue for noninternational conflicts. We can take advantage of what I think is a changing political landscape. The question, at the end of the day or the end of tomorrow, will be, is there a way to take advantage of what I think is a propitious moment? Moreover, the destruction of heritage is associated in virtually everyone’s mind with reviled terrorist groups. So it seems to me that the association with high politics gives us leverage that did not exist prior to the global war on terrorism, which draws the ire of UN officials, government officials, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals watching the evening news. I think the advantages of securitization far outweigh the disadvantages. These three bits of good news are the backdrop for trying to contextualize the feasibility of rethinking and finding something new to look at in what Irina Bokova calls “cultural cleansing” and Edward Luck calls “cultural genocide.” Can political, military, and normative entrepreneurs take advantage of this moment?

In closing, I want to revert to R2P, the Responsibility to Protect, for two reasons. The work of the original commission came up with a framework—prevent, react, rebuild—which is exactly the vocabulary—or at least my reading of the vocabulary—that is used by museum curators everywhere to think about protecting cultural heritage. And when prevention fails, which is almost always the case, and sites are attacked and people are attacked, the next question is, how do you react? And almost inevitably, one also has to think about what comes next and pick up the pieces afterward. But I return to the commission for a second reason, which is that my own experience indicates that reframing an issue in a creative way represents a normative advance and also, in this case, a practical value: reports and the volume of research alter the way that states, organizations, and individuals think about, and occasionally actually act on, an issue.