Attacks on Cultural Property

Abstract

Introduction We have discussed how law of armed conflict/international humanitarian law (LOAC/ IHL) consists, at least, of 1907 Hague Regulation IV, the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the 1977 Additional Protocols, customary international law, case law, and multinational treaties. In fact, there are scores of treaties, conventions, declarations, compacts, and resolutions that bear on LOAC/IHL in one way or another. Six multinational treaties are particularly significant to LOAC/IHL: the 1925 Gas Protocol Prohibiting the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases; the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property; the 1971 Convention on the Prohibition of Development, Production and Stockpiling of Biological and Toxin Weapons; the 1997 Ottawa Treaty Banning the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Land Mines; the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons; and the 1993 Convention on the Prohibition of Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons. The 1976 Convention on Environmental Modification might reasonably be added to that list. Of these, the 1980 Conventional Weapons and 1993 Chemical Weapons Conventions, particularly, have potential impact on war fighters. Violations of either could lead to war crime charges against combatants in the field or, at the least, intensely negative international scrutiny. In this chapter, the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and its two protocols, also receive attention. It is essentially a treaty about targeting. Looting the enemy's cultural treasures and religious shrines has been a regular feature of aggressive and imperial war time out of mind; it was still so for the war-lords of Germany in the Second World War. Bombarders devoted to cracking enemy civilian morale may believe, almost certainly mistakenly, that wrecking his treasures and shrines is a good way to go about it. One of the first things the Germans did on seizing Warsaw at the end of September 1939 was to destroy the Poles’ most beloved national monument, the one to Chopin…. The Dresden climax of [British] Bomber Command's offensive has acquired its peculiarly bad reputation because, in addition to being of little military importance, it was uniquely destructive of cultural treasures.