Cultural Property: Hague Convention

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 14th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to my very dear and noble friend Lady Andrews, who initiated this debate. Like many other noble Lords, I was utterly shocked when the first images appeared on our screens of ISIL militants destroying antiquities in Iraq. We then saw it repeated in Syria, at Palmyra, but with the horrible news of the murder of Khaled al-Asaad, the caretaker of that important site. Because of my interest in antiquities, I have visited Syria and to see that destruction is just so horrifying. As I, like others, watched the hacking into historical artefacts and saw them being toppled and ground into the dust, I felt almost as deep a wound as when I hear news of bombings and killings. I questioned my own moral compass. I wondered why I was feeling such grief over the loss of things—artefacts and art—and why it was so sickening. Why were we having such visceral responses to this? It is because of the very thing that many have mentioned, particularly the right reverend Prelate who spoke. This is about the destruction of our common heritage and sense of who we are as a people. It is about our humanity, and our shared humanity at that.

The deliberate destruction and theft of cultural heritage by Islamic State is not just mindless vandalism but ideological. That is the horror of it because it is justified by invoking the part of traditional Islamic thinking about Tawhid and the idea of the Islamic religion being monotheistic. But it is being invoked in a literal way to oppose anything that is other or different, so it has justified the destruction of monasteries and shrines, too, if they are of the Shia tradition. There is the destruction of churches, because Christianity is in their sights, and of ancient temples and statues, especially if they are of human form. This is all part of the Salafist tradition, which has its source in Wahhabist Saudi Arabia. It is a corrupted form of Islam.

The motivation is to eradicate utterly that with which it disagrees. It is an attack on the identity of peoples, their belief systems and who we all are. Our shared cultural heritage, which should be teaching us tolerance and respect for diverse humanity, is invoked for the very opposite purposes. We should be concerned about what this all means: a return to year zero, in the way invoked by Pol Pot, leaving no traces of any previous culture or civilisation so as to provide a new platform for that which is being promulgated. We should be very clear why we should feel this so deeply and why this moment is a time for acting with urgency.

Despite the UN’s ban on the trade of artefacts looted from Syria since 2011, we have seen extensive smuggling out of the Middle East and into the underground antique market of Europe and North America. The horror of those crimes has to be met with a proper response, but it is more than that. We are seeing other crimes. This destruction is a war crime under Article 8 of the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court. I saw only recently that Mrs Fatou Bensouda, the lead prosecutor at that court, has insisted after the destruction of sites in Mali by Ansar Dine that perpetrators will be held accountable because these are war crimes. However, they are not only war crimes. Those of us concerned with international law would all recognise that they also constitute crimes against humanity because of what they are doing to the identity of peoples.

That is why I heartily endorse the appeal to government by my noble friend Lady Andrews that urgent steps should be taken to make progress on ratifying the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. It is a source of shame to us that we have this history, described so powerfully by my noble friend Lord Howarth, of this being agreed time after time by Ministers, yet we still stand here today without having legislated.

ISIS cannot silence history and we should be making that message clear. ISIS cannot erase great culture from the memory of the world. We should be sending a message that perpetrators of these crimes will be held accountable, and delays in legislating are unjustifiable. We have to find time to get this legislation through. I hope that the Minister will be the bearer of good news today and will not just rely again on the idea that time is not available. This is urgent and is something that speaks to who we are.