Many suggestions have been heard by this observer in Syria including by local officials and citizens who are on the front lines trying to preserve and protect the cultural heritage that we all share.
Syria and Iraq's cultural heritage which belongs of all of us needs our help. Today international law needs to be changed in hopes of stopping the current iconoclastic onslaught, and prevent future ones. Yet with the United Nations Security Council is polarized and politicized and has done little to fulfill its obligations. Existing international agreements are weak and not effectively enforced.
Among proposals being discussed, and some even being implemented on a discrete ad hoc local basis, by patriotic Syrians. Some but by no means all proposals being discussed and hopefully to be implemented include:
Buy the looted objects off the jihadists, looters and errant regular citizens and secure them in safety vaults somewhere until the fighting ends, This has actually been done in Syria with modest success but given its sensitivity, without much publicity.
We can all help raise awareness in our communities and instruct our politicians to tighten and enforce current national and international laws and to ratify the instruments of international humanitarian law that protect cultural heritage. Specifically the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (The Hague 1954) and its two Protocols (1954 and 1999), as well as the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (Paris 1970); to implement them swiftly and efficiently into national legislation and in accord with their spirit and overarching goal to preserve cultural heritage, and to observe and enforce them.
We can and must support new dedicated groups like Heritage for Peace and more than two dozen NGO's recently formed that are working to protect archeological sites in Syria and Iraq.
In each of our communities we must work on strengthening our national capacities, training for soldiers, more resources, experts on the ground, and better coordination with armed forces, Interpol, and other actors while encouraging volunteer organizations willing to send international volunteers experts as Cultural Heritage Monitors on the scene. Their work would be to assess, protect, and investigate cultural property destruction and looting. All this while working with locals of all religions and ethnicities who want to protect our and their cultural heritage. In other words we need to establish the cultural equivalent of the Red Cross and Blue Shield providing an emergency response to cultural property at risk from armed conflict.
The United Nations and international regional organizations under whose auspices national, multi-national or private forces may be deployed, including peacekeeping operations, have an obligation to incorporate the principles of cultural property protection in the authorization of any forces deployed under their mandate or authority. Moreover, their commanders must ensure that cultural property protection is integrated into all Rules of Engagement as well as to incorporate cultural property protection into all pre-conflict, conflict and post-conflict stabilization planning. As part of the UN's and other regional deployments, there must be serious pre-deployment training in cultural property protection for such forces in general, and of their officers in particular; and to create expert/liaison officers for cultural property protection in such forces.
In addition the United Nations Security Council must explicitly prohibit trade in cultural materials illegally removed from all areas of conflict and occupation.
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