Governing the souls and community: why do Islamists destroy world heritage sites?

Abstract

From Bamiyan to Timbuktu and Palmyra, Islamic fundamentalist groups have willfully destroyed cultural edifices which were listed as world heritage sites. Yet, beyond the criminal acts and their shock value, this article argues that attacks on cultural and religious sites may be viewed as actions embedded in a political project of gouvernement. In this regard, spectacular destruction of cultural heritage may not be simply a signal sent to the international community, but rather an action embedded in a broader political project of governing territory and its inhabitants, aimed at building a new political community based on a new ethos that includes the control of the economy of cultural heritage sites. This article uses the destruction of cultural heritage sites in Timbuktu in 2012 to show the ways in which they fit within the political project of the Ansar Dine jihadist group. Furthermore, the Islamic State’s attacks on cultural sites in Syria and Iraq are also analyzed in light of a political project to govern the territory and communities. The broader implications of this study include the need to pay closer attention to perpetrators’ claims and justifications and to take them seriously, by both international justice scholarship and policy circles. Doing so does not absolve the crimes or mitigate their gravity, but rather allows for better approaches to identify, protect or rebuild cultural heritage in conflict settings.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For legal analyses of the Al Mahdi case and its implications for international justice, see Casaly (2016); Schabas (2017); de Hoon (2016); Badar and Higgins (2017); Sterio (2017); Capone (2018).

2 International courts such as the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) have previously convicted perpetrators of the war crimes of destruction of cultural property. In all those instances however, the charges of destruction of cultural property were included within a broader set of charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. For instance, Alfred Rosenberg was also charged and found guilty by the IMT of crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity (see International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg), Judgment of 1 October 1946, p. 115). In the aftermath of the Balkan Wars, Miodrag Jokić was also found guilty of the war crimes against cultural property, and crimes of unlawful attack on civilians, murder, and cruel treatment (see Judgement in the Case the Prosecutor v. Miodrag Jokic https://www.icty.org/en/sid/8448). Similarly, Pavle Strugar was also charged and found guilty of crimes against persons (murder, cruel treatment, attacks on civilians), and crimes against cultural property (see ICTY, Prosecutor v. Pavle Strugar, Judgment, 31 January 2005, Case No IT-01-42-T, 108-150).

3 By economy, I mean here gestion (in the French meaning), the ways in which meanings and values of these artifacts are administered.

4 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict with Regulations for the Execution of the Convention 1954, adopted 14 May 1954, UNESCO, art. 1(a) (entered into force 7 Aug. 1956).

5 Ibid., (b)-(c)

6 Such courts include, for instance, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

7 Signaling is indeed prevalent in studies on terrorism and forms of targeting civilians during conflict (Crenshaw 1981; Kalyvas 2006). One may for instance signal its commitment to the cause by attacking symbolically charged targets (Brosché et al. 2017). The attacks in Timbuktu for instance sent strong signals to the international community although they were soft targets from the perspective of the jihadists given that they had already asserted their control over the region.

8 “Gouverner, c’est avoir en main la force publique, pour donner aux hommes, sous le regard de Dieu, la sécurité et la justice” (Dupont-Ferrier 1938, 7). Author’s translation.

9 It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the various Islamic schools of thought regarding tombs, mausoleums, and saints. For the case of Islamic practice and Sufism in Mali, see for instance Soares (2005, 2007, 2013); O’Dell (2013); Bell (2013); Thurston and Lebovich (2013).

10 For an analysis of the 2012 conflict in Mali, see for instance, Wing (2013); Thurston and Lebovich (2013); Morgan (2012); Lecocq et al (2013); Bøås and Torheim (2013); Bleck and Michelitch (2015).

11 See Mali referral letter to the ICC, <https://www.icc-cpi.int/NR/rdonlyres/A245A47F-BFD1-45B6-891C-3BCB5B173F57/0/ReferralLetterMali130712.pdf>

12 Article 8(2)(e)(iv) of the Rome Statute refers to “Intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not military objectives.” See Rome Statute of the ICC, <https://www.icc-cpi.int/nr/rdonlyres/ea9aeff7-5752-4f84-be94-0a655eb30e16/0/rome_statute_english.pdf>

13 See Prosecutor v. Al Mahdi, Case No. ICC-01/12-01/15, Judgment, paras. 38-39 (27 September 2016).

14 The author conducted fieldwork research in Mali (Timbuktu, Djenné, and Bamako) in December 2016 and interviewed many respondents who expressed frustration at what they perceived to be the sole focus of the ICC, UNESCO, and the international community: the destruction of cultural heritage. For instance, a retired Malian judge said, “Malians are not very attached to these cultural artefacts… They ask, what about the soldiers who were killed in Aguelhok? Instead, the ICC goes after this little breaker of shrines [Al Mahdi].” See Ba (2020).

15 Only 8.5% of the UNESCO World Heritage sites are located on the African continent. See http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/stat

16 It is worth noting also that crimes against cultural heritage have a long history in Mali – as in other places – including looting of archeological sites and the illicit market of artefacts. Also, jihad and counter-jihad movements over the past few centuries have featured destruction and rebuilding of mosques and other edifices, such as the fabled mosque of Djenné, for instance (Joy 2012, 2016). Therefore, the international attention that resulted from the 2012 attacks against cultural heritage sites must be viewed in the broader context of transnational jihadism and the global war on terror.

17 As Beránek and Tupek (2018) assert, attacks targeting specifically Islamic funeral and burial sites are driven by the interpretation of the Salafi/Wahhabi tradition that graves and shrines have a high potential of tempting the believer towards polytheism.

18 They did however destroy the door of the Sidi Yahia mosque. According to local beliefs, the door was supposed to remain closed until the day of the Last Judgment.

19 It is important to quote at length his justification that although he was against the mausoleums, their destruction had no basis in Sharia Law. He states, “I was convinced that the destruction of the mausoleums had no legal basis in Sharia law. It’s true that, according to a fatwa recognized by all traditions of Islam, tombs must not be erected more than one chibr (about ten centimeters) above ground. But this fatwa only applies to new tombs and not to those that already exist. I wanted to leave the mausoleums intact…Sharia has never called on the faithful to stick rigidly to rules that were made in ancient times, or to transpose them to the letter, to another time and place” (Barrak 2017).

20 The Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan was also a political act carried out in response to changing international context for the Taliban regime and in pursuit of political ends. The Taliban registered their anger at the UN sanctions against their regime, and the refusal of most UN member-states to formally recognize their regime. The Taliban also expressed their anger at the international community’s preemptive efforts to save the statues, and the outrage that followed their destruction. This, in the eyes of the Taliban regime, showed that the international community was more concerned about the statues than the suffering of the Afghani population which resulted from both the UN sanctions and the isolation of the Taliban regime (Francioni and Lenzerini 2003; Faiser 2009; Chiovenda 2014).

21 Although ISIS used terrorist tactics to administer its so-called Caliphate, it did not fit the conventional features of a terrorist organization at all, given that it boasted some 30,000 fighters, and maintained large military capabilities and financial assets. ISIS’ revenue from oil was estimated to be between $1 million and $3 million a day. And oil was just one source a revenue among a large portfolio of other revenues (Cronin 2015).

22 The New York Times unearthed thousands of internal documents that show how the Islamic State governed the territory and the populations under its control. For instance, these documents show that IS issued birth certificates and operated its own DMV, and offered services such as trash collection (Callimachi, 2018).

23 For instance, to justify the destruction of the Mosul Museum and Niveveh, an Al Hayat video uses a theological justification, stating, “Oh Muslims, the remains that you see behind me are the idols of peoples of previous centuries, which were worshipped instead of Allah. The Assyrians, Akkadians, and others took for themselves gods of rain, of agriculture, and of war, and worshipped them along with Allah, and tried to appease them with all kinds of sacrifices… Since Allah commanded us to shatter and destroy these statues, idols, and remains, it is easy for us to obey, and we do not care [what people think], even if they are worth billions of dollars” (cited in Isakhan and Zarandona 2018).

24 Other examples of iconoclasm for such ends include the Nazi destruction of cultural heritage in Warsaw in order to create the neue deutsche Stadt Warschau, and the Croats attempt to turn Mostar into the capital of “a newly formed statelet of Herceg-Bosna” (Clapperton et al. 2017, 1211).

25 For ISIS, the modern-nation is a form of shirk because it requires from Muslim citizens obedience to its laws, which are not derived from God’s laws, making the modern nation-state idolatrous, as Sayyd Qutb (1990, 47-50) argued (cited in Jones 2018, 43). ISIS leader al-Baghdadi criticized the Iraqi state for foregrounding Iraqi citizenship rather than Muslim identity, asserting that “our creed is that a Muslim is our brother even if he is a Filipino Asian and that the devil worshiper is our enemy even if he is definitely Iraqi” (cited in Jones 2018, 44).

26 In addition to these political ends, there is also a more pragmatic aspect of the Islamic State’s governance of the cultural artefacts, namely the looting and management of the illicit market of the antiquities as a source for revenues (Isakhan and Zarandona 2015; Taub 2015; Faucon, Kantchev, and MacDonald 2017)

27 As Sjoberg and Gentry (2015, 3) write, “Women, like men, are capable of violence. Women, like men, commit political violence for a variety of reasons, including strategy, ideological commitments, and for individual and social grievances. Women, like men, sometimes see violence as the best means to their political ends.”

28 On the other hand, modes of government can also be viewed through the preservation or rehabilitation of cultural sites and memory. Projects such as the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee and the Palestinian Museum in the West Bank are examples of such creative practices by non-state actors in the absence of a state. These practices point to modes of government through resistance and resourceful insurgency (De Cesari 2019).

29 Badar (2011) argues that the principles of Islamic law are, for the most part, consistent with internationally recognized norms and standards, particularly those enshrined in the Rome Statute.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Oumar Ba

Oumar Ba is an assistant professor of political Science at Morehouse College. His research focuses on the politics on international justice and the global governance of atrocity crimes. He is the author of States of Justice (CUP 2020). Email: [email protected]