Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities

Intentional destruction of cultural heritage has a long history. Contemporary examples include the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, mosques in Xinjiang, China, mausoleums in Timbuktu, Mali, and Greco-Roman remains in Syria. Cultural heritage destruction invariably accompanies assaults on civilians, making heritage attacks impossible to disentangle from the mass atrocities of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. Both seek to eliminate people and the heritage with which they identify. Abstract: In January 2020, then US president Donald Trump threatened to attack cultural sites among fifty-two targets if Iran retaliated for the targeted killing of Iranian commander General Qassim Suleimani, one of its top generals. Trump said that the United States had identified the targets as being “at a very high level and important to Iran and the Iranian culture.” The statement led to a worldwide outcry, with UN, UNESCO, and US officials pointing out that Washington had signed the 1954 convention protecting cultural property in the event of armed conflict. Targeting cultural heritage has a long history, with recent examples including the Mostar Bridge in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, mausoleums in Timbuktu, Mali, and Greco-Roman remains in Palmyra, Syria. This introduction asks, What if Raphael Lemkin’s draft of the 1948 Genocide Convention had left intact its original proposal to include cultural as well as human genocide? It discusses the “value” of cultural heritage, why it is often targeted, the humanitarian consequences of such and virtually impossible to disentangle. Both seek in the end to eliminate a people and the cultural heritage with which they identify. Abstract: What is the realm “the West”? What does it mean to identify with “Western culture”? In excerpts from his book The Lies That Bind , Kwame Anthony Appiah demonstrates how the notion of Western identity has formed the basis of hierarchies, status, and structures of power. The idea of Western culture represents a modern construction, a grand “Plato-to-NATO” narrative arc with its precursors in concepts of Christendom and Europe. Although this volume focuses on the protection of immovable cultural heritage, Appiah reminds us that all cultural practices and objects must be regarded as mobile, mutable, infinitely complex, and ultimately resistant to ownership by any single group. Abstract: This essay argues that cultural heritage is as much about narrative as materiality: it is often the physical manifestation of identity politics. The buildings, monuments, and statues that matter most to the general population, and to political leaders, are not those that tell us what people did long ago, but those that embody the narrative of Abstract: This chapter explores the history of the intentional destruction of cultural heritage from ancient times to the present. It analyzes the political, religious, social, ethnic, and other conditions and motivations that feed the obliteration of cultural artifacts and cultural heritage. Of particular interest are the links to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other atrocities perpetrated against civilian populations. These connections are explored in cases from antiquity to the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy, the iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformation, the European colonial age, the French and Russian Revolutions, and the Nazi era, when the systematized obliteration of culture and humanity reached new levels. Next, the crimes of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the ethnic and cultural cleansings of the Balkan Wars are highlighted. Finally, another dimension of ruthlessness is reached with the annihilation of cultural heritage and humanity that the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) exploited for propaganda purposes before the eyes of a global audience. Abstract: Late antiquity provides a case study for heritage destruction and atrocities. This historical period follows that of antiquity, in which there had been dramatic examples of both, including the leveling of ancient Corinth and the killing of eighty thousand people in one day in Anatolia. Yet after the destruction of Jerusalem there was not much more horror of this kind in the Roman Empire, despite a few instances of fanaticism (such as the murder of Hypatia). We have to ask what caused this conspicuous change? What provoked such violence as it actually occurred? The plague in the third and sixth centuries CE diminished destruction and atrocity, whereas religion, principally Christianity, caused outbreaks of both. The written heritage of the Muslim world constitutes a vast cultural heritage beyond reckoning, with much of the written culture of the Islamic world still today preserved in manuscript ways—improper Abstract: Societies and individuals are attached to their cultural heritage, which helps define their identity and contributes to their self-esteem. The purposeful actions of nonstate armed groups, militias, despotic governments, or invading armies in attacking tangible and intangible cultural heritage inflict losses that far exceed their physical destruction. Such actions are akin to cultural and social genocide. An effort to quantify the economic value of cultural heritage becomes instructive for appreciating the enormous cost of its destruction. We have techniques well suited to capture both use and nonuse values as well as tangible and intangible values. This will help us to grasp the importance of our cultural heritage, which strengthens our self-confidence and pride, for those with strong and living links to their past are in the best position to design their future. Abstract: Over the past few years, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) has been transformed into a high-security police state, with an estimated 1.8 million Turkic Muslim citizens incarcerated and subjected to abusive regimes of indoctrination and forced labor. China explains its actions as a necessary response to extremist terror, while international observers and governments have designated its policies as genocide. However, China’s approach to heritage in this region is fully subsumed within the state’s political and economic goals. Uyghur religious heritage—mosques, cemeteries, and shrines—has been demolished: places whose principal value lies in the complex of historical meanings, forms of community, and religious and cultural expression that surround them. Their destruction represents a fundamental attack on Uyghur culture and identity, and is integral to a push to assimilate and pacify the region in pursuit of the economic and strategic goals of the Belt and Road Initiative. Abstract: Cultural reconstruction in the “post-conflict” period in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan has taken disturbing shape in regions dominated by religious or ethnic minorities. In Sri Lanka this is explored in relation to the northern Jaffna Peninsula, which is home to most of the country’s Hindu Tamils; in Afghanistan, the Bamiyan Valley, where the Hazara Shia minority lives. Here, the very processes of reconstruction and heritage conservation meant to repair a society become instruments through which one side continues its domination over the other. In Sri Lanka, a majoritarian government uses all the tools at its disposal to effect a “recovery” of heritage that underlines the disempowerment of the Tamil minority; and in Afghanistan the international organizations that have come to assist in the aftermath of the Taliban era unwittingly contribute to a subtler power play between the central government and an ethnic minority that has long been at the margins of Afghan life. Abstract: The rise of Da’esh (ISIS) and its expansion across Syria and Iraq were characterized by well-publicized attacks on both religious groups and cultural heritage, disseminated through a dangerous new paradigm of “performative destruction.” The performative destruction of monuments and sites was a carefully choreographed, Internet-propagated, public strategy of cultural genocide combined with acts of physical genocide. Da’esh’s war on people and things was effective because it was embedded in an integrated system combining religious ideology, a political agenda, and extreme violence, amplified and intensified through the violence Abstract: Syrian cities and sites suffered devastating destruction during the ten-years’ war of 2011–20. The worst situation was found in Aleppo, a city all but destroyed during the conflict Abstract: Behind every creation there is an underlying meaning that led to its existence. Hence the physical destruction of buildings accompanies the invisible destruction of their meanings. This chapter addresses those meanings, which tend to be overlooked in the processes of restoration and preservation, arguing that the answer to the question of how to preserve sites and built heritage inevitably relates to what is preserved and why. This is surely a question of values, a matter that could easily be oversimplified (into purely the issue of religious identity) or overcomplicated (into a debate around historical significance). This chapter seeks to find common ground in understanding the value of heritage through an examination of the case of Homs, the third-largest city in Syria and the capital of its central province, which sustained enormous damage during the Syrian Civil War. By revisiting the historical genesis of this city in relation to its geography, typology, and cultural and religious values, the process of its rebuilding and the preservation of its endangered heritage may have a chance in an otherwise dim future. Abstract: How will reconstruction unfold in Syria, given the staggering scale of destruction from its long civil war and the limited resources and narrow, authoritarian interests of President Bashar al-Assad’s government? A few token rebuilding projects already underway in Aleppo, Homs, and Damascus provide an initial an