Sarah
Jane Meharg
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of
Geography
Queens University Kingston
Ontario
Tel: 011 (613) 533-6000 x75940
identicide@hotmail.com
www.postconflict.com
Ms. Meharg is currently completing her Ph.D. at Queens
University, Kingston Canada and has created an NGO called Pre-Conflict Planners. Ms.
Meharg will be seeking employment with UNESCO upon graduation in autumn 2002, and hopes to
pursue a career in protecting cultural property during conflict and rebuilding cultural
spaces in post-conflict communities. She and Dr. Brian S. Osborne will be publishing a
book on these topics in 2004 for the opening of Novi-Most in Mostar. Feel free to
contact Ms. Meharg if you are interested in these topics, or if you have an interest in
the Bridge of Mostar and its reconstruction.
Identicide
and Cultural Cannibalism:
Warfares Appetite for
Symbolic Place
(Previously published as
"Identicide and Cultural Cannibalism: Warfares Appetite for Symbolic
Place", Peace Research Journal 33:3 November (2001), 89-98.)
Please, no reproductions of this
article except by permission from author.
© Sarah Jane Meharg
Ph.D. (Geography) Candidate
Department of Geography, Queens
University
Kingston, Ontario, Canada
None need to be reminded of the impact
of the ravages of war. Peoples, economies, and political systems all suffer, as do many
material icons of cultural heritage. Throughout history, revered monuments and shrines,
buildings and sites with historical, aesthetic, or scientific value are destroyed. And
often they are deliberately targeted in an attempt at destroying identities. Indeed, identicide
and cultural cannibalism are diagnostic features of war, ancient and modern. Some
societies have gone to great lengths to erase all traces of other cultures from their
landscapes. Sacred sites have been despoiled. Vernacular places have been destroyed, and
visual prompts of cultural identity have been elided from familiar places. Paradoxically,
this has taken place in Bosnia and Afghanistan even as the rest of the world attempts to
preserve and protect sites of cultural heritage as part of our shared patrimony. This
paper is concerned with the intentional destruction of symbolic landscapes during warfare.
Two extraordinary cases of identicide and cultural cannibalism in recent years were the
purposeful destruction of the Bridge of Mostar in Bosnia and the bombing of the Bamiyan
Buddhas in Afghanistan.
Symbolic Place
Landscape provides a context within which humans
live, and also provides the boundaries, quite complexly, within which people remake
themselves and are "worked" upon by the landscape they have constructed. So
framed, "place becomes like personalityunique and particular." Further,
landscape is seen as a "prop" of memory and identity and may be contested
because it holds significance for people, situating a "sense of place" and
"genus loci." This emotional bonding of people with place is psychic in nature4
and resides in the "realm of memory."
As symbolic landscapes create a particularity of
place, they also act as narratives of collective memory that underpin the cohesion and
identity of groups. Halbwachs argues that "we preserve memories of each epoch in our
lives, and these are continually reproduced; through them a sense of our identity is
perpetuated. The localization of memory on the material is what negotiates its survival,
and by removing the material we begin to erase memory. Without landscape to trigger
memory, there is no link with the past, and it recedes beyond our collective memory. Yet,
place can also reside in the cerebral, and can exist as a psychic terrain, saturated with
meaning and symbolism. Further, "landmarks" represent the convergence of the
material with the cerebral, mixing historic and mythic circumstances. They act as mnemonic
devices within our lived-in world, representing such things as dates, people, or even
myths that aid in the creation of nationalism.
A major thrust in recent geographical studies has
involved examining the political uses to which regions are increasingly put by political
movements, parties, and ethnocrats.1 Agnew argues that landscapes within regions have a
significant role in the "genesis and organization of ethnonationalists and anti-state
political movements" and may serve as the ideological foundation upon which political
movements can mobilize popular support. Regionalism and a local "sense of place"
help restore social belonging that can be readily visualized through landmarks,
landscapes, diets, music, clothing and histories, but also to justify ideological
movements. Such spatial expressions of "blood and soil" have been used to
describe some of the causes of the Balkan war, linking "blood and belonging" to
the "constructed" symbolic landscape.
Identicide
War tactics that are meant to denigrate and destroy
the social fabric of community are not new. These age-old tactics are some of the most
effective war tools, and unfortunately, have been re-introduced into modern warfare. Such
acts of identicide subject people to periods of meaninglessness, forgetting, and loss of
identity when their bond with place is broken. Globalization and urban change can result
in "placelessness"the opposite of a sense of place. Symbolic landscape
hinges upon particularity of place, yet identicide and cultural cannibalism diminish
difference among places resulting in a homogenization of landscapes devoid of meaning.
People grieve the destruction of symbolic place at a level equated with the death of a
loved one, and there is a marked emotional response to the loss of ones home or
homeland that can be described with similar adjectives used to describe feelings of grief.
There are many examples throughout history of defiled temples, desecrated altars, and
purposeful destruction of symbolic lands, but what is it about landscape that can
infuriate a people and draw out intense acts of identicide and cultural cannibalism?
Identity resides in landscape, constructed through a
series of factors including gender and historical context. It satisfies a sense of social
belonging and evokes a dynamic relationship between the past and the present. Yet,
territorial identities can be among the most salient and provoke the greatest degree of
ambivalence and conflict between peoples. Wrong argues "identity is always
problematic, something that is not just given but that has to be sought, striven for, and
forged out of fragments, or if attained is constantly subject to diffusion and confusion,
even to outright dissolution." Interestingly, as warfare has become confined within
state borders, tactics employed by the Romans and Mongols resurface, and areas of symbolic
importance are targeted. In times of conflict, the very sight of anothers cultural
symbols can create tension; thus, in Bosnia, a Bosnian Serb may view a Bosnian Muslim
mosque as a threatening symbol within a contested cultural landscape, or in Afghanistan,
artwork depicting human or animal forms may be considered heretical.
The discourses of genocide reflect the systematic
destruction of culture so that the rites, rituals, and places are no longer available to
enact culture and the people themselves have been killed or moved. Either way, identity is
defective, collective memory is rendered useless, and social fabric is destroyed.
Curbing the Appetite
The impact of war on cultural heritage has spurred a
global heritage protection movement. The western world has been concerned with the
protection of cultural property for more than a century. The Lieber Code (1864) and the
Brussels Declaration (1874) led to The Hague Convention, which in 1907 adopted the
"laws and customs of land warfare." This protocol set out the rules of warfare
and the protection of PoWs, civilian populationsand cultural property. Subsequently,
the League of Nations codified the protection of cultural property, but it was not until
1946 that the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
took over the protection mandate of the League of Nations and concentrated on peacetime
protection. In 1954, The Hague Convention approved the "protection of cultural
property in the event of armed conflict." Further, the UNESCO convention of 1972
encourages signatories to protect their natural and cultural heritage by promoting
international co-operation in conservation, providing technical assistance, and offering
emergency assistance for world heritage sites in immediate danger. Since 1946, UNESCO has
sponsored the identification, protection, and preservation worldwide of cultural and
natural heritage considered to be of outstanding value to humanity. To date, 190 states
parties have signed the UNESCO convention.
By signing the convention, each country pledges to
conserve not only the world heritage sites situated on its territory, but also to protect
heritage beyond its borders. Both Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia signed the
convention, yet due to the complexities surrounding the breakdown of state leadership, the
original agreement was rendered null, and had no bearing on the destruction of cultural
property by both the Taliban and the Balkan belligerents. We should ask ourselves if a
political legacy offers future accountability. Curiously, such protection was not extended
to two examples of ancient symbolic landscape: the Bridge of Mostar and the Bamiyan
Buddhas.
Bridge of Mostar
The city of Mostar is located south of Sarajevo on
the Neretva River. It was located on an important economic trading juncture and outpost of
the Ottoman Empire. The city received the Aga Khan Foundation Award for architecture in
1987 and was an important tourist destination.
In 1557, a bridge was commissioned by Sultan
Sulejman the Magnificent to span the Neretva River. It was to incorporate the newest
building techniques and style of Ottoman Baroque architecture. The Bridge of Mostar
successfully remained intact for over 400 years. Acting as a touchstone of memory, its
presence activated the collective memory of the local community and united groups beyond
its borders, as a symbol on stamps, currency and as a symbol of the Sarajevo Olympics.
It was a narrow, ivory-coloured limestone structure,
peaked in the middle, with steep inclines on both sides, 30 metres long and 20 metres
high. It was declared the most beautiful of bridges in the world when it was completed. It
was wide enough to accommodate foot travel, and many locals would stroll along it on their
evening walk. It was where people met to discuss their business, their lives, and their
families. It became a place of romance, where teens received their first kiss. The Bridge
of Mostar resonated with rites of passage. It was considered one of the greatest
historical monuments of the Balkans.
The worst of the Yugoslav conflict occurred between
1991 and 1994, and the city of Mostar was attacked and destroyed for the duration of the
war. In April 1992, Bosnia Serb forces first attacked the Old Bridge. In a strange turn of
events, the original protectors of the Bridge, the Bosnia Croats, attacked the bridge in
May 1993, when they turned against their Muslim allies on the left bank of the river.
Their intention was to split the union of the two shores of Mostarone shore would be
Muslim and the other Croat.
Frantic attempts to protect the bridge with
scaffolding, roofing tin, and old rubber were futile. Locals knew the importance of the
bridge, and believed that with all its beauty and grace, it was "built to outlive
people; it was an attempt to grasp eternity." Yet, despite the bridges fame,
despite its symbolism to a community and to the nation, the historic bridge was shelled at
point-blank range and collapsed into the Neretva River. Later, the Croat soldiers cheered
and fired their guns in the air as they revelled in erasing an enduring symbol of
multiculturalism in the Balkans.
The Bamiyan Buddhas
Afghanistan is a country rich in history. It has
been involved in historical milestones due to its location on the borders of many powerful
empires. Buddhism was introduced into the Afghan area in the third century and centralized
in the northeast, near the border of Pakistan. At the time, the country lay at the heart
of the Silk Route, and all travellers moving east to west overland were required to trek
through the Bamiyan Valley region in the northeast. With the caravans came the Buddhist
monks, who taught their religion along the route. Eastern Afghanistan became rich with
monks, monasteries, sacred places, and profound artwork.
The inspiration of Buddhism called for the
construction of two masterpieces to grace the main trade route. The massive statues would
greet travellers as they entered the Bamiyan Valley, insuring safe travel as they
departedmaking the gesture of "reassurance."
The two statues were hewn out of rock around the
fourth and fifth centuries AD. They were covered with mud and straw mixture to model the
expression of the face, the hands, and the folds of the robes. They were then covered with
plaster and painted. The smaller Buddha is 38 m and was coloured blue, and the larger one,
standing at 53 m, was red. The hands and faces were of gold.
Most symbols of religion come under scrutiny at one
time or another by iconoclasts, and the Buddhas were no different. It appears that this
fate was meted out to the frescoes surrounding the Buddhas, and also the monks cells
located in the hewn rock. The idea of iconoclasm is to take away the soul of the hated
image by obliterating, or at least deforming, the head and hands. Yet even with this
cannibalism, the Buddhas survived over 1500 years of human activity.
The Taliban became known to the international
community in 1994 and began to broker a "sense of peace" in warring Afghanistan.
The Taliban now control 90% of the country on the claim of creating a "pure Islamic
state." They have attempted to eradicate television, music, cinema, artwork, and
health care and education for women all of which that consider immoral or frivolous. The
Talibans strategy is to rid the country of all non-Islamic symbology, namely
"idols" or depictions of humans and animalswhich are forbidden by Islam.
Since 1998, the Bamiyan Valley has been in the hands
of the Taliban. As early as 1997, the commander in charge of taking over the valley told
the international press that as soon as he was able to take control of the area, he would
destroy the Buddhas. Of course, this got the attention of UNESCO and other protection
agenciesbut specifically the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistans
Cultural Heritage (SPACH), which has since tried to create a peaceful, non-violent outcome
of the Taliban rule in the Bamiyan Valley, and other significant places throughout
Afghanistan.
Yet even with pre-destruction knowledge, the
international community looked onappearing to ignore the early warning signs of
imminent destruction. In March 2001, the Buddhas were shelled point-blank and reduced to
rubble. The Taliban directing the onslaught later cheered and had their photos taken above
the piles of rock and dust.
Conclusion: Cultural Cannibalism
Satiated?
The lure of control and of staking a claim in a
particular locale to declare autonomy and identity are strong factors of both regionalism
and nationalism today, and to "lose the landscape is to lose the right to define
identity in the landscape." Some societies have gone to great lengths to erase
competing symbols on shared landscapes, in order to perpetrate ethnocide, ethnic
cleansing, and genocide. This century has witnessed cultural genocide in its extreme with
mass murders of civilian populations, in an atrocity that may be compounded by the
deprivation of national identity grounded in symbolic landscape.
In contrast to "traditional" inter-state
wars in which "warriors" went off to do battle against each other on foreign
battlefields, modern intra-state ethnic warfare is characterized by systematic mass
killings of civilians in civil conflict. The end result is that civilians are suffering in
an unprecedented manner as homes, communities, and symbolic buildings are targeted and
destroyed. In particular, landscapes seem to attract the attention of combatants as they
appreciate the nuanced power of symbolic landscapes as powerful manifestations of meaning,
memory, and identity that contest their own. Powerful political regimes seem to be
repelled by such landscapes and attempt to homogenize such environs. Political movements
that seek to gain control over the social production of space, place, and landscape to
manipulate citizens have been witnessed in the "new" wars contrived by the
politicians.
Do cultural cannibalism and identicide satiate
warfares appetite for symbolic place? Probably not, as there is no accountability
for perpetrators destroying world heritage and our shared cultural patrimony. The drive of
intentional destruction goes on, and continues in both Bosnia and Afghanistan at an
alarming rate. Insatiable cultural cannibalism consumed the bridge and the Buddhas. UNESCO
"condemned" these destructive acts, yet condemnation does not stop a regime from
eliminating what they please. Peace practitioners need a deeper and more complex
understanding of the dynamic relationship between people and place, because the victims of
identicide are not the bridge or the Buddhas, but the societies which subscribed to these
monuments of culture and spirit. They are left with a sense of placelessness devoid of
particularity and familiarity. Not only are the perpetrators guilty of reducing grand
architectural edifices to piles of rubble, they are ensuring that culture and identity
have nowhere to reside, nowhere to be ritualized, and nowhere to be remembered.
Notes:
(1) - Identicide is the act of
destroying vernacular and symbolic place during war with the intention of erasing cultural
identity and a sense of social belonging; see Sarah Meharg, Making It and Breaking It
and Making It Again: The Importance of Identity in the Destruction and Reconstruction of
War-torn Societies, (1999). Further, cultural cannibalism is the intentional
elimination of symbolism representing a culture, perceived as threatening or contested. It
could be argued that identicide and cultural cannibalism are, in fact, conceptually the
same, but one distinction must be made. That is, identicide occurs when groups contest and
aim to destroy one anothers places of identity, while cultural cannibalism is a
diagnostic tool for the destruction of shared world culture and heritage for immediate
political, religious, or ideological goals. The Taliban, for example, are aiming to
destroy a contested Buddhist landscape impregnated with historical Afghan significance to
reach the short-term goal of creating a pure Islamic state. They are in fact, destroying
shared cultural patrimony, and cannibalizing culture.
(2) - See W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape
and Power (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), and also the pertinent
analysis by D. Mitchell, "The Lure of the Local: Landscape Studies at the End of a
Troubled Century," Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 2 (2001), p. 269-81.
(3) - See John Agnew, "Regions in
Revolt," Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 1 (2001), p. 103-110.
(4) - See Brian Osborne,
"Constructing Landscapes of Power: the George Etienne Cartier Monument,
Montreal," Journal of Historical Geography 24 (1998), p. 431-58, for further
analysis concerning the significance of psychic terrain and landscape.
(5) - See Pierre Nora, Realms of
Memory: The Construction of the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996). Entrikin elaborates upon Noras point by arguing "the role of place as
the repository of collective memory is an enduring geographical theme of considerable
contemporary interest," and "the conflation of places and memories is consistent
with communitarian particularity and reinforces the common practice of conceiving
place-based social relations as particularistic;" see J. Nicholas Entrikin,
"Place and Region 3," Progress in Human Geography 21, no. 2 (1997), p.
263-8, see in particular p. 264.
(6) - See Maurice Halbwachs, On
Collective Memory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992); Paul Connerton, How
Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); James Fentress and
Chris Wickham, Social Memory: New Perspectives on the Past (Oxford: Blackwell,
1992); Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, New Hampshire:
University Press of New England, 1993); J. Gillis, Commemorations: The Politics of
National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Pierre Nora, Realms
of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996).
(7) - See M. Halbwachs, On Collective
Memory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 47
(8) - See Patrick Hutton, History as
an Art of Memory (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1993), p.
79.
(9) - Ibid. Also David Lowenthal, The
Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Possessed
by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York: The Free Press,
1996).
(10) - See John Agnew, "Regions in
Revolt," Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 1 (2001), p. 103-110.
(11) - Ibid.
(12) - See E. Relph, Place and
Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976); Douglas Porteous, Planned to Death: The
Annihilation of a Place Called Howdendyke (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1989); John Entrikin, The Betweeness of Place (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1991).
(13) - See J. Nicholas Entrikin,
"Place and Region 3," Progress in Human Geography 21, no. 2 (1997); Tony
Hiss, The Experience of Place: A New Way of Looking At and Dealing With Our Radically
Changing Cities and Countryside (New York: Random House, 1990); William Leach, Country
of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life (New York: Pantheon, 1999).
(14) - See Fried in Robert Gutman, People
in Buildings (New York: Basic Books, 1972). Interestingly, placelessness is often
foregrounded as a problem of post-modern planning and design; for further analyses see
Schneekloth and Shibley, Placemaking: The Art and Practice of Building Communities
(New York: Wiley, 1995), p.18.
(15) - See Dennis Wrong,
"Adversarial Identities and Multiculturalism," Society 37, no. 2 (2000),
p. 11.
(16) - For detailed analysis regarding
the protection of cultural property, refer to Prott and OKeefe, Law and the
Cultural Heritage Vol.1 (Great Britain: Billing, 1984); Kifle Jote, International
Legal Protection of Cultural Heritage (Stockholm: Juristforlaget, 1994); Jiri Toman, The
Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (Vermont: Dartmouth
Publishing Company, 1996).
(17) - Ibid.
(18) - Ibid.
(19) - While cultural property is
foregrounded in international protection conventions, the less popular "vernacular
property" is left unprotected, although theorists consider it to contribute to the
social fabric. As war moves into the urban realm, the ordinary elements, which help
provide a sense of identity and social belonging, are ruined.
(20) - See Jerilynn Dodds, "Bridge
over the Neretva," Archaeology 51 (January-February 1998), p. 48.
(21) - That same year, SPACH did succeed
in halting the imminent destruction of the Buddhas after the same commander drilled holes
in the head of the larger Buddha with the aim of inserting dynamite into the holes. Since
then, tires have been burned to blacken the face of the statues and munitions have been
stored in the lower caves at the base of the larger statue.
(22) - See K. Till, "Staging the
Past: Landscape Designs, Cultural Identity, and Erinnerurgspolitik at Berlins Neue
Wache," Ecumene 6 (1999), p. 251-83.
(23) - Ethnocide is the systematic
destruction of cultural practice. For a particularly detailed analysis, see Keith Doubt, Sociology
After Bosnia and Kosovo: Recovering Justice (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), p.
x, where he argues that "ethnic cleansing" is a profoundly ambiguous and
unsuitable concept for social analysis
. Genocide is the deliberate and systematic
destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group. As well, according to the 1948 UN
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide is defined
as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a
national, ethnic, or religious group, as such: a) killing members of the group; b) causing
serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) deliberately inflicting on the
group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in
part; d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and e) forcibly
transferring children of the group to another group (see www.un.org for UN Conventions).
(24) - In the case of the Turkish
genocide of the Armenians (1915-16), scholars argue that after the genocide the Armenians
were further victimized by 80 years of ethnocide depriving them of their national
identity. For further analysis of the Armenian Genocide, refer to Richard Hovannisian, Remembrance
and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1998). In another example, Serb and Croat armies murdered en masse, and also destroyed
symbolic and vernacular landscapes by converting such sacred sites as churches into
mosques, museums, prisons, and farms.
(25) - See Michael Ignatieff, Blood
and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1993); John
Paul Lederach, Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation across Cultures
(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997); Anne Griffiths, Building Peace and
Democracy in Post-Conflict Societies (proceedings from workshop at Dalhousie
University, 1998); Barnett Rubin, Cases and Strategies for Preventive Action (New
York: Century Foundation Press, 1998)
(26) - See Klaus Dodds, "Political
Geography III: Some Thoughts on Banality, New Wars, and the Geopolitical Tradition," Progress
in Human Geography 24, no. 1 (2000), p.123.
(27) - See D. Mitchell, "The Lure of
the Local: Landscape studies at the End of a Troubled Century," Progress in Human
Geography 25, no. 2 (2001), p. 278.
(28) - Yet, the reconstruction of
symbolic landscapes representative of identity, memory, regionalism and nationalism
becomes problematic when it increases ethnic hatred and challenges fragile states of
peace. |