so we've heard a lot of amazing stories
and information tonight about the
various ways that we can lose cultural
heritage to looting but we haven't
really talked about losing cultural
heritage to armed conflict and the kind
of looting that basically just happens
when you have an entire nation like Nazi
Germany kind of devoted to looting on
the most massive scale in history and
there was a recent movie called the
monuments men that kind of in a
fictionalized way devoted itself to
talking about the monuments men and
these were really my heroes when I was
in grad school studying art history and
also serving as a young military officer
and I thought wow that's pretty cool
I would love to save art as part of my
military career there were fewer than
350 monuments men altogether most of
them were in the US military
a small handful of them were from the
British military and then other Allied
forces and and think of this in a
conflict of over a billion people
throughout World War two while we have
this amazing story the monuments men not
a lot of people remembered it and I
think that the movie really brought to
bear this awareness about cultural
property during armed conflict and and
the risk that it takes yes of course
people are killed and people are
displaced on a massive scale but what
happens to their identity to their
cultural heritage and how did the Nazi
looting of millions of objects and and
particularly from European museums and
Jewish collections where people were
targeted specifically because of their
collections like the Rothschild family
etc you know how how do you combat that
and so we had this small group of people
dedicated to this this is James rorimer
who was a serving military and infantry
officer and basically most of the
monuments men were already actively
serving in the military and the cultural
heritage professional community the
museums community essentially told the
military where to find these folks
within the ranks who had this kind of
capability
James rumor was a curator at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art they brought
him out of the infantry and over to the
monuments men and they worked kind of
all across Europe
first of all preventing or trying to
prevent through mapping by providing
maps to the military to keep them from
hitting sites with bombing but then
later as they discovered the looted
material that the Nazis were was we're
keeping around in Austria and Germany
finding that material figuring out a way
to repatriate it to its country of
origin so it could be returned to its
rightful owners so we learned a big
lesson from that and the countries of
the world got together and decided to
create a new international treaty the
1954 Hague Convention - specifically to
protect cultural heritage during armed
conflict but that doesn't mean that it
necessarily worked you can make treaties
but a lot of times the countries
involved in conflicts don't necessarily
adhere to them so we had terrible
situations like the intentional
targeting of cultural heritage in the
Bosnia conflict we had the deliberate
destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by
the Taliban and I think most of us
remember the 2003 looting of the Iraq
museum it was very much in the media
that everything from the museum was
completely gone that actually turned out
not to be true
the museum staff hid many of those
collections or most of the collections
in a secret storage location the real
saviors of cultural heritage in these
terrible situations of disaster and
armed conflict and looting are the
people who take care of it every day
those curators those museum directors
who often risk their lives to do this
and this was the same case in the Iraq
museum but they did indeed lose more
than 15,000 objects for the collection
that's an estimate
commentation very important you don't
know what's been looted from your museum
if it hasn't properly been catalogued
and photographed to begin with
unfortunately that was the case with the
Iraq museum under the ten years of
sanctions they had it really been able
to take the time to document excavation
material that was coming into the museum
it kind of got boxed and put in storage
and that was the first place the looters
went was to the storage areas they
couldn't hide everything
many many storage magazines over a
million objects were in this museum when
it was looted and unfortunately many of
the regional museums had stored their
collections in Baghdad for safekeeping
which turned out to be not so safe you'd
think that there's an international
group sort of a cultural heritage rescue
squad that parachutes in after an
incident like this and that's what I
thought I was a very naive major who was
assigned to go to Baghdad to help with
the museum and to help advise the
Ministry of Culture as an art historian
and museum curator myself and suddenly
realized that we had a much larger scale
problem than just the museum looting we
had looting of archaeological sites
throughout the country you know under
the Saddam Hussein death was the penalty
for looting if he got caught but you
know suddenly here was a really unstable
situation with looting happening in the
city of Baghdad so it wasn't very easy
to go out to the countryside and protect
archaeological sites and so here's the
extent of the monuments men for Baghdad
in 2003 and one of them was a woman
there were monuments women in World War
two as well but so my colleague was
Sumner their captain was Sumner at the
time was landscape archaeologist and so
he he preceded me in Baghdad and you
know when I arrived after the looting I
I was called up as an individual went
straight to Baghdad and he said Wow okay
good luck with this because I'm gonna go
save the National Zoo now and that's
exactly what he proceeded to do and he
wrote a wonderful book
about it so but I just want to point out
that we're at the central bank of Iraq
in this photo in Baghdad and we're here
because a wonderful collection of
archaeological artifacts from the site
at NIMH Rude often referred to as the
treasure of NIMH rood which is a very
important probably next to King Tut's
treasure and the bactrian hoard probably
the third most important treasure of the
like and National Geographic was very
very worried about the status of this
collection and had representatives there
on the ground they had a project where
they actually paid to pump water out of
the basement of the Arak National Museum
and why the military hadn't figured out
how to do this yet I still don't have a
clue but and it had to be done more than
once because they were having a hard
time finding out where the water was
coming in but finally they were able to
do so and I you know got 10 years later
just want to thank my colleagues at
National Geographic for contributing to
that and allowing us to safeguard this
really important cultural resource so
coming back and realizing that there
really isn't an organization who does
this kind of cultural heritage rescue
like on the ground
immediate response kind of like Doctors
Without Borders does for people I really
realized that there is not that kind of
Museum for culture we have UNESCO which
is a really important organization that
does major cultural heritage
preservation projects but I'm talking
about real have a bag packed by your
door and have all your shots and go and
help your colleagues in a disaster
situation like this so we created the
u.s. committee of the Blue Shield it's a
nonprofit organization that's part of an
international network to do this kind of
or to support this kind of work but it's
still very difficult and I'll talk about
you know some of the ongoing challenges
of trying to do this kind of work
internationally I don't think I have to
go too far into the problems with
Egyptian sites but I have to say
it felt a little bit DejaVu seeing
images of anna major archaeological
museum in a country where there was
horrible instability and seeing images
of soldiers inside the National Museum
in Egypt a place that I'd only gotten an
opportunity to visit once and you know
worried very much about what was going
to happen with the sights another major
area where we've seen intentional
destruction of cultural heritage
recently you heard about the jihadist
groups who occupied northern Mali and
finally in January of 2012 they were
driven out by French forces but not
before they did a tremendous amount of
damage to the cultural heritage of the
region and particularly the historic
city of Timbuktu where they damaged they
burned many of the manuscript
collections of the Achmed Baba library
they looted museums as you can see there
they destroyed the Sufi Saints
mausoleums around the city of Timbuktu
and they also in a really insidious way
prevented Malians from practicing their
very important intangible heritage no
singing no traditional dress women were
not allowed to wear their hair the way
they wanted to men were required to
dress in a certain way and they weren't
allowed to have dance poetry or theatre
so these things for millions you know
we're almost as damaged damaging to
their culture as seeing the objects to
start and then finally the really
terrible scenario that we're
experiencing now with the Syrian civil
war this is the ancient souk in Aleppo
this is just one example of the many
many tragic cases the city of Aleppo is
a world heritage site and it has been
pretty much devastated during the
conflict the Grand Mosque has been
grievously damaged that whole central
ancient part of the city damaged crac de
chevaliers the crusader fortress another
world hair
site very much devastated from being
used as a military base of operations
and the fighting going on between the
two sides those are just a few examples
so what can we do about it resources
well where I work the Smithsonian a few
years ago recognized that there is a
need for this type of response and with
our resources that we have 19 museums 9
research centers a zoo and more than
6,000 colleagues that I can call upon
for their time and their expertise it's
it's become really clear that through
partnerships a sort of
whole-of-government approach talking
with organizations within government
like the Department of State USAID the
Department of Defense that we can have a
lot of effect and then partnering with
nongovernmental organizations and
nonprofits like National Geographic like
the Blue Shield like the International
Council of museums etc that we can have
an effect so in order to help with this
Darth of modern-day monuments men as we
like to say the Blue Shield and
instituted a program of training u.s.
military forces about cultural property
protection specifically Civil Affairs
units the world war two monuments men
were Civil Affairs and they still are
today this is a very recent one just a
couple of weeks ago we had Marines from
the civil military operation school at
Quantico at the National Portrait
Gallery and American Art Museum training
on packing and crating in emergency
situations the Haiti project was a big
area where Smithsonian really recognized
the need to jump in and help with
cultural recovery during that we
partnered with a number of organizations
including the American Institute for
conservation which is based here in DC
the President's Committee on the arts
and humanities helped us get it kicked
off with Michelle Obama's involvement
and we were able to help our Haitian
colleagues save more than 30,000 objects
of their heritage over an 18-month
project near the Holy Trinity murals
that were saved and these are being
stored until they can build a new church
we have a museum professional training
program at the Smithsonian which works
around the world but in particular
recently we went to Mali to help train
their museum professionals plus
professionals from eight other West
African countries on disaster risk
management thinking about using museums
for post-conflict reconciliation and
other programs to really help museum
professionals think about that what-if
scenario what if this could happen in my
museum or if it already has sharing
information about how you were able to
save your collections we hope to be able
to serve as a point of coordination for
multiple partnerships to help be that
emergency responder for cultural
heritage to help our colleagues who are
under duress from natural disasters and
armed conflicts to save their
collections and to train about
documentation and international legal
instruments that can help worldwide and
saving our cultural heritage thanks a
lot
Oh