On July 7, the Amerigo Vespucci training ship, moored in New York, will host the Permanent Mission of Italy to the United Nations for a meeting on the protection of cultural heritage in peacekeeping operations. The event is being held on the sidelines of the fifth United Nations Chiefs of Police Summit, the gathering that brings together police chiefs, ministers and institutional representatives to discuss the role of policing in UN missions. UNESCO, INTERPOL, UNODC, UNOCT, UNICRI, the Department of Peace Operations and the Carabinieri are also involved in the program.
In war, armies, infrastructure and civilians are not the only targets. Religious sites, archives, archaeological sites, libraries and monuments are often destroyed as well, sometimes precisely to strike at the memory of a community. When an armed group tears down a mausoleum or loots a museum, it is not only causing cultural damage: it may be trying to erase a history, intimidate a population or finance its activities by selling objects on the illegal market. In 2017, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2347, dedicated to the destruction and trafficking of cultural heritage by terrorist groups in armed conflict.
The case that changed much of the way this issue is discussed is Mali. In 2012, during the jihadist occupation of Timbuktu, mausoleums and religious sites listed as UNESCO World Heritage were attacked. In 2016, the International Criminal Court convicted Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi for the war crime connected to the attack on ten historic and religious monuments. It was one of the first cases in which the destruction of cultural heritage was treated as a matter of international criminal law rather than as simple collateral damage. The UN mission in Mali, MINUSMA, later became the first major example of a peacekeeping operation with tasks explicitly linked to the protection of cultural and historic sites.
The discussion aboard the Vespucci will therefore focus on mandates, traceability, databases, police cooperation and personnel training. It will also look at how to protect a cultural site during a peacekeeping mission whose main purpose is not exclusively that, because priorities are already numerous and resources, security and reliable information are often lacking. This means understanding when looting is just theft and when it is part of a specific criminal plan; it also means having inventories and photographs before objects disappear; and it means making soldiers, police officers, customs authorities, prosecutors and cultural institutions work together without waiting for the crisis to be over.
Italy brings a particular experience to this discussion, not only because it has 61 sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List, more than any other country, but also because in 1969 it created a specialized Carabinieri unit for the protection of cultural heritage. Italy’s database of unlawfully removed cultural goods contains more than 7.2 million catalogued objects and over 1.1 million images. That says two things at once: Italy has highly developed tools, but also a very large problem to manage.
The international side of the work depends above all on INTERPOL. Its stolen works of art database contains nearly 57,000 objects and is built on certified information provided by the competent authorities. The ID-Art app allows police forces, customs officers, collectors and market operators to check more easily whether an object has been reported stolen. UNESCO is also working on a virtual museum of stolen objects, designed to make visible what often disappears silently through changes of ownership, borders and private collections.
The meeting can be followed through the dedicated streaming link.
