The ethics of partnership

This chapter discusses the ethical dilemmas associated with attempting to protect cultural property in the event of armed conflict and why such protection is important. It provides a brief history of cultural property protection (CPP) from the writings of Sun Tzu in sixth-century BCE China to the post-Second World War attempts to make such destruction a war crime as led by Raphael Lemkin. These efforts led to the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and its Protocols of 1954 and 1999. The chapter notes that those drafting the Convention anticipated the immediate establishment of the ‘Red Cross of Cultural Property’ that they referred to as the ‘Blue and White Shield’ in relation to the protective emblem of the Convention. The chapter focuses on the author’s personal involvement in CPP since 2003, when he became the advisor to the UK’s Ministry of Defence on the identification and protection of the archaeological heritage in Iraq immediately prior to the US/UK-led invasion. It discusses the criticisms made at the time and attempts to address them in the 2011 edited volume Cultural Heritage, Ethics, and the Military . It then charts the development and current activities of the Blue Shield, finally established 42 years later than anticipated in 1996 and that only received minimal funding 21 years after that in 2017. It ends with a series of unresolved ethical issues relating to CPP.