Research

Protecting Cultural Heritage during Wartime: Learning the Lessons of Iraq

In response to the disastrous looting of the Iraq Museum in April 2003 and the ongoing damage to Mesopotamian archaeological sites, the Cultural Policy Center has undertaken a multi-year initiative to explore policies and legal regimes that will better prevent the pillaging of priceless artifacts and the destruction of historic and archaeological sites in the aftermath of armed conflict. Under the leadership of Faculty Director Larry Rothfield, a team of experts is developing a set of policy recommendations that aims to improve how governments, NGOs, foundations, and professional organizations of archaeologists and cultural leaders do their individual work and cooperate with each other.

The problem of looting antiquities is not limited to wartime situations. In peacetime, this problem is addressed by crafting and enforcing laws and regulations directed at suppliers, distributors, and purchasers of illegally obtained antiquities. During wartime, however, laws and regulations do not suffice. This project focuses on how, in the absence of positive laws, civil authority, and policy powers . but in the presence of armed forces . looting can be prevented.

Our study of the pre-war efforts to avert the post-combat looting of sites in Iraq has revealed many failures of policy: by post-war planners, national and international government agencies, NGOs and cultural heritage protection advocates. We have invited specialists from these fields to the table with scholars from the University of Chicago and elsewhere to evaluate new mechanisms capable of succeeding.

Project milestones:

• February 3, 2006. The Center held Protecting Cultural Heritage: International Law after the War in Iraq, a public conference in partnership with the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute and Law School.

  Panelists examined existing and proposed international legal conventions meant to prevent the looting and destruction of cultural heritage during armed conflict and occupation. While the Iraqi situation might have been improved if combatants on both sides had upheld their legal responsibilities under the Hague Convention, the events of 2003 exposed the serious shortcomings of a legal document aimed at dealing with twentieth-century warfare. Panelists considered the legal status of the 1954 Hague Convention, its applicability to the events in Iraq, and proposals for a new protocol to the Hague Convention that will address the problems that arose in Iraq.

• August 11-13, 2006. The Center hosted “Preventing Looting of Cultural Heritage during Wartime: Learning the Lessons if Iraq” at the Pocantico Conference Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

  This meeting signaled an important step forward for cultural heritage protection, convening a trans-disciplinary group of experts to assess the problems that developed as a result of shortcomings of cultural policy on an international and national level, as well as failures in U.S. postwar planning.

  It brought together representatives from archaeological associations, the museum world, preservation advocacy groups, national antiquities agencies, U.S. Defense and State Departments and the uniformed military, UNESCO and NATO. Participants addressed the issue of how to reinforce the legal framework for protecting cultural heritage, and then explored how to better protect antiquities and art objects by acknowledging and working with new methods of warfare and occupation, sharing cultural resources management techniques among nations, building relationships between the military and experts in the arts and humanities, and exploring the interaction between warfare and the international art market. The group concluding this working conference by assembling a set of recommendations policymakers, serving as a foundation for a future publication.

• April 2008. Publication of Antiquities under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection after the Iraq War by AltaMira Press.

  April 9, 2008. Policy briefing on the findings from Antiquities under Siege at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

NEXT STEPS:

Upcoming activities include a series of gatherings to address related cultural heritage protection issues, including the trafficking of illicit antiquities, the ethics of collecting, and restitution of art and artifacts across national borders.

Contact Wendy Norris to learn more about this project: wnorris@uchicago.edu, 773.834.3495.