Reading #2 Week 2 February 08 2017 Suter's Protecting the World's Cultural Heritage

• Protecting the World's Cultural Heritage by Keith Suter
• 2003, the United States, Britain, and Australia invaded Iraq
• Iraq, 1 of the most significant places for archaeology, some sites and artifacts go back 10k years
• Looting cultural property is a way of 'attacking' the enemy population by destroying their institutional memory
• This destruction not only robs a country of its own heritage but it also destroys the capacity of everyone else much later on to get to know about that past. It is gone forever.
• Another motivation for vandalism is a religious desire to destroy artworks of a different religious persuasion. The most common form of religious-based vandalism now comes from the rise of some Islamic fundamentalists. They are trying to eradicate the pre-Islamic history of their countries 
• The giant stone Buddhas had been carved into the rock for about 1700 years
• If fundamentalist Muslims ever took power in Egypt they would probably destroy the antique collections of items relating to the Pharoahs 
• In contrast to their strategy in the first Gulf War, American war planners had been careful not to attack Iraqi infrastructure
• The Americans evidently expected that at the final stages of the attack, embittered Iraqis would loot the symbols of the old regime, such as Hussein's palaces. But the military planners did not think that the looters would in face go after practically every other public building in Baghdad as well. At least 32,000 items of antiquity are known to have been pillaged from the National Museum in Baghdad and the country's approximately 12,000 archaeological sites
• Ironically, this lack of attention can be contrasted with the amount of effort that went into looking for the alleged weapons of mass destruction. In the end no weapons were found. Meanwhile the culturally significant items disappeared. 
• Much of the archaeological work is on Iraq's pre-Islamic past and so some Islamic fundamentalists would not approve of this work
• The Roerich Pact required governments to treat historic monuments as "neutral" in wartime and so not to be targeted; each such building to be given a distinctive flag; and the buildings not to be used for military purposes by their own governments