Conflict takes toll on historic sites

With at least 130 historical sites in Iran damaged by United States-Israeli strikes and concerns also growing over Lebanon’s cultural sites amid Israeli bombardment, Iranian artist Neda Zoghi says the attacks “surpass the conventional definition of collateral damage”.

“When over 100 cultural heritage sites and museums sustain deliberate or negligent destruction in a matter of weeks, we are confronting something far more calculated — the systematic dismantling of a civilization’s physical memory,” said Zoghi, who holds a doctorate in Islamic art and is a civilization specialist at the Asia West East Centre, a research center based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Iranian Minister of Cultural Heritage, Tourism, and Handicrafts Seyed Reza Salehi-Amiri said at least 131 historical and civilizational monuments across 20 Iranian provinces were damaged during attacks by the US and Israel, Xinhua News Agency reported on Friday.

Tehran suffered the most as 63 historical, cultural and civilizational monuments in the capital were affected, including the Golestan Palace, “which is a masterpiece of the Safavid and Qajar eras’ architecture”, the minister said, adding that the Sa’dabad Palace, with an area spanning about 100 hectares and around 20 museums, also suffered serious damage.

In the central province of Isfahan, 23 historical and civilizational sites were damaged, the most important being the Chehel Sotoun Palace, which is inscribed on the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization World Heritage List. In the western province of Kurdistan, 12 historical monuments have been damaged.

“As someone who has spent decades studying Iranian artistic traditions, I can tell you that these are not empty buildings. Every tile-work panel, every inscribed archway, every manuscript cabinet represents a node in a living network of human knowledge that took centuries to construct and cannot be reconstructed in any lifetime,” Zoghi said.

She said that Iranian artistic heritage is deeply layered. A single mosque may contain brickwork, calligraphy, tile mosaics, and painted interiors, and each layer has a different conversation.

“When such a structure is damaged, you do not lose one thing. You lose many things simultaneously, each irreplaceable,” Zoghi said.

“The international community must understand: these sites are not symbols of the current political order. They predate it by centuries or millennia.

“The targeting of such spaces constitutes a form of cultural violence that international law has specifically named and prohibited. And yet here we are.”

Following the damage to the Golestan Palace, UNESCO released a statement on March 2, saying it continues to closely monitor the situation of cultural heritage in Iran and across the region, with a view to ensuring its protection.

“UNESCO recalls that cultural property is protected under international law, notably the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, including its enhanced protection mechanism, as well as the 1972 Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage,” the statement said.

As security deteriorated in the region, UNESCO issued another statement calling for maximum restraint and to take all necessary measures to spare education, culture, media, sciences, and the environment as the social foundations of societies.

It lamented that since the outbreak of hostilities on Feb 28, sites including the Golestan Palace in Iran, the White City of Tel Aviv in Israel, and Tyre in Lebanon — all inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List — have been reported as impacted and damaged.

It expressed concerns for other countries also under threat, notably Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cyprus, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkiye, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.

In Gaza, which has been under intense Israeli bombardment for three years, UNESCO is conducting a preliminary damage assessment for cultural properties through remote monitoring based on satellite imagery and analysis provided.

As of March 24, UNESCO confirmed it has verified damage to 164 sites in Gaza since Oct 7, 2023 — 14 religious sites, 128 buildings of historical or artistic interest, three depositories of movable cultural property, nine monuments, two museums, and eight archaeological sites.

“Perhaps the deepest misconception is that the destruction of Iranian cultural heritage harms only Iranians, or only Muslims, or only those who sympathize with Iran’s current government. This is profoundly wrong,” said Zoghi, the Iranian artist.

She noted that Persepolis, for instance, is not an Iranian nationalist monument. It is a world monument — the ceremonial capital of an empire that issued the first known human rights declaration, a decree by Cyrus the Great now held at the UN as a symbol of universal dignity.

Heritage sites such as the cave paintings of Lorestan, the ancient city of Susa, and the stepped gardens of Pasargadae represent the shared story of human civilization.

“When they are damaged or destroyed, every schoolchild in Tehran, every art student in Berlin, every archaeologist in Cairo loses something. Heritage destruction is always a crime against the future, not merely against the present,” Zoghi said.

As the intensity of dizzying developments switched between US-Iran tit-for-tat strikes and Israel’s relentless pounding of Lebanon, UNESCO convened an extraordinary meeting on April 1 to strengthen the protection of cultural heritage in Lebanon, following Beirut’s request.

The meeting led to granting provisional enhanced protection to 39 cultural properties in Lebanon, as well as the provision of international financial assistance totaling over $100,000 for emergency operations on the ground, UNESCO said in a statement the same day.

Some experts in the region have expressed concerns that even if major sites such as Tyre and Baalbek are not directly targeted, vibrations from nearby explosions could destabilize structures and columns.

Baalbek, a large archaeological complex, is home to some of the world’s best-preserved ancient Roman temple ruins. It is also home to Lebanon’s renowned cultural Baalbeck International Festival.

Nabil Najjar, a member of the executive committee of Baalbeck International Festival, said the ongoing strikes are targeting the town of Baalbek much less than southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs.

“The festival has not been canceled yet. It was supposed to take place at the end of July (and) beginning of August. But it is likely that the festival will be postponed or canceled this year,” Najjar said.

In 2024, he said, the perimeter wall of the Baalbek archaeological site was hit and the UNESCO shield was immediately raised to protect the site. “An inspection was necessary to check if the columns and temples were affected by the vibrations caused by the explosion that was very close. Many UNESCO-protected sites throughout Lebanon were protected by this shield later on.

“In 2024, it was the Baalbeck International Festival committee that raised the concern together with (Lebanon’s) Minister of Culture Ghassan Salameh, asking UNESCO to help protect the cultural sites of Lebanon.”

Enhanced protection

Arie Afriansyah, a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Indonesia, said that UNESCO’s move to enhance protection for 39 cultural sites in Lebanon “is legally important, but only partly effective in practice”.

“Enhanced protection under the 1999 Second Protocol gives listed sites the highest treaty-based protection: they must not be attacked or used for military purposes, and serious violations should be criminalized,” he said.

“Its real value is deterrence, clearer no-strike identification, documentation, and stronger accountability later. But it is not a physical shield.

“In Lebanon, damage has still occurred, and the regime is weakened because Israel is not a party to the 1999 Second Protocol, though the 1954 Hague Convention still applies.”

Parties in the conflict, Afriansyah said, should be held accountable if they attack the protected properties.

Zoghi, the Iranian artist, said the drafters of the 1954 Hague Convention understood something essential: that cultural property belongs not to the state that happens to hold it, but to all of humanity. That is why “the protection it affords is unconditional”.

“What we observe today is a troubling pattern of selective enforcement. When Iran retaliates — and one may debate the proportionality or wisdom of that retaliation — resolutions are passed with remarkable speed,” said Zoghi.

Yet, she said, the original strikes that triggered those responses, strikes that damaged mosques, synagogues, historic bazaars, archaeological museums, and pre-Islamic Zoroastrian sites, “receive no equivalent international censure”.

“This asymmetry is not merely politically inconvenient. It is legally corrosive. It teaches every future aggressor that the Convention is a shield available only to the powerful,” she added.

Zoghi said this is “not to justify any particular military action”, but because the “integrity of international humanitarian law depends on its universal application”.

“The moment it becomes a tool selectively deployed against one party, it ceases to function as law and becomes instead a form of geopolitical rhetoric dressed in legal language. That is dangerous for every civilization on Earth, not only for Iran,” Zoghi said.

The civilization specialist also rejected framing the conflict as a “religious war” as Iranian civilization or “what we call the broader Persianate world” was never a monolith of religious identity.

“To reduce this heritage and this conflict to a simple religious binary is to commit violence against history itself. It erases the complexity of what Iran’s civilization is — that is simultaneously Muslim, Christian, Jew, Zoroastrian, ancient, and modern,” Zoghi said. “You may wage war against a government, (but) history will never forgive you for waging war against civilization, as you never forgot the Nazis.”

jan@chinadailyapac.com