Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 150

ashes of property targeted by enemy combatants in the ongoing U.S. Civil
War and was the first piece of legislation to call for the protection of cultural
property during armed conflict (Note �). The first true universal exploration
came in the ���� and ���� Hague Conventions, which declared forbidden ‘to
destroy or seize the enemy’s property, unless such destruction or seizure be
imperatively demanded by the necessities of war’.
The international community was responding primarily to the increased
efficacy of the tools of warfare, including the advent of dirigibles, airplanes
and advanced naval technology.
In ����, Raphael Lemkin, a young Polish Jewish lawyer, prepared to present
a paper to a League of Nations conference in Madrid. Inspired by the lack of
action taken against aggressor states after World War I, Lemkin put forward
a plan to create formalized international laws to prosecute ‘barbarism’, the
systematic killing of particular ethnic or religious groups, and ‘vandalism’,
the destruction of the cultural property and built environment of the targeted
group. Lemkin saw the two modes of destruction as parallel processes that
intended to erase a racial or ethnic group as well as their cultural imprints
in architecture, iconography and dissemination of ideas.
Lemkin served in the Polish Army during the ���� siege of Warsaw, later
escaping to the United States, but the loss of several family members in
the Holocaust as well as the targeted destruction of his own Polish Jewish
cultural patrimony compelled him to write: “It takes centuries and sometimes
thousands of years to create a natural culture, but Genocide can destroy a culture
instantly, like fire can destroy a building in an hour.” (Note �)
Lemkin’s proposal fell on deaf ears at the League of Nations, but its
successor organization, the United Nations, created in the wake of World
War II and the Holocaust, responded to Lemkin’s appeals by creating an
international convention to prevent and prosecute genocide. However, the
‘cultural genocide’ clauses of Lemkin’s initial drafts were excised, partly due
to the lobbying of nation states whose colonised Indigenous communities
and their cultures had been victims of these processes.
Nevertheless, in late ����, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organizations (UNESCO) was formed to ‘respond to the firm belief
of nations’ that ‘peace must be established on the basis of humanity’s moral
and intellectual solidarity’ (Note �). In ����, the Hague Convention for the
Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict was crafted
and signed by member states of UNESCO. Some states immediately ratified
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