Vlasic, M. V., & Turku, H. (2016).

Protecting cultural heritage as a means for international

peace, security and stability: The case of ISIS, Syria and Iraq. Vand. J. Transnat'l L., 49, 1371.

 Holding perpetrators who damage cultural property accountable as a means to peacebuilding.

 The protection of cultural property in war zones should be an element in the whole strategy
for bringing peace, stability and security to the region.
 Creating a private-public initiative to fight the trafficking of stolen antiquities from
conflict zones.
 ISIS – gets its funding from oil and looting antiquities – the profits from the trafficking of
antiquities are considerably smaller than oil revenues, but it is a lucrative trade because few
resources are needed for a high margin return.
 ISIS’ twofold strategy:
o Destroying large monuments, sculptures, temples that it cannot sell on the black
market due to their size for propaganda purposes.
o Actively plundering smaller/midsize objects.
 Protecting cultural property as a means for international peace and security
o Cultural property as “one of the basic elements of civilisation”; it is important to
the dignity and identity of people.
o Archaeological knowledge plays a role in legitimising or delegitimising interests,
particularly in contexts where states seek to establish sovereign ty and build
nationhood.
o Cultural property has scholarly value, as it tells us who we are and where we come
from.
 There are grounds to believe that the protection of cultural property is linked with
international peace, stability and security.
o Such that the protection of cultural heritage becomes a part of a platform for fighting
terrorism and bringing about peace.
 UN resolutions.
o Resolution 2199 in February 2015 by the Security Council – condemned all trade
with al-Qaeda associated groups and called for all member states to take appropriate
steps to prevent the trade in Iraqi and Syrian cultural property and other items of
archaeological, historical, cultural, rare scientific, and religious importance illegally
removed from Iraq since 6 August 1990 and from Syria since 15 March 2011.
o In May 2015, UN General Assembly resolved that those involved in cultural
cleansing in Iraq could be committing war crimes.
o Latest UN resolution, Resolution 2249, addressed antiquities trafficking – stating that
the eradication of cultural heritage and trafficking of cultural property constitutes a
global and unprecedented threat to international peace and security – basically an
explicit condemnation of the actions of ISIS etc.
 The protection of stolen antiquities may help to rebuild functioning states in Iraq and Syria/.
o Scholarship that suggests that history can be used to create unity within a state.
o Syria and Iraq needing to create a platform for national reconciliation and nation-
building that transcends religious and ethnic divides.
 Historical narratives and nation building.
o The goal of nation building should not be to impose common identities in deeply
divided peoples but to organise states that can administer their territories and allow
people to live together despite differences.
 o The state is not successful through the use of force, but rather through the shared
perception that the state possesses a principled basis for its rule.
 Constructivism – the creation of national identity is possible because it is a cultural artefact of
a particular kind.
o National identity as an “imagined political community – and imagined as both
inherently limited and sovereign."
o Although it is an extremely powerful force, national identity is an abstract discourse
because, even in the smallest nation, members will never meet their fellow
countrymen, yet everyone in that nation envisions an image of togetherness.”
o Necessary to bring about the existence of a state; but also necessary to bring
members of its society together regardless of their language, faith, ethnicity, and
gender.
 Symbols
o Signifying and identifying a group of people as a nation can trigger strong emotional
responses and serve as signifiers of a group’s cohesiveness.
 Necessary for historical narration about the nation and its importance.
 National symbols are conceptual representations of group membership. They
are necessary for historical narration about the nation and its importance.
 Storytelling through symbols, artefacts, historical sites, buildings,
monuments, sculptures, and paintings, which create a narrative that is both
easy to digest and easily transmittable within a group, are necessary for the
very possibility of a national identity.
 Shared memories
o Without memory, there is no identity, without identity, there is no nation.
o Linking oneself with remote ancestors and earlier cultures in the homeland in a
relatively unbroken line of succession is one of the essential ingredients for unity.
 Cultural property, therefore, creates a backdrop where a nation can synthesise its
worldview.
o Post-conflict Syria and Iraq will have to rediscover shared memories of the past in
order to rebuild a peaceful nation.
o Merryman – cultural property as being put to a variety of political uses in a variety of
political contexts – ethnic, regional, and national.
o E.g.: National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City – extraordinary sophisticated
and effective use of cultural property to instil a sense of national identity and national
pride.
o Mexico, like other ethnically diverse states, has encountered a shit tonne of issues
regarding nation building because different groups identity with their own reginal
ethnic identity rather than the larger Mexican nation.
 National reconciliation and peacebuilding are highly complex, multifaceted processes.
o Preservation of history is one element that can facilitate the process.
o Identity is articulated through collective understanding of what unites a group of
people.
 Protecting heritage is an important part of all peacebuilding efforts.
o Preservation of historical sites and artifacts, which create a narrative of a rich past, is
an important element of national reconciliation.
o “Culture is essential to the renewal of society” = Thomas Cambell, Director of The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
 Example: Destruction of the burial place of the prophet Younis/Jonah (of whale fame) in
Mosul, Iraq.
 o The mosque was built on an archaeological site dating back to the eighth century BC
and is mentioned in the Hebrew and Christian Bible and the Qur’an.
o ISIS militants destroyed the mosque because to them, it had “become a place for
apostasy, not prayer”.
o But the tomb of Jonah was not just another sacred place in Mosul for Jews,
Christians and Muslims; to many, it was a symbol of tolerance and a powerful
reminder of the values and traditions all religions shared.
o The extremists probably perceived this symbol of tolerance as a threat.
 By stripping these societies of their art and proud past, terrorist and criminal organizations are
attempting to pave the way for the creation of quasi-states that are intolerant of many shared
values, including cultural diversity.