UK must learn from Iraq War failure to protect cultural heritage, leading culture organisations urge
Shortcomings in the UK’s planning and implementation of the 2003 Iraq invasion and occupation led to a fundamental failure to protect Iraq’s cultural property, according to evidence submitted to the Chilcot Inquiry by thirteen major heritage and culture organisations today, including the UK National Commission.
The evidence highlights five main failures in the planning and implementation of the Coalition Forces’ invasion and subsequent occupation, including the relative secrecy of pre-invasion planning and how proceeds from illicit trade in looted antiquities helped fund the insurgency.
The Government is being urged to take immediate action to ensure that such a cultural catastrophe cannot happen again. This should include ratifying as a matter of urgency the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and its two Protocols of 1954 and 1999. The UK is now the most significant military power not to have ratified this convention.
Download the full evidence submitted to the Iraq Inquiry from the sidebar.
The five main failures and lessons highlighted to the Inquiry in the written evidence are:
- The ineffectiveness, relative secrecy, informality and limited scope of the pre-invasion planning for heritage and culture and the failure to plan for the aftermath, despite the vociferous concerns of many national and international heritage bodies
- The extent and impact of looting, fuelling illicit trade in antiquities and the alarming evidence that some of the proceeds of such trade have been used to fund the insurgency
- How the evidence that failure to protect the Iraqi people’s heritage resulted in serious problems for winning ‘hearts and minds’, making the job much harder
- The increasingly clear picture now available of the scale of the damage to sites, museums, libraries and archives and the lessons to be learned about the effect of removing existing administrative structures to manage heritage and culture
- The contrast between the Government’s relatively rapid action to legislate on dealing in illicit antiquity and its ongoing failure 7 years on to ratify the 1954 Hague Convention or put in place all the procedures and training needed to make it work
Summarising the heritage organisations’ key concerns, Harry Reeves OBE, Secretary General of the UK National Commission for UNESCO said:
The lessons from the Iraq war and occupation clearly shows that the UK urgently needs to ratify the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict to ensure the armed forces receive appropriate cultural property awareness training in preparation for any future deployments.”
The evidence was jointly submitted by the UK National Commission for UNESCO, British Academy, British Institute for the Study of Iraq, Council for British Archaeology, European Association of Archaeologists, Institute for Archaeologists, International Council on Monuments and Sites UK, International Council of Museums UK, Museums Association, National Trust, Nautical Archaeology Society, Society of Antiquaries of London and the UK & Ireland Committee of the Blue Shield.
Written: 17/02/2010 , last modified: 17/02/2010
