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Unesco needs US support to protect heritage

For years, Unesco's outgoing director general, Irina Bokova, has sounded the alarm.

On October 12, the United States announced it would withdraw from Unesco, the cultural and educational arm of the United Nations, because of what it calls the organisation's anti-Israel bias.
Unesco's largely symbolic presence in the Palestinian territories - including the designation of the Old City of Hebron as a World Heritage site - makes up a tiny part of a global mandate covering 195 member states and 10 associate members and will not be affected by the absence of the US.
With its misguided decision, the United States is forfeiting its leadership in a cause on which Unesco and its partners in the US, Europe and beyond are finally making progress: protecting art, sacred buildings and other historic treasures from deliberate attacks during armed conflict.
From the smashing of mud-brick shrines in Timbuktu to the burning of Rohingya villages in Myanmar, assaults on cultural heritage have become a depressingly common feature of contemporary conflict. Even amid its rapid retreat in Iraq and Syria, Daesh has continued its destruction. In June, with international forces closing in on Mosul, the group blew up the 12th-century Great Mosque of Al Nuri and its extraordinary minaret, whose leaning, "humpback" silhouette has for centuries defined the city's skyline.
For years, Unesco's outgoing director general, Irina Bokova, has sounded the alarm, noting that the attacks are part of campaigns to wipe out entire communities. Bokova wrote in 2012 that "we must start seeing cultural heritage as an international security issue."
In early 2015, Daesh showed how real a threat this was in its on-camera rampage through the Mosul Museum and defacement of the colossal Winged Bull of Nineveh. Yet the world stood by months later, when the group occupied the ancient site of Palmyra, blew up its extraordinary temples and decapitated Khaled Al Asaad, the 84-year-old Syrian archaeologist who devoted his career to the site.
Unesco bore some of the blame. By loudly condemning such attacks, the organisation gave publicity to would-be destroyers even as it lacked authority to stop them. In the final years of the Obama administration, US officials began to embrace Unesco's call to action. In 2014, John Kerry, then the secretary of state, warned that Daesh's campaign against culture was "purposeful" and directly connected to attacks on populations.
Meanwhile, the government-administered Smithsonian Institution, working with groups in the US and the Middle East, began giving emergency training and technical support to Iraqi and Syrian preservationists. This has been crucial to the successful protection of sites and museums in northern Syria, among other places.
And in May 2016, President Barack Obama enacted bipartisan legislation to protect international heritage "at risk due to political instability, armed conflict, or natural or other disasters" - establishing for the first time a body within the executive branch to address the threat.
The American efforts coincided with bold new thinking in the international community. In 2016, recognising that cultural destruction was directly related to ethnic cleansing, the International Committee of the Red Cross entered an agreement with Unesco, in which it pledged to help evacuate cultural objects "at imminent risk." While the accord has not yet been tested in practice, it is significant because the ICRC is often on the ground on both sides of a conflict and has unparalleled access to sites.
With Unesco's support, France and the UAE established a $75 million fund to provide "safe havens" and other forms of protection for objects and monuments under threat of attack. The American investor and philanthropist Thomas Kaplan, who has given $1 million, is chairman of the fund.
Finally, in March, pushed by Unesco and the governments of France and Italy, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution explicitly linking attacks on cultural heritage to terrorism and calling on member states to provide one another with "all necessary assistance" to prevent those attacks.
The movement to integrate cultural heritage into security policy has quickly gained support from several European governments and leading international institutions. In a landmark August 2016 decision against an extremist in Timbuktu, the International Criminal Court ruled the destruction of cultural heritage a war crime.
The European Union has formally incorporated the protection of cultural heritage in the mandates of 15 EU military and civilian missions around the world. And for the first time, the United Nations is including the protection of sites and monuments in an official mandate for armed peacekeepers in Mali.
The international community has a woeful record of protecting art and monuments in conflict zones. To truly make a difference, the recent breakthroughs will require robust cooperation among Unesco, the Security Council, regional governments, international peacekeepers, NGOs and above all local activists on the ground.
But if the United States, whose military has greater reach than that of any other country, turns its back on these efforts, the chances of success will be slim. And we may find ourselves watching another Palmyra reduced to rubble.
Hugh Eakin, a fellow at the New York Public Library's Culman Center, is working on a book about modern art in the World War II era
- NYT Syndicate