Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 154

culpability presumably influenced sentencing; he received a term of � years
after the prosection asked for � to �� years.
What will be the short and long term impacts of this prosecution? Will
other extremists see this as a deterrent? Will generals or political leaders be
further cautioned?
In October ����, Burundi and South Africa announced their intention
to withdraw from the ICC. The nations argued that the court’s focus was
unfairly weighted towards prosecuting crimes in African states. But, the
response from observers including journalists and human rights experts is
that impunity for sitting heads of states and governments is a key factor in
the desire to leave the court (Note �).
There should never be impunity for crimes against culture. The UN member
states, international courts and governments must unite to ensure that
destruction – whether wanton, disproportionate, or explicitly willful – is not
swept under the carpet of political convenience.
But there are glimmers of hope for the future legal persecution of attempts to
erase people and their collective identity and memory. Experts in international
cultural heritage and rights, including Professor Patty Gerstenblith as well
as Professor Karima Bennoune, the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of
cultural rights, are passionately encouraging awareness and writing about
how such frameworks could be crafted.
In ����, Justice Trindade made direct references to Raphael Lemkin’s
thwarted efforts in an International Court of Justice dissenting opinion.
Rather than simply accepting the current language of the Convention as
the appeal judges had done in the Tolimir case at the ICTY, Justice Trindade
wrote: ‘The (Genocide) Convention, essentially people-centered, will have a
future if attention is rightly turned to its rationale, to its object and purpose...
Already for some time, attention has been drawn to the shortcomings of
the Convention against Genocide as originally conceived, namely: a) the
narrowing of its scope, excluding cultural genocide…’ (Note �)
It is an enormous satisfaction to a filmmaker that the source author feels
the adaptation has worked. Robert Bevan has written of the film that he may
personally have made something more ‘jagged’ and ‘pugnaciously dramatic’,
but that ‘Tim has instead, created an effective call to peace rather than arms
that, though passionate, appeals to our intellect more than our anger. It
works… It is Tim’s great skill that this central message comes through loud
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