UNESCO and the Future of Cultural Patrimony

Twenty-five miles east of Timbuktu, amidst the scattered acacias and sandburs that alone populate this desolate corner of the Sahel, lies the cemetery of Cheikh Sīdi al-Wāfi al-Amīr al-Arawāni. The moment this mausoleum was established, back in the early eighteenth century, it began its gradual surrender to the abrasive sand and dust borne along by north-easterly harmattan winds. Centuries of scouring have left the site, according to UNESCO’s 2014 Étude sur les mausolées de Tombouktou, “non-repérable”. It was to this forlorn place that the remains of the great librarian Ahmad bin Mbarak bin Barka bin Muhammad Bul’arāf were conveyed upon his demise in 1955. Renowned as he was for having amassed a library of 2076 invaluable manuscripts, for having penned the influential “Essay on the Importance of History”, and for having compiled a wide-ranging biographical dictionary, or tarjamah, of scholars from Takrūr, the Sahara, and Chinguetti, Ahmad Bul’arāf’s death was treated as nothing short of catastrophic by Timbuktu’s scholarly community. One contemporary, Al-Hādī al-Mabrū Al-Dālī, lamented:

What a pity on the sciences and their books

On their owners when this calamity occurred

Their schools and places have become deserted

There’s no one in them except crows and vultures

Suddenly today there is a caller and no one to respond

Except the echoes and the tunes of the winds

By Ahmad Bul’arāf they were granted a gift

How many lessons were conducted and

You have upheld their loftiness, established their origin

You maintained their essence with your honourable books.

The famed Bul’arāf library dwindled, with the bulk of its contents donated to a state-run archive. Bul’arāf’s gravestone disintegrated, eroded by trade winds and blanketed by sheets of aeolian sand. The life’s work, and even the earthly remains, of the man hailed by Mahmoud Mohamed Dedeb as a “great hero and famous scholar, reviver of Islamic culture” had almost wholly disappeared, and Mali’s post-independence cultural revival seemed imperilled. In the fullness of time, however, a far greater calamity would be visited upon the City of 333 Saints and its precious libraries and heritage sites.

In early 2012 a militant group styling itself Ansar Dine—“Defenders of the Faith”—took advantage of a Malian coup d’état and, alongside the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, seized control of a vast swathe of Mali’s north-east region and marched triumphantly into Timbuktu. Sharia law was imposed in April, and by May an iconoclastic campaign was in full swing, as Ansar Dine followed in the destructive footsteps of the First Saudi State’s Wahhabi Army, the Society for the Eradication of Evil Innovation and the Establishment of the Sunna, the Taliban, Boko Haram, ISIL and other such movements. On the grounds that excessive veneration of holy sites can lead to shirk, or idolatry, Ansar Dine adherents, clad in their trademark black robes and armed with pickaxes, launched themselves at cemeteries, tombs, mausolea and Sufi shrines. Musical instruments and tape recordings stored at local radio stations were carted away in rice sacks and systematically destroyed.

Most shockingly of all, the main gate of the Sidi Yahya mosque was smashed down, for it had been said that the doors would not be thrown open until the last day of the world, and the militants wanted, in their own words, to “destroy the mystery”. More fitting words could hardly have been uttered. “The door was on the ground,” said Cissé Baba, an official at a nearby mosque. “It has been there for more than a century. The entire city of Timbuktu is shocked.” One leader of Ansar Dine, Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, could hardly contain his glee. “Those UNESCO jackasses … they think that this is heritage,” he was reported as having sneered. “Does ‘heritage’ include worshipping cows and trees?” And thus were the words of Sainte-Beuve confirmed: “Nothing collapses more quickly than civilization during crises like this one; lost in three weeks is the accomplishment of centuries.” A Sudanese proverb had it that “salt comes from the north, gold from the south, and silver from the country of the white men, but the word of God and the treasures of wisdom are only to be found in Timbuktu”, but that was all facing an existential threat.

Still, all was not lost. In the medieval Epic of Sundiata the great Malinke hero Sundiata Keita is told that he is “the outgrowth of Mali, just as the silk-cotton tree is the growth of the earth, born of deep and mighty roots. To face the tempest the tree must have long roots and gnarled branches.” Timbuktu, another famed outgrowth of Mali, likewise proved to be sufficiently racinated to withstand the Islamist tempest. This was in no small part owing to the efforts of the librarian Abdel Kader Haïdara, who realised early on that a “great catastrophe” was taking place, and that eventually Ansar Dine would “enter our library and smash up everything”. So at considerable personal risk Haïdara and a network of compatriots managed to sneak some 350,000 volumes from private and public collections to the relative safety of Bamako in southern Mali. The “honourable books” of Timbuktu were thereby largely spared the indignities visited upon the less portable heritage of the city, though around two-fifths of the manuscripts remain in dire need of restoration, having become either mould-ridden, worm-eaten, or sodden while deposited in secret caches.

After the French-led Opération Serval ejected Ansar Dine from the region early in 2013, the work of repairing the city’s mutilated cultural infrastructure began. While it is impossible to replace the manuscripts lost when the Ahmed Baba Institute was set ablaze by fleeing rebels, with enough mud-brick, straw and sweat the mosques and mausolea could still be restored to something like their original condition. By February 2016 the fourteen damaged mausolea were sufficiently repaired as to warrant a consecration ceremony unseen since the eleventh century, during which Almamy Koureissi, speaking for the Ministry of Culture, Handicrafts and Tourism of Mali, declared that “culture is at the heart of government action because we have found our bearings, our cultural values. We need to embrace our moral centre, to remain standing, open to the world, welcoming and hospitable in accordance with our legendary traditions.” On September 19, 2016, another ceremony was held to mark the reinstallation of the sacred gate of the mosque of Sidi Yahi, at which the UNESCO Director-General at the time, Irina Bokova, stated that “the reinstallation of the sacred gate, a religious and cultural landmark of Timbuktu, marks a new and decisive step in Mali’s reconstruction and peace building work”.

A ruling by the International Criminal Court followed a few days later, in which the trial chamber for the first time found against a defendant—the aforementioned Ahmad Al Mahdi—for having directed attacks against “buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, [or] historic monuments”, in the instant case a number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Timbuktu. In January 2018 the ICC announced that Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud, the head of the Islamic police during Ansar Dine’s reign of terror, would face similar charges, and while the tribunal has consistently maintained that “crimes against property are generally of lesser gravity than crimes against persons”, the prosecutions and rulings still represent a sign that the enormities perpetrated in Timbuktu throughout 2012 had not only shocked the conscience of the world, but had also led international organisations to take more seriously than ever the threats that campaigns like that of Ansar Dine pose to international cultural patrimony.

The situation in Timbuktu has yet to return to normal, given the threat posed by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Nevertheless, as the singer Abdulrahman Cissé recently put it, “It’s still your city. Even if there’s war, or fire, it’s better for you to stay in your city. Put up with the smoke in your city, soon the fresh air will come back.” That there is any fresh air at all is thanks to the efforts of a coalition that includes local activists, scholars and organisations like Timbuktu Renaissance, aided by the French military, international agencies like UNESCO and the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali, plus a host of non-profits, universities and private donors. The monuments of Timbuktu had been threatened with annihilation, but now they represent, in the words of the European Union Ambassador to Mali, Alain Holleville, a prime example of “promoting culture as a factor of reconciliation and lasting peace”. But the case of Timbuktu has unfortunately come to represent the exceptio probat regulam.

For Irina Bokova, the reconstruction of Timbuktu’s mausolea constituted evidence that “we have forged bonds of friendship and nothing can undo them”, in turn providing “irrefutable proof that unity is possible and peace is even stronger than before”. This sort of rhetoric is entirely in keeping with the language of the UNESCO Constitution’s preamble, which tells us that “wars begin in the minds of men”, and so “it is in the minds of men that defences of peace must be constructed”, as well as that of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, which tells us that “cultural property belonging to any people” becomes “the cultural heritage of all mankind”. Here heritage is being presented as some kind of cultural public good, but in reality heritage is neither non-excludable nor non-rivalrous. Julian Huxley, the first director-general of UNESCO, acknowledged the “impossibility of UNESCO producing the rabbit of political peace out of a cultural and scientific hat”. More recently the heritage specialist David Lowenthal has convincingly argued that “heritage provokes internal as well as international rivalry”, that “bellicose xenophobia is a heritage hallmark”, and that the “heritage past” is all too often “unseemly”, a “jumbled, malleable amalgam ever reshaped by this or that partisan interest”. Indeed, one might expect a modern-day director-general of UNESCO to understand the inefficacy of the heritage nostrum better than anyone, the relative success of the Timbuktu intervention notwithstanding.

Recent years have seen numerous conflicts arising out of UNESCO’s seemingly anodyne task of inscribing various heritage sites and intangible cultural practices, endangered or otherwise. Cambodia and Thailand, for instance, had for decades worked to confine their battle over ownership of the Khmer temple of Preah Vihear to diplomatic intercourse and feisty exercises in symbolic politicking, but Cambodia’s 2008 inscription of the complex as a UNESCO World Heritage Site caused tensions to reach breaking point. A July 2008 joint communiqué facilitated by UNESCO was thought to have papered over the two countries’ differences, but by October Thai and Cambodian troops were trading blows, and a Thai bombardment in April of 2009 even damaged the site in question. On February 4, 2011, the two countries again exchanged mortar fire, killing at least seven, including the temple’s official photographer, while damaging some more of the structures and littering the area with land mines and unexploded cluster bombs; to this day the site is inaccessible from Thailand.

Although less violent in nature, China’s continuing campaign to appropriate Mongolian throat singing, the Kyrgyz Epic of Manas, Tibetan opera and Korean peasant dances via the process of UNESCO inscription is part of what Andrew Higgins has called an effort to “reinforce cultural claims viewed as essential to holding together a vast territory populated on the fringes by ethnic minorities of often uncertain loyalties”, a tactic which has understandably roiled public opinion in neighbouring nations and domestic ethnic communities. The Chinese inscription of the traditionally Tibetan region of Hoh Xil, or Kekexili, has potential consequences that go far beyond the symbolic, with the International Campaign for Tibet warning that the move may pave the way for the villagisation of tens of thousands of nomads.

More disturbing still has been the decades-long battle over cultural sites in Israel and Palestine, waged not just on the ground but in the halls of the Maison de l’UNESCO headquarters on the Place de Fontenoy in Paris. The whole sorry affair began in 1948, when the Lebanese hosts refused to grant Israeli observers entry permits to attend the UNESCO General Conference in Beirut. The Czechoslovakian, Hungarian, and Polish delegations objected to the “violation of UN high policy”, and the Eastern bloc boycotted the event, while the United States Department of State kept schtum, concerned as it was with maintaining the “possibility of influencing [the Arab states] separately and also weaning them away from the Latin-American block”, according to a contemporaneous diplomatic report. Widespread anti-Israeli language led to walk-outs among Western delegates in 1974, and matters only worsened in 1982, when UNESCO added the Old City of Jerusalem and its Walls to its World Heritage in Danger List, pursuant to Article 11(4) of its Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, even though Israeli authorities had already handed control of the Temple Mount over to the Islamic Trust, or Waqf, and had disallowed Jewish religious rites or Israeli archaeological investigations on the premises.

By 2015 UNESCO was accusing Israel of conducting “illegal excavations” within its own sovereign territory and of damaging the “visual integrity” of Jerusalem’s Old City by installing a light rail system, allegations that seem benign in the light of the grotesque 2016 claim that Israel was “planting fake Jewish graves in Muslim cemeteries”. The UNESCO position that Israeli authorities are conjuring up Jewish graves and scheming to desecrate mosques tangentially approaches blood libel, and Jonathan Tobin has suggested that such rhetoric is “feeding into efforts to foment hatred against Jews” and thereby constitutes official “UN endorsement of anti-Semitism”. It seems almost quaint that in 2005 the UNESCO director-general Koichiro Matsuura maintained that “Jerusalem embodies the hope and dream of dialogue between cultures, civilizations and spiritual traditions, a dialogue through which mutual understanding between peoples may flourish.”

Of even greater concern is the sheer hypocrisy on display at the Maison de l’UNESCO. Israel’s Foreign Ministry director-general Dore Gold had reason to observe that:

as the historical heritage sites of this area are being systematically destroyed by jihadist forces, such as Islamic State, in Syria and Iraq, UNESCO’s adoption of utterly false allegations about Israeli archaeological practices is misplaced and hypocritical, at best.

The only major excavations on the Temple Mount were carried out as part of construction of the El-Marwani Mosque, erected on top of Solomon’s Stables, a process Shany Mor described as:

a wanton and unrecoverable destruction of archaeological treasures ranging across three millennia of human patrimony. Unlike the imagined archaeological damage fantasists and fanatics accuse Israel of committing, this was never condemned by UNESCO or any other international body.

In 2017 UNESCO listed the Cave of Patriarchs in Hebron as a specifically Palestinian heritage site, and added it to the World Heritage in Danger List, even though the site is a Herodean-era structure frequented by Jews and Muslims alike, which contains the tombs of the Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob and Leah, and in any event is in a fairly remarkable state of preservation. Benjamin Netanyahu’s incredulous reaction to the inscription—“Not a Jewish site? Who is buried there?”—said it all. Yet at the same time, there are any number of sites that never made it onto the World Heritage in Danger List, including the synagogues of the Old City of Aleppo, lost to the “Old City Rehabilitation Project” and then to the destruction wrought by the Syrian Civil War, or the Tomb of Nahum at Alqosh, in the Iraqi governorate of Nineveh, which has suffered from neglect and has been existentially threatened by ISIL, but whose listing was breezily repudiated by UNESCO on the grounds that the Kurdish Regional Government lacked the requisite standing to communicate with the agency on the matter. Acknowledging these sites would create at least a veneer of evenhandedness, but this is evidently too much to ask.

Perhaps the most devastating such example is the case of the Tomb of Joseph, Son of Jacob in Nablus, targeted in 2000 by Palestinian rioters, who desecrated the library and the yeshivah, splattered the dome with green paint, and then went on to murder Rabbi Hillel Lieberman, who had gone to the site to inspect the damage. In the years to come the Qever Yosef would be routinely vandalised, and in 2015 the tomb was again hit by petrol bombs; Israelis who attempted to repair the damage were set upon and beaten, and their vehicles torched. The words of Vladimir Jabotinsky, written after a wave of violence swept through Bessarabia less than a hundred years previously, are altogether apposite:

In that town, I spied in the debris

The torn fragment of a parchment scroll

And gently brushed away the dirt to see

What tale it told.

Written on it was “In a strange land”—

Just a few words from the Bible, but the sum

Of all one needs to understand

Of a pogrom.

Somehow the funerary monument of the biblical patriarch Joseph, nestled in the valley that separates Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, a mere stone’s throw from Jacob’s Well, has come to be located in a strange land indeed. Wrecked and calcined as it is, and with the contents of its library in tatters, there is still no listing for the Qever Yosef on the World Heritage in Danger List.

The sheer hypocrisy of the UNESCO action concerning the Cave of the Patriarchs—undertaken at a 2017 meeting of the World Heritage Committee in Kraków which also featured speechifying that Israel’s envoy to UNESCO, Shama Hacohen, later described as the drawing of a “horrifying parallel between Holocaust victims to other victims and Palestinian victims”—prompted United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley to declare the move an “affront to history” which “discredits an already highly questionable UN agency”. In October 2017, the Trump administration announced that it would withdraw from UNESCO by the end of 2018, while Israel filed its withdrawal notice two months later.

The Reagan administration pulled out from the organisation in 1984, citing mismanagement and corruption, a pro-Soviet tilt, and “an endemic hostility toward the institutions of a free society—particularly those that protect a free press, free markets and, above all, individual human rights”. One would have been hard-pressed to take issue with those assertions at the time; indeed Pierre de Senarclens, the director of UNESCO’s division of human rights, had notably resigned from his post in 1983 on the grounds that the agency had created a “climate of mistrust, prejudice, intolerance, incoherence, arbitrariness, fear, and servility”. The situation appears to be little better now, if the genuinely obsessive, BDS-infused bent of the agency is any indication. How any of this has furthered the UNESCO’s stated interest of ensuring the “intellectual solidarity of mankind” is anyone’s guess.

That UNESCO regularly comes in for criticism from the Right should hardly be surprising. Recall Auberon Waugh’s assertion that it was “impertinent for an international organisation—especially one largely dominated by Afro-Asian militants—to express a preference” for heritage sites in the first place. But the American and Israeli withdrawals come at a particularly bad time for UNESCO, increasingly hollowed out as it is. Andrew Robinson has noted “a sad decline from the aspirations of that post-war moment in 1945”, particularly from an infrastructural perspective, as “some 600 unpaid interns from all over the globe thronged its headquarters, among consultants and a reduced staff trying to manage two or three posts per person”. Its budget is roughly $250 million per annum and shrinking—a fairly modest amount when one considers that English Heritage alone had expenditure of £99.7 million for 2016-17. This is not an agency in robust health, and its vulnerabilities have been exacerbated now that critiques from the Left are mounting as well. Lynn Meskell, in her 2018 book A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace, laments:

the problems of violence and serious infractions of human rights, often perpetrated by governments, that threaten the lives of residents in and around World Heritage Sites as witnessed in Old Panama and Angkor … Quotidian acts of social injustice need to be traced and confronted more readily in intergovernmental spheres, rather than setting our sights on the fate of monuments.

What is more, writes Meskell, UNESCO’s commemoration of sites of violence has implicated it in the re-contextualising of “episodes of illegal occupation, atrocities, war crimes, and even genocide, while the victims are left to relive the trauma. This is the dark side of heritage branding.” Evidently the agency simply cannot win.

Even in contexts that would appear to be ideologically neutral, UNESCO has proven unable to avoid criticism. The official listing of Yoga and Kumbh Mela under the Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage of 2003 would not, on its face, appear tendentious, but as Rahul Goswami has pointed out, such recognition brings with it “adverse consequences”:

by the listing, an entire system of philosophical thought and practice has been reduced to “ICH”. Identifying and safeguarding ICH is good and benefits, especially, traditional cultivation, handicrafts, hand weavers, rural household industries and the festivals and social practices associated with them. But Indic intellectual, artistic and customary heritage is far more often than not considerably greater than the very recent, rather Eurocentric vision which formed the Convention … A UNESCO listing inevitably means encouraging a hierarchy in which the listed ICH—such as the 13 from India—are accorded a status superior to those unlisted, provincial or local. In the absence of a national or state means of according equal recognition to our vidyas, kalas, natya and nritya, arts humble and mundane—all of which are a source of identity for their participants, listing becomes a liability.

As Goswami put it, the use of phraseology that is “agnostic in nature or at best religion-neutral” can be problematic, and it is evident that “the religious or spiritual aspect of practices and knowledge systems must be muted and that their textual interpretation will gain in validity only if adequately glossed through gender, inclusiveness, tolerance and caste/equality”, and as a result, “if not guarded against stringently, within the course of two generations, the very modes of perceiving our extraordinary diversity of intangible cultural practices and forms will have been replaced”. Already we have a list of “Elements on the Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage” for India on which the “traditional brass and copper craft of utensil making among the Thatheras of Jandiala Guru” is casually plopped next to “the tradition of Vedic chanting” and the “Buddhist chanting of Ladakh”. It amounts to a sort of motley heritage garden folly, a fabrique full of ornamental cultural curiosities and other ethnographica of passing interest, as opposed to some of the most sacred expressions of the divine and human spirits imaginable.

The essentially arbitrary nature of these inscriptions only undercuts the mission to comprehensively preserve the various natural and cultural wonders of our planet. Consider the various efforts being made by Parisian advocates to place open-air bouquinistes, bistros and even baguettes on the official list of intangible heritage. Why not librairies mobiles, crêperies and viennoiserie? In 2016, Belgium succeeded in placing “beer culture” on the List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, but now a campaign is in the works to have “fries and mayonnaise” recognised as well. There seems to be no reason not throw in filet de cheval and gaufres while we’re at it. It all comes across as eccentric or even capricious. Take the 2007 addition of Japan’s Iwami Ginzan Silver Mine after intensive lobbying from the diplomatic and tourism sectors, despite the locale meeting precisely none of UNESCO’s ten fundamental heritage criteria, alongside the controversial 2009 delisting of Germany’s scenic and culturally-rich Dresden Elbe Valley because of the erection of the much-needed Waldschloesschen Bridge.

Viewed as a whole, this is not so much a cultural beauty contest waged between nations as a gallimaufry of disparate national, regional and global interests and occasional whims. And even the odd heritage coup seems to be invariably undercut, as when Standard Chartered’s  announcement in June 2018 that it would not finance or lend to projects that endanger World Heritage Sites was followed the very next day by the Romanian government’s decision to withdraw its application to make Rosia Montana a protected World Heritage Site, for the sake of a planned commercial gold mine. It turns out that the “international organisation of culture”, as Herbert Coblans dubbed it, is as impossible as it is unseemly.

UNESCO has from its birth played the part of Buridan’s ass, forever caught between opposing poles of philosophy and praxis. Huxley’s vision for UNESCO was for it to forge a “single world culture” informed by “evolutionary humanism”, but it is also an intergovernmental agency made up of delegates for nation-states, each pursuing individual, and occasionally obnoxious, agendas. It has declared its support for the “free flow of ideas by word and image”, but the “new world information order” advanced at UNESCO’s 1980 general conference in Belgrade exhibited what Leonard Theberge at the time called “a clear bias against private sector involvement in communications”. From the outset the institution, while ostensibly concerned with the “preparation for more intelligent citizenship in the embryonic international community”, was instead mired in conflicts between Israel and the Arab League, Israel and Palestine, the West and the Warsaw Pact, the global North and South, not to mention various regional contests in which cultural heritage has become regrettably weaponised.     

Yet we still have the example of Timbuktu, from which, it is fervently hoped, we might learn how best to salvage cultural heritage in extremis. It was the librarian Ahmad Bul’arāf, renowned denizen of that City of 333 Saints, who argued:

the art of history is necessary to benefit in this world and in the hereafter or both. If there is benefit in this world only then it is an obligation on some and if there is benefit for the hereafter then it is an obligation on everybody.

The remnants of the past—cultural patrimony in forms tangible and intangible—have indeed given rise to a universal obligation. But the international agency tasked with preserving those remnants has all too often adopted either blatant ideological biases or expedient postures of abject submission, depending on the circumstances. UNESCO, increasingly unable to play the role of the facilitator for “peoples speaking to peoples”, risks devolving into a glorified tourism resource and modest source of heritage funding at best, and a regular source of international agitation at worst. The slack can be picked up by organisations like the International Committee of the Blue Shield and other conservation-oriented institutions, but it is regrettable to see an agency that once aimed to “go beyond politics, beyond economics, to reach thinking people”, in the words of Anne O’Hare McCormick, stumbling so badly in that regard.

We are left with the lingering concern that “rotten wood cannot be carved, nor are dung walls plastered”, as the Analects tell us. And all the while an iconoclastic tempest continues to blow; time will tell how robust are the roots of global cultural patrimony. There are presentiments that can be gleaned from the Dângrêk Mountains in Cambodia, where the temple of Preah Vihear perches atop a shell-pocked cliff; from the Nineveh Plains, where the mouldering frame of the Tomb of Nahum lies crumbling; from the ill-treated Qever Yosef in Nablus; and from the plateau of Hoh Xil in China’s Qinghai Province, where nomads cling to an increasingly precarious existence. In these places we see how heritage is not always, in the words of Alain Holleville, “a factor of reconciliation and lasting peace”, but rather a venue for the misprision of history or the division of spoils. We must take what comfort we can, then, from the words spoken in a few months ago by the Malian librarian Adiaratou Coulibaly who, holding a precious illuminated manuscript rescued six years earlier from the bonfires of Ansar Dine, expressed the hope that the book, which “has survived for 800 years”, might now “live for 800 more”.

Matthew Omolesky is a United States-based human rights lawyer. In the June 2017 issue he wrote on Somalia.