• Heritage sites, war, and the collective failure of humanity

There is a particular cruelty in destroying what cannot be rebuilt. 

When a bomb obliterates a hospital, the bricks and mortar may eventually rise again. When it obliterates a sixth-century monastery or a 2,000-year-old temple, what is lost is not merely stone but centuries of accumulated meaning, the prayers whispered within those walls, the artisans’ hands that shaped them, the civilisations that bequeathed them to posterity. 

The destruction of cultural heritage in times of war is not collateral damage; it is, in its most calculated form, the destruction of civilisation itself. And the world, led by the increasingly ineffective UNESCO, has proven woefully incapable of preventing it.

The bigger picture of destruction

As I write this, the evidence mounts, and it mounts by the day. In the Gaza Strip, between 2023 and 2025, hundreds of culturally and historically important buildings, libraries, museums, and reservoirs of knowledge were destroyed or heavily damaged in the Israeli military offensive. UNESCO’s own verification, as of February, verifies damage to at least 157 cultural sites in the Gaza Strip. 

However, the figure is far higher according to the Palestinian Government and other researchers. The 13th-century Great Omari Mosque, one of the oldest in Gaza and a masterpiece of Islamic architecture, lies in ruins. The 12th-century Church of Saint Porphyrius, which housed hundreds of Palestinian civilians seeking shelter, was also hit, with the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem accusing the Israelis of deliberately targeting the church. 

The World Bank estimated that there was an amount of over $ 300 million in damage to Gaza’s cultural heritage as of January 2024. Eighty percent of buildings in Gaza were damaged or destroyed, including the tangible aspects of Palestinian culture.

Let us be precise about what this entails. Cultural heritage represents the collective identity of the people. When you destroy the mosques, churches, libraries, and museums of any given people, you are not simply engaging in war with the combatants; you are engaging in war with memory itself. You are essentially telling the people of any given land that their memory is disposable, that the accomplishments of their ancestors are disposable. This is not a new thing, but the impunity with which this is happening should give every thinking citizen of this world cause for concern.

Let us look at the bigger picture of destruction. In Ukraine, since its invasion by Russia in February 2022, UNESCO has verified the destruction of 485 cultural sites, 149 religious sites, 249 buildings of historical and artistic interest, 33 museums, and 18 libraries, among others. The financial loss is over $ 2.5 billion. More than 15,000 pieces of Ukrainian fine art and artefacts have been reported missing due to the systematic plunder of the nation’s museums by Russian forces. 

Ukraine has accused the Russian Government of transforming the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Tauric Chersonese in Crimea into what has been referred to as the ‘Historical Park,’ which is nothing but cultural appropriation in the most grotesque manner. 

In Sudan, the civil war that began in 2023 has destroyed the cultural heritage of the country in the most devastating manner. The Nyala Museum in South Darfur has been transformed into a military base. The museum built to commemorate Sultan Ali Dinar in the town of El Fasher has been destroyed by fire due to bombardment. The Sudanese Government has accused the Rapid Support Forces of smuggling antiquities and engaging in the illicit trade of stolen identity.

These are not isolated incidents. Rather, they are all part of a larger pattern that has been unfolding for decades and spans multiple continents. For instance, in March 2001, the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, which were two monumental sculptures from the sixth century that had stood for nearly 1,500 years as a testament to the extent of Buddhist culture along the Silk Road. 

The Director-General of UNESCO declared: “The deliberate destruction of cultural property is a crime against culture and against the heritage of all humanity. Properties that are destroyed are not only Afghanistan’s but belong to all of humanity.” However, nothing could be done to prevent this tragedy from occurring despite all the rhetoric emanating from all over the world. 

In Syria, the Islamic State took over the ancient city of Palmyra in 2015 and went on to destroy the 2,000-year-old Temple of Baalshamin and the Temple of Bel, all while selling looted antiquities on the black market to fund its reign of terror. In Mali, Islamist rebels took over Timbuktu in 2012 and destroyed mosques and mausoleums that dated back to the 15th century.

To whom does cultural heritage belong?

The common thread running through all these disasters has been the failure of the international legal regime that was supposed to prevent them. The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, concluded in 1954, was the first international treaty to focus specifically on the protection of cultural heritage during times of conflict. 

The treaty was born out of the devastation of the Second World War, when the destruction of European cities had brought home to the world the vulnerability of irreplaceable cultural treasures. The treaty binds member states to respect and safeguard cultural property, refrain from using them for military purposes, and mark cultural property with the distinctive symbol of the Blue Shield. The treaty’s Second Protocol, concluded in 1999, tightened up the rules and established a system of “enhanced protection” for sites of the highest importance.

On paper, this legal framework is admirable. In practice, it has proven to be little more than an exercise in wishful thinking. Only 68 states have ratified the 1999 protocol. The convention’s enforcement procedures, to say the least, are weak. If a state or non-state entity damages a protected site, the impact is negligible. UNESCO releases statements of “deep concern”. It “urges all parties to strictly adhere to international law”. It expediently adds sites already under bombardment to its list of endangered cultural heritage sites, a bureaucratic response to a humanitarian crisis. 

As a legal expert trenchantly remarks, while the international community has condemned the destruction of cultural heritage sites, its efforts to stop the destruction of cultural heritage sites have been small. The threat to cultural heritage, another commentator remarks, has been a secondary or tertiary policy concern of the international community.

This brings me to the question that all Sri Lankans, and all citizens of formerly colonised nations, must ask with particular urgency: to whom does cultural heritage belong? The answer provided by international law, that heritage sites are the responsibility of the states on whose territory they are located, is both legally accurate and morally insufficient. 

Is a sixth-century monastery in Gaza merely Palestinian heritage? Are the Buddhas of Bamiyan merely Afghan heritage? Is the ancient city of Palmyra merely Syrian heritage? They are the heritage of humanity, repositories of knowledge and meaning that transcend national borders, political systems, and the temporary occupants of power.

We, in Sri Lanka, understand this intimately. Our own island has experienced the loss of heritage over several decades of civil conflict. Yet, we also understand, from our own painful colonial past, that heritage can be taken as well as destroyed. 

The heritage objects that I examine in European museums – Sri Lankan ivory boxes, statues, and textiles – were taken during colonial times and are currently housed in national museums, ethnology museums, and royal museums. They are simultaneously Sri Lankan, South Asian, and part of a global narrative of cultural exchange and appropriation. Provenance is not merely about the objects; it is about the ethics of power and its relationship to past ownership.

This dual reality – heritage destroyed in conflict and heritage displaced through colonialism – points to the basic inadequacy of a system that only considers national sovereignty. If heritage really is part of humanity, then humanity must be held collectively responsible for its protection. This cannot be done by way of conventions that no one bothers to enforce and declarations that no one bothers to follow.

What must be done 

What, then, can be done? First, we must recognise the complicity of the war partners, the nations that provide the weapons, intelligence, and diplomatic support to the warring parties that are destroying cultural heritage. If a missile made in one nation strikes a UNESCO World Heritage Site in another, the responsibility does not end at the borders of the nation that launched the missile. 

The arms trade is implicated in the destruction of cultural heritage, and any reform of the international regime for the protection of cultural heritage must engage with this complicity of the arms trade. States that profit from the sale of weapons used to destroy heritage sites should not be taken seriously as champions of heritage protection at UNESCO meetings.

Second, UNESCO itself must be reformed or transcended. UNESCO has done some good work – its reconstruction efforts in Timbuktu, its documentation of the damage in Ukraine and Gaza, its emergency listing of threatened heritage sites – but it is structurally incapable of enforcing its own conventions. It is bound by a system of sovereign states, whose cooperation it must solicit, and whose actions it must not seek to compel. 

Where a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council is itself a perpetrator of heritage destruction, as in the case of the Russian destruction of Ukrainian heritage, the entire system of international accountability breaks down. UNESCO is incapable of holding to account the very states whose political and financial support it must solicit. This is not a design flaw; it is the design.

Third, the International Criminal Court (ICC) must recognise the destruction of cultural heritage not as a peripheral but as an integral aspect of the prosecution of war crimes. The historic 2016 conviction of Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi by the ICC for the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against nine mausoleums and one mosque in Timbuktu, Mali, marked a major milestone in the history of international criminal law, as the defendant was convicted as a co-perpetrator of the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against cultural property. 

This conviction marked the first time the ICC had indicted an individual for the war crime of attacking religious buildings or historical monuments. This conviction of the defendant for the sole war crime of intentionally directing attacks against cultural property is the first of its kind by the ICC. However, this is the solitary example of the ICC holding individuals accountable for the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against cultural property. The destruction of cultural heritage in Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, and other parts of the world has not resulted in any other convictions by the ICC.

Fourth, and perhaps most fundamentally, we must develop a global ethic of heritage stewardship that transcends state-based approaches. Civil society, academia, diaspora communities, and even indigenous knowledge holders all have important roles to play. 

Palestinian archaeologists have risked their own lives to document the destruction of sites in Gaza even as bombs continue to rain down. Ukrainian cultural workers have moved thousands of artefacts under fire. These examples of bravery and commitment remind us that heritage protection is not just an activity reserved for diplomats and lawyers; it is an intrinsically humanist activity, driven by the idea that what we inherited from our ancestors is worthy of surviving.

As an academic who has spent many years studying the history of Sri Lankan objects within colonial collections in Europe, I am all too aware that the discussion of heritage protection must be intertwined with the discussion of heritage justice. The same international community that fails to act to save heritage sites from destruction in conflict also fails to act to right the historical displacement of heritage in colonialism. The reason for the failure in each case is the same: the failure to understand that cultural heritage is, in fact, what it has always been, a common inheritance of humanity, requiring a common responsibility for its protection.

The empty niches in Bamiyan, the rubble of Gaza’s mosques, the despoiled museums in Sudan, and the shattered churches in Ukraine are not merely national tragedies. They are wounds to the memory of our species. Every heritage site destroyed in conflict is a chapter torn from a book that belongs to all of us. And every failure to prevent such destruction, every unenforced convention, every equivocation, and every arms deal that puts missiles in the hands of those who would level ancient cities are failures for which we all bear a measure of responsibility.

The question is not whether we can afford to protect the world’s heritage. The question is whether we can afford not to. For a civilisation that cannot protect its past has already forfeited its future.

(The writer is an ethnographer and art historian specialising in material culture, critical museum studies, and participatory research methodologies. As a member of Provenance Research on Objects of the Colonial Era (PPROCE), the Netherlands and Dutch Research Council (NWO) committees, she engages with repatriation and decolonisation debates. She currently holds a NIAS-NIOD-KITLV Research Fellowship in the Netherlands)

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication)