Cultural Property (Armed Conflicts) Bill [HL]

Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury Excerpts

Monday 6th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury (LD)]

My Lords, I support the Bill, and in my response the other day to the gracious Speech I congratulated the Government and the Minister on including and introducing it. As the noble Lord, Lord Foster, has pointed out, all three major political parties represented in this House have long called for action on this matter but all three have spent time in government when no action was taken, so I repeat my congratulations today to this Government on this belated event. It has been embarrassing, and counterintuitive, that Britain is one of the last major powers to have done so, considering that we are seen as a leading light in the world of heritage, particularly due to the admirable work of the British Museum and the British Council.

As the Heritage Alliance, whose admirable notes I think many noble Lords have received, points out:

“This formal ratification is all the more urgent as military operations increase across the world. The destruction of cultural capital—the … Buddhas and the Palmyra Arch—demonstrate that aggressors are following a long history of using cultural warfare to demoralise communities by destroying the symbols of their nationhood”.

While it is obvious that cultural artefacts are susceptible to damage and destruction where there is armed conflict, it is something that can and must be addressed. We on these Benches, along with so many people who have already spoken, welcome the introduction of the protection of cultural property fund and the development of a military cultural property protection unit within the Armed Forces.

The much-mentioned Professor Peter Stone, someone we all recognise and admire, has argued that while not all cultural property can be protected, it is surely a mark of a moral and civilised nation that it deploys its armed forces with enough training and knowledge to avert wanton and unnecessary damage to our common heritage. I think we all agree with that. He notes that there has already been work by the cultural heritage community with the military—again, something that has been mentioned quite a lot today—over the identification of cultural property prior to conflict. He gave as an example the NATO air campaign in Libya to show that specific sites can be successfully protected as a result of information supplied by NATO and Blue Shield to the Armed Forces. Apparently armed vehicles were placed around the Roman fort at Ras Almargeb, thought to be in order to deflect NATO attacks. We took out the vehicles, not the fort.

When it comes to the Bill, we wholeheartedly support consultation with UNESCO, Blue Shield and other stakeholder groups about how to ensure that the money is put to best use. Will the Minister also look at our suggestion that it should be used as a way of leveraging funds from other countries around the world? Does she agree that the protection of cultural property fund needs to establish a strategy for the future if it is to be used to achieve its full potential? Does she agree that co-ordination is essential and that there needs to be a central team based in London, not large but recognised and with clear credibility within the heritage community, military, police, customs and NGO sectors? Does she agree that training needs to be a core purpose, and that it needs to look to the future—in other words, to be ahead of the game in helping countries at risk to prepare for the worst? Does she agree that a balance needs to be struck between emergency response and long-term support?

However, as so many noble Lords—my noble friend Lord Redesdale, the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, and the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge—have said, the likes of Daesh of course do not just destroy. A fascinating and disturbing “Dispatches” on Channel 4 called “ISIS and the Missing Treasures”—I hope the Minister will note that I have managed to get the brilliance of Channel 4 into this debate—showed how looted treasure, which many noble Lords have referred to, funds terrorism. London is the second-largest art market in the world and items move through our ports and customs all the time, yet, as my noble friend Lord Foster mentioned, we have a tiny team to police the situation. Why are they not doing more? I take on board the question from the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, about how we treat family heirlooms that are brought out of war zones and sold, but listening to the Minister it seems that Part 4, which many noble Lords have mentioned, offers lots of opportunities to try to solve these issues.

I am afraid that I will get a little political. While we are debating and discussing—and supporting—the Bill, why are the Government simultaneously supporting and abetting the Saudi-led coalition’s destruction of cultural property in Yemen? Parts of the old city of Sanaa are gone, as is the Great Dam of Marib—a feat of engineering that was undertaken 2,800 years ago. Missiles fired from the coalition’s planes have obliterated a museum where the fruits of an American-Yemeni archaeological dig were stored, historic caked-mud high-rise dwellings, 12th-century citadels and minarets, and archaeological sites at Baraqish, Sirwah and other places, whose importance to humanity’s heritage has been recognised by the UN. There seems to have been a bit of a breakdown of our adherence to international humanitarian law, which is at odds with the welcome ratification of this convention.

Finally, there is always a danger when we talk about protecting cultural heritage that we appear to ignore the appalling suffering of the people caught up in the conflicts that threaten them—that artefacts are somehow more important than flesh and blood. Of course they are not, but destroying a people’s culture is also a way of destroying them—a point emphasised on the plight of the Yazidis by Irina Bokova, the director-general of UNESCO, who was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Renfrew. She uses the term “cultural cleansing”:

“What are Yazidis if they are uprooted from a place where they have been living for centuries? … You destroy the temples, you take away what they have … It’s really more than ethnic cleansing, because you deprive them of their identity. You just want to destroy them totally, you don’t want anything from their culture left there for humanity. It’s as if they never existed”.

We must not allow this to happen anywhere, to anyone, and the Bill is part of recognising that.