How does heritage get endangered in times of war and conflict?

Illustrate with one

example ..

An often neglected but fundamentally important victim of conflict is the physical

manifestations of a community, a people, a nation—their heritage. The cultural
heritage of France and Belgium was utterly devastated during World War I,
epitomized by the burning of the medieval library at Leuven and destruction of the
cathedral of Rheims. A century later conflicts in states such as Iraq, Afghanistan and
Syria continue to be characterized by the destruction of cultural heritage. So how far
have we come in protecting cultural heritage from the devastating effects of war?
Over the past century, surprisingly far, and at the same time not quite far enough.
International law to protect cultural heritage has developed reactively, responding to
conflict and destruction after the fact in the hope that it will not be repeated. An
understanding of this law, its strengths and its shortcomings, requires its
contextualization within the conflicts of the past century.

When simmering tensions exploded into war in 1914, there were already some laws
in place to protect cultural heritage. In 1899, at the initiative of Czar Nicholas II of
Russia, the First Hague Peace Conference adopted a set of laws, updated in 1907,
to create a regime that would regulate the conduct of war and hopefully encourage
“lasting peace.” Inspired by the Liber Code drafted during the American Civil War to
protect the heritage of the United States, and mindful of the destruction that befell
Strasbourg and Paris during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871, the Convention
Concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land provided some rudimentary
forms of protection for cultural heritage. This included prohibiting seizure, destruction
and willful damage to institutions dedicated to education and the arts and sciences,
as well as historic monuments and works of art themselves. Plunder in occupied
territory was expressly forbidden, as was the confiscation of private property. Most
important, states were required to take steps to avoid destroying museums, hospitals
and historic monuments during sieges and bombardments as long as they were not
being used for “military purposes.” This reflected a view that the law ought to reflect
the realities of war and ought not to unduly restrict the military in the ultimate
achievement of its objective. This concept of a military necessity exception to any
rule that attempted to protect cultural heritage continues to bedevil the protection of
cultural heritage during armed conflicts.

These rules proved inadequate to protect heritage during World War I. Not only was
cultural heritage often used for military purposes, but the doctrine of military
necessity justified the destruction and damage of numerous sites throughout Europe,
including the library of Leuven and the cathedral at Rheims, as well as the 13th
century church of St. Gervais, Whitby Abbey and the old royal palace in Belgrade.
Nevertheless, the general principle that cultural heritage ought to receive protection
appears to have been accepted by all belligerents, many of which took steps to avoid
unnecessary destruction. That heritage was not free to be destroyed or plundered
was reflected in the Treaty of Versailles, which required the restitution of identified
cultural heritage back to the territory from which it came and restitution in kind, in the
case of the library of Leuven, for cultural objects that were destroyed.
The 20 years after World War I saw a number of attempts to draft laws that would
prevent the kind of destruction that was wrought during the war. The 1923 draft
Hague Rules Concerning the Control of Wireless Telegraphy in Times of War and Air
Warfare; the 1935 American Treaty on the Protection of Artistic and Scientific
Institutions and Historic Monuments, known as the Roerich Pact; and the 1938
Preliminary Draft International Convention for the Protection of Historic Buildings and
Works of Art in Times of War had all made some limited progress at the time of the
outbreak of international hostilities in 1939.

Nevertheless, World War II visited more destruction on the world’s cultural heritage
than any other war. Aerial bombardment in particular caused extensive and
indiscriminate damage. While a number of historic English cities (including Exeter,
Bath, Norwich, York and Canterbury) suffered extensive damage in the Baedeker
raids, the historic cities of Germany (such as Lubeck, Cologne, Wurzburg and
Hamburg) and many in Japan (such as Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama and Kobe) were
almost obliterated. The Allied view was that while targets were to be limited only to
those whose destruction offered a distinct military advantage, any collateral damage
caused during the targeting of a military objective was necessary and lawful. The
principle of military necessity effectively justified any damage to cultural heritage,
except that which offered no distinct military advantage. On the ground this resulted
in the almost complete destruction of the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino and
much of the historic quarter of Florence.

The lack of any distinct military advantage did, however, save a number of cities
from bombing, or at least from extensive damage to their cultural heritage. Paris was
spared and Rome, while subjected to some bombing, was largely exempt from
attack given its limited strategic position. Reflecting this sentiment, Gen. Dwight
Eisenhower, in an order to all commanders in Italy, commented that, “Today we are
fighting in a country which has contributed a great deal to our cultural inheritance, a
country rich in monuments which by their creation helped and now in their old age
illustrate the growth of the civilization which is ours. We are bound to respect those
monuments so far as war allows”.

While the built heritage of Europe was extensively damaged or destroyed from
shelling and bombing, the movable cultural heritage was subject to widespread
plunder, looting and destruction, particularly in occupied territories.

With the Allied advance into mainland Europe through Italy in 1943, the U.S.
established the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and
Historic Monuments in Europe to coordinate protection of works of cultural value in
areas occupied by Allied forces. A special branch, recently depicted in George
Clooney’s film “The Monuments Men,” was formed with officers trained to assist in
identifying and preserving cultural heritage. These branches provided information to
commanders about cultural heritage sites within the war zones, and they often had
the difficult job of balancing the desire to protect such sites with the military’s views
on the necessity of possible destruction. The defeat of Germany did not put an end
to the looting of cultural heritage. Russian forces systematically looted those parts of
Germany under their control following a policy of reparation for German
appropriations.
The destruction of cultural heritage during World War II shattered any illusion that
existing international law provided any effective protection.

The wholesale destruction, pillage, plunder and looting of cultural heritage during
World War II galvanized international action to create an international regime that
would protect cultural heritage during armed conflicts. Under the auspices of the
newly created United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Heritage during Armed
Conflicts was adopted in 1954. The convention sought to supplement the postwar
Geneva Conventions by providing a comprehensive protection regime that would not
only address rights and duties of states relating to cultural property during an armed
conflict, but also prior to and following such a conflict. This required the balancing of
the interests of the military on the one hand and the protection of cultural property on
the other. To ensure that the convention would be acceptable to states with a large
and potentially active military, the drafters sought to produce a realistic convention
rather than an ideal one in the belief that “modest, but enforceable provisions would
better serve the cause of saving monuments” than a convention that sought “an ideal
of unlimited protection.”

A core conventional obligation requires each state to protect its own cultural
property, in times of both peace and war, by refraining from using that property and
its immediate surroundings for purposes that are likely to expose it to destruction or
damage in the event of armed conflict. An infamous breach of this obligation was the
placement of Iraqi fighter planes near the archaeological site of the Temple of Ur
during the Persian Gulf War. The corollary core obligation is to respect other states’
cultural property by not making that property the target of attack or using that
property for military purposes. This obligation extends to cultural property in the
opposing states’ territory, such that the U.S. ought not, for example, to have
established a military base on the archaeological site of the ancient city of Babylon
during the Iraq War.

Following the destruction of cultural property during the conflicts in Iran, Iraq, Kuwait
and the former Yugoslavia, it became evident that the convention, together with the
1949 Geneva Conventions and its Additional Protocols, did not provide a sufficiently
rigorous and broadly acceptable protection regime for cultural heritage. A key
concern was the failure to define “military necessity” in the convention given its
importance as an overriding concept. A protocol to the convention was adopted in
1999, addressing a range of matters covered in the convention in a way that seeks
to add clarity and specificity without fundamentally changing the conventional
regime. This has been met with limited success, given that only 67 of the 126 states
party to the convention have ratified the protocol.

Ratification is, of course, a necessary prerequisite for the application of the

convention. It is noteworthy then that the U.S. only became a party to the convention
in 2009, and the U.K. is yet to join. Arguably some aspects of the international law
are applicable as customary international law, but far too many states have not yet
bound themselves to these international conventional obligations.

Perhaps the most notable recent development in the law protecting cultural heritage
has evolved in the jurisprudence of the International Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia. The conflict resulted in extensive damage and destruction to a great
many old churches and mosques and to medieval sites in Vukovar, including the
18th-century Eltz Castle, as well as to the Oriental Institute and National and
University Library in Sarajevo.

States do protect cultural heritage. The indiscriminate bombing and shelling so

prevalent during the world wars has been eliminated, pillage and plunder radically
reduced and criminal responsibility enhanced. And yet cultural heritage continues to
suffer. This is only in small part as a result of military necessity. In large part it results
from motivations that law cannot address: the very motivations for conflict itself.