Cultural Heritage Protection within International Humanitarian Efforts During Conflicts and Disasters

Contributions from: Aparna Tandon, Isber Sabrine, Paola Jani, Mihir R. Bhatt and Khayal Trivedi

What place does cultural heritage protection have within the humanitarian efforts while planning for aid and relief? How must we protect the invaluable world heritage during times of crisis? And how do we manage the risk, and provide first-aid to cultural heritage during emergencies? 

Conflicts, disasters and climate change stand as major threats to human civilisation, its systems and consequently its heritage, culture and legacy. And yet often when the international humanitarian aid framework is considered, culture and heritage do not get as much value and attention as they require. As the UN Secretary-General recently declared, we are living through an era of global boiling. In the past few months and years, the world has witnessed wildfires engulfing parts of Hawaii and Canada, floods in India, China, Slovenia and Italy, in addition to the ongoing war in Ukraine, Sudan and many parts of the world. While strengthening humanitarian networks to safeguard and protect lives must be carried out, tangible and intangible cultural heritage must be an integral part of the same. 

In this sector where funds and international support are scarce, organisations like ICCROM and Heritage for Peace continue to innovate on several fronts in order to mobilise ground-level work in safeguarding our collective heritage. This article sheds light on the various projects of these two organisations.

ICCROM, an intergovernmental organisation founded in 1956 at the 9^th session of UNESCO in New Delhi, has been working at the forefront of this field for more than half a century now. How must we protect humanity’s heritage and what role heritage can play in mitigating climate change, reducing disaster risk and building sustainable peace? These are some of the essential questions that ICCROM has been working on through its plethora of initiatives. 

First Aid and Resilience (FAR) for cultural heritage in times of crisis, is an ICCROM flagship programme aimed at developing capacities at the intersection of climate change, disasters and conflict to prevent, forecast and prepare for emergency situations. Such programmes are developed through context-based training that use human-centric design, community engagement, new media and technology, with coordination from various actors and stakeholders at city and regional level to aptly manage risks. The boundaries of these trainings are therefore beyond institutions, to communities at the city level. 

One of the important works ICCROM carried out was a course on fire risk in heritage places. Through 3D simulations and models, an extremely successful training was led in Estonia which paved the way for policies and increased skills in coping with such disasters. These trainings are therefore not just a source of knowledge and learning, but also brainstorming, forming policies, tools and strategies. 

Because this sector lacks adequate funding, this space is often ad-hoc and donor-driven which increases the risk of politics, as some heritage may well be considered more valuable than the other. ICCROM cuts through this challenge by directly involving locals to gauge which cultural heritage is important to them, how communities relate to it, and thereby training them as cultural first-aiders to act in times of crisis. So far more than 1000 cultural first aiders are trained globally in 120+ countries. Currently, Ihor Poshyvailo, a Ukrainian cultural first aider and an alumni of ICCROM First Aid to Cultural Heritage is helping to build the first national team of cultural first aiders in Ukraine. Similar training has also been carried out in other parts of the world such as Pakistan, Nepal, India etc. 

Using new methodologies that involve the use of technology, ICCROM has developed a mobile application that can help government, humanitarian organisations and other agents to estimate damage to tangible and intangible heritage in the first hours of an emergency.  In their extensive work with communities, it was also found that cultural first aid can also be a pathway for psychological support and early recovery from trauma, as seen in the case of Myagi Shriyo Net. Here the survivors of the recurring earthquake and Tsunami in Japan were engaged in the process of documentation and heritage preservation of collections of documents and other records at risk. These projects and methods of cultural heritage protection are a testament to the necessity of such intervention within the framework of humanitarian aid and relief. 

Observing the work of Heritage for Peace on the other hand sheds light on the importance of establishing a network of several actors/organisations to support heritage works indifferent to religion and nationality. President and Co-founder of the organisation, Isber Sabrine, has been spearheading the critical work they have been doing in Ukraine, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and Spain and stressed that culture remains the most basic need for humanities. 

Heritage for Peace has been working in past years to create an Arab network of civil society organisations to safeguard cultural heritage in the region. With huge parts of territories controlled by non-state actors in the region, it becomes critical that community and local-led initiatives work together to protect the extremely valuable cultural heritage sites situated in these conflict zones. This network of NGOs identifies and defines heritage protection projects, enhances visibility, empowers local community participation, and fosters inclusive social development and economic development. 

Amongst their relevant projects, PACTON.ES is aimed at documenting artefacts that were looted in the countries of conflict. In the absence of economic stability, looting and illicit trade have become extremely common in the region, and pose a great challenge on the ground. SHELTr, is an e-learning tool created to bridge gaps and misunderstandings between National, Islamic and International Heritage Law. It is designed to foster knowledge and depoliticise cultural heritage that is deemed valuable to humanity in all three legal contexts. The Rafakatuna project in Raqqa, funded by the protection fund of the British council, stands as a case study that the heritage that needs to be restored in time-sensitive scenarios is the heritage that benefits the community, as opposed to the structures that are not well integrated in the community’s practice. The Palmyrene Voice Initiative documents the Palmyrene wool and leather products of the Awassi sheep in the countries of the diaspora. This helps keep the cultural heritage and community’s identity alive despite the forced migration. 

Amongst several other projects that were either done or are ongoing in countries such as Yemen, Sudan and Libya, it was found that with low sums of money, cultural heritage protection missions have the potential to create a lot of employment opportunities amongst locals (source). We must strive to create more systems that facilitate such opportunities in crisis.

Cultural heritage sites and monuments are repositories of centuries of history and tradition. Despite this, cultural heritage protection is not fully mainstream into the language of humanitarian aid, nor is it operationalised in planning for it. Culture is our primary need. And not just in the times of crisis but we must also work towards building protection during times of peace. This can be ensured by building relationships with local stakeholders in the domain and strengthening them. 

Building a network of actors in which locals play an integral role in acting, protecting, mitigating, and responding when crisis strikes, is crucial. This process therefore requires as much ground-level participation, as it needs an international effort and recognition.

Learning from these efforts of ICCROM and Heritage for Peace, several takeaways can be noted for the humanitarian sector in South Asia and beyond. 

• Museums and cultural networks in South Asia and the Disaster management authorities must create channels of communication and partnerships to prepare, mitigate and preserve our cultural heritage.

• There must also be a mechanism for accountability when the important cultural heritage is being lost to conflicts, disasters and climate change.

• The region requires new humanitarian champions and actors for the protection of tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Here, the definition of culture should encompass all – common culture, subaltern culture, culture of protest, culture of labour and working-class culture.

• Increased partnership for protection during preparation for a crisis. 

• We must engage with a wide range of aid workers during policy-making as well as for the use of new digital technologies, AI, and machine learning that may be useful for our cause.

• Women have been marginalised, suppressed and discriminated against for centuries despite having contributed the most to the intangible and tangible cultural heritage of our times. Is there a feminist approach to heritage protection?

• There is no major exercise done on the global lessons learnt during the cultural heritage protection projects. We must formulate the same and specifically look at the knowledge gained for the region.

• And lastly, we must create space for financial support for anticipatory protection actions in South Asia. Unless we do not prepare the funds for the same, we will spend a lot more during times of crisis. 

  
  

Contributions from:

Isber Sabrine (Heritage for Peace), Aparna Tandon (ICCROM), Paola Jani, Mihir Bhatt (AIDMI), and Khayal Trivedi (HOISA)