Threats to Heritage and the Place-People Connection
Threats to heritage sites spark international uproar, but our outrage has to be on the right grounds. We can’t advocate solely for a nation’s treasured places while its people face the same fate.
Image by Mostafa Meraji, via Unsplash.
Originally written and published 13 January 2020 for Strand Magazine.
Early this year, a certain Twitter-savvy president took to the internet to threaten an attack on 52 Iranian cultural sites attempting to curb Tehran’s retaliation to the assassination of Qassim Soleimani, general of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Trump’s ultimatum instigated uproar within the international community both on and offline, with good reason. The president’s expressions of bigotry and ignorance on social media are evidently one of the many unnerving characteristics that the public has had to put up with during his tumultuous term. He behaved, as usual, as a bully, and was called out for his hypocrisy in a speech made on behalf of Foreign Minister Javad Zarid to the United Nations Security Council on the Thursday following the assassination. As quick to threaten as he is to condemn, the same president that claims iron-fisted intolerance to acts of terror has now threatened to inflict them against Iranian cultural sites in the same breath – or rather, in the same Twitter feed.
It seems as though the definition of terror has somehow been regionalised. It reflects Western heroes fighting Eastern enemies who threaten the peace and security of the civilised world. But terrorism is terrorism even when the threat comes from be a white perpetrator in a white house. The irony of widespread xenophobia on the basis of terrorism, a fear that has arguably been fuelled by the Trump campaign, is that the same leader who vilifies minority groups as militant is willing to embody the archetype of the destructive tyrant just the same. His threats to destroy cultural heritage and the demolition of Palmyra by ISIS are ideologically one and the same.
It’s interesting to consider why cultural heritage is repeatedly targeted in times of conflict. There is a certain quality possessed by these sites, monuments and objects that make them sacred, even if they are not religious. They hold power in what, and whom they represent; they mark collective memories, shared histories, emotional attachments, and fundamental identities, not only of individual people but of entire cultural, ethnic and religious groups. In symbolising countless generations straddling centuries and far-flung borders, the influence of cultural heritage is so vast it is immeasurable; not to mention protected under a unanimous 2017 United Nations resolution against its destruction.
If cultural heritage is powerful because it is symbolic, attacking it is equally suggestive. Acts of terror against heritage sites are carried out with an intention to do much more than destroy a site in a literal sense, although needless to say this would be a great shame and a war crime under the 1954 Hague Convention in itself. They represent acts of violence against entire groups of people, threats to shatter the identity, memory, community and sense of place that heritage can provide.
Image by Mostafa Meraji, via Unsplash.
Dialogue surrounding heritage and conflict is not one that need be reserved for big men with big weapons, nor solely a community of archaeologically-engaged academics. Threats to and attacks on cultural sites can and should resonate with each and every one of us; at least, amongst those who share in an appreciation for cultural heritage as an expression of human creativity and sentimentality, of which we are all capable. Working and advocating to preserve these sites nods at the notions of collective responsibility and unity, diverse peoples bound together by our shared perception of the values of beauty, community, faith, and craft.
But it is simply not enough to recognise that heritage sites and all they stand to represent are worth protection and advocacy. Our outcries against violence must be taken one step further, because it is simply absurd to oppose the harm of a nation’s treasured places while its largely innocent people face the same fate. Here lies a moral and logical inconsistency within the collective psyche. We are so dumbfounded by material beauty that we seldom make the connection between the arts and architecture we admire and the people to which they are inextricably connected, whose safety is under even greater threat.
Image by Faruk Kaymak, via Unsplash.
I will be the first to justify the importance of tangible heritage, but not without underscoring that its human correspondents must be defended with the same gusto. We cannot prioritise the inanimate world before humankind. If the international community is to be outraged in the face of terrorism, it cannot just be on the basis that in the face violent destruction the world would lose some stunning architecture and historical legacy. It must address and refuse to stand for the defacing of people as much as place.
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