ancient artisans, craftsmen and scribes – not to mention the efforts of Yemeni and foreign researchers who have dedicated years of their lives to studying and preserving this legacy – were pulverised,” she stated.
The amount of destruction of cultural monuments and artifacts in recent times is widespread. In 2001, the Taliban blew up two 1,700-year-old statues of Buddha carved into a cliff in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan valley. Both were the tallest statues of Buddha in the world.
In 2012, Islamists destroyed at least half of roughly 600-year-old shrines in the city of Timbuktu, in Mali, a UN World Heritage Site, before an international force pushed the militants out. Isis is also responsible for the destruction of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, in Northern Iraq. As they did in other cities it destroyed, ISIS profits from the sale of antiquities.
In 2015, Isis destroyed the city of Hatra, an Iraqi city-state from the Roman era, also a UN World Heritage site. “The destruction of Hatra marks a turning point in the appalling strategy of cultural cleansing underway in Iraq, said Irina Bokova, Unesco’s Director-General.
Although fundamentalists are to a large extent responsible for the destruction of important monuments and sale of many artefacts, one shouldn’t forget the role that the US-led war in Iraq had in the destruction and looting of important ancient cultural pieces of art. Iraq’s occupying forces allowed Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad to be looted without any effort to protect those valuable artefacts.
According to Ihsan Fethi, an Iraqi architect who was Chairman of the School of Architecture in Baghdad (1986-1991) and member of the Supreme Committee of Cultural Heritage of Iraq, some of former president Bush’s advisers resigned because the US and other invading countries didn’t do anything to protect Iraq’s historical sites. Fethi estimates in 35,000 the number of small and large items missing from the National Museum of Iraq. Only a small amount of those artefacts have been returned to Iraq.
Although those mentioned are just a few examples, they show the tremendous damage to culture by hatred and intolerance. Of the 1,007 known World Heritage sites, 48 are now in danger of being destroyed. Unless all countries agree on a policy of respect for ancient sites and cultural artefacts, wars not only will devastate and destroy people’s lives, but they will also destroy the culture that is part of its past and allows people to develop and flourish.
This article has been excerpted from: ‘Cultural treasures are also victims of war’.
Courtesy: Counterpunch.org