November 25, 2015

France's asylum for artefacts: protecting treasures from ISIS

located:	France, Iraq, Nepal, Syria
editor:	Vanessa Ellingham

Here’s one way France is defending against ISIS that you may not have heard of: protecting cultural treasures.

Forget cultural diplomacy, where museums and embassies have in recent times made an effort to exhibit foreign pieces and spread goodwill. The President of the Louvre, Jean-Luc Martinez has drawn up a 50-point plan to defend civilisation and our treasures.

Following ISIS’s destruction buildings at the ancient site of Palmyra in Syria, France’s President Hollande commissioned Martinez to draw up the plan and his key recommendation - that France provides “asylum” for threatened artefacts - is already being pushed through law.

Recognising the cultural threat posed by ISIS, the plans don’t attempt to “convert” the organisation but rather preserve artefacts from the organisation’s idea that ancient history should be knocked down to make room for their fresh ideologies.

Martinez has suggested that up to 20% of ISIS’s funding may come from the cultural loot it is known to be selling abroad on the black market. So his plans propose both a new European database of stolen cultural property and a European Monitoring Centre to scrutinise the illicit art trade.

If given the go-ahead at European level or, as is suggested, by UNESCO, a fund would also be created to reconstruct damaged antiquities, and a program would be developed to train more archaeologists in Iraq and Syria.

Khaled al-Asaad, the antiques scholar who was killed by ISIS militants after refusing to lead them to Palmyra’s hidden treasures, would be remembered with a memorial in the Tuileries Garden in Paris.

As Jonathan Jones argues in The Guardian, “some people may object that this move is typical of French cultural elitism and say that instead of flamboyantly defending the Louvre’s “eurocentric” vision of civilisation, France should pour money into multicultural exhibitions, especially of Islamic art, to break down barriers. But that has been tried. Since 9/11, museums have embraced global culture with incredible enthusiasm and Islam in particular has been celebrated by shows like the British Museum’s Hajj.”

“But it makes no difference to terrorists if you admire classical temples or medieval minarets because their parody of religion makes them hate almost all expressions of creativity and thought – including many Islamic traditions. In Timbuktu, Islamists destroyed Sufi shrines and attacked mausoleums because these are supposedly against their “pure” fantasy of Islam.”

“Civilisation is under threat and it needs defending. “