Cultural heritage enters emergency response

On Aug. 4, 2020, the explosion at the Port of Beirut sent a blast wave through some of the capital’s most historically significant neighborhoods. Beyond the devastating loss of life, the blast damaged more than 650 historic buildings, while museums, libraries, archives and other heritage sites sustained extensive losses.

Dust covered the city. Glass blanketed streets and museum floors. Doors and windows had been

torn away. At the Sursock Museum, the blast had shattered the building’s glass and damaged its collections.

Lebanese archaeologist and former journalist Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly reached Beirut at 5 a.m. the following morning.

“The city was destroyed in one minute,” Farchakh Bajjaly told The Beiruter. “Normally, reaching that level of destruction takes thirty years.”

For the growing network of heritage responders, the priority was immediate stabilization. By Aug. 6, Farchakh Bajjaly said, teams were entering damaged cultural institutions and securing them against further harm. The work began with tasks that bore little resemblance to conventional archaeology.

“The first priority is simply securing the building. You remove the broken glass, eliminate immediate hazards and close the doors and windows,” Farchakh Bajjaly said.

From an engineering and architectural perspective, it was one of the most complicated emergency operations imaginable.

The response marked one of the most advanced examples of cultural emergency response in practice. But the discipline itself had been forged over nearly two decades through a succession of crises stretching from Baghdad to Syria before arriving in Beirut.

The turning point in Baghdad

On April 8, 2003, employees of the Iraq Museum left the building as fighting from the U.S.-led invasion, which had begun three weeks earlier, reached central Baghdad. Over the next four days, after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's government created a security vacuum, looters entered one of the world's most important archaeological museums. Display cases were smashed, storerooms breached and roughly 15,000 artifacts disappeared, from finely carved cylinder seals and cuneiform tablets to Assyrian sculptures, Sumerian jewelry and ancient ivories representing more than 7,000 years of Mesopotamian civilization.

The museum remained unprotected for days despite repeated appeals from its staff. U.S. forces did not deploy tanks to guard the site until April 16, drawing sharp international criticism over their failure to safeguard one of the world's most significant archaeological collections. Although thousands of artifacts have since been recovered, thousands remain missing more than two decades later.

Reporting from Iraq before and after the museum was looted, Farchakh Bajjaly came to understand that Iraqis were mourning far more than stolen antiquities. They were mourning an assault on memory, identity and a civilization they regarded as their own.

"That's when you realize these are not just old stones," Farchakh Bajjaly told The Beiruter.

Whether people understand archaeology or not doesn't matter. For them, those places are part of who they are. It’s in their bones.

The looting of the Iraq Museum marked a turning point in how the world understood cultural heritage during war. Yet the deliberate destruction of history was hardly new.

The weaponization of heritage

The use of cultural destruction as an instrument of domination long predates modern warfare.

Farchakh Bajjaly draws a distinction between armies historically seeking to rule a population and those seeking to erase it.

“Throughout the great invasions, if you wanted to occupy a land and rule its people, you generally didn't destroy cultural or religious buildings,” she said.

But if you want to destroy an enemy completely, you target their cultural heritage. You destroy their civilization. That's how you impose your power.

The very recognition that cultural heritage could be weaponized laid the foundations for its protection. But it would take the destruction of World War II for governments to codify that centuries-old principle in international law. Adopted in 1954, the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict required states to safeguard cultural property in their own territories and refrain from using or attacking it except under narrowly defined military circumstances.

When legal protection failed

A legal obligation, however, did not automatically create an operational blueprint.

When U.S. forces reached Baghdad in 2003, the Hague Convention had already established an international obligation to protect cultural heritage. Yet as the Iraqi state collapsed and the Iraq Museum was ransacked, neither the occupying forces nor the international heritage community had an operational system capable of securing one of the world's most important archaeological collections.

"The question people began asking was, 'What are you actually doing to protect cultural heritage in war zones?'" Farchakh Bajjaly said.

Then Daesh changed the equation.

After seizing territory across Iraq and Syria, the group deliberately incorporated cultural destruction into its strategy of war. In 2015, it bulldozed the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud and destroyed major monuments at Palmyra, including the Temple of Baalshamin, the Temple of Bel and the Arch of Triumph. UNESCO described the campaign as a systematic effort to deprive communities of their identity and history.

Many of the attacks were staged for the cameras. Images of smashed statues and exploding temples circulated around the world, turning cultural destruction into propaganda as well as psychological warfare.

"When murdering and raping was no longer enough, they targeted cultural heritage. When smashing statues was no longer enough, they blew up temples," Farchakh Bajjaly said.

Daesh’s attacks were another turning point, because the world realized that cultural heritage had become a deliberate target of modern warfare.

Governments and international organizations responded by investing in emergency heritage protection through initiatives such as the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas (ALIPH), the British Council's Cultural Protection Fund, the Dutch Cultural Emergency Response program and expanded work by Blue Shield.

The focus shifted from establishing legal principles to developing practical methods for protecting cultural heritage during active conflict.

Who enters a damaged museum first? How should unstable buildings and threatened collections be secured? Who coordinates museum staff, engineers, security forces and international funders?

Organizations such as Biladi emerged to answer those questions. Founded in 2012, the Lebanese nonprofit co-founded by Farchakh Bajjaly developed emergency response training that translated the Hague Convention into procedures deployable during conflict.

Beirut becomes the test

By the time the Port of Beirut exploded in 2020, the systems developed in the wake of Baghdad and refined after Daesh were put into practice. The response demonstrated what cultural emergency response required: conservation expertise alongside logistics, engineering, security and coordinated decision-making across institutions.

Biladi coordinated with Blue Shield Lebanon, volunteer networks, architects, archaeologists and engineers to assess damaged buildings and carry out emergency stabilization. International partners agreed to finance urgent safeguarding work before formal grants had been approved, while the Lebanese Armed Forces and later UNIFIL helped secure and stabilize damaged heritage sites, including the historic Ministry of Foreign Affairs building.

The blast also led Biladi and the Lebanese Armed Forces, working with the Ministry of Culture, to develop the Cultural Property Protection Emergency Response capability. The program trains soldiers, civil defense personnel, archaeologists, architects and other first responders to secure collections and cultural buildings during disasters.

The Beirut response helped institutionalize a model forged through repeated failures, from Baghdad's emptied display cases to Palmyra's demolished temples and Beirut's shattered museums. Cultural emergency response cannot prevent every loss. It can, however, reject the idea that the destruction of a people's history is inevitable.

“Slowly but surely, it’s one of the parameters expected during times of war. It’s a new mindset that’s spreading around the world.” Farchakh Bajjaly said.

The real shift is that protecting heritage is no longer considered a luxury. It’s become a necessity.