Treasures of history

PROTECTION of heritage shot up as a world priority this week with a nine-year prison term for an extremist who destroyed ancient monuments in Mali’s Timbuktu four years ago.

Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi expressed remorse for his madness, saying he had been swept up in an evil wave by al-Qaeda and others. He was a leader in the attacks on a sacred gate of the Sidi Yahia mosque, and nine 700-year-old mausoleums.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) judges found his regret deep and genuine. He admitted the deeds, planning them, supplying pick-axes and in one case even a bulldozer.

Demented and despicable as it was, the act had an aim, according to a judge: to break that nation’s soul. These were historic treasures.

It was the first such successfully prosecuted war crime, fresh territory for a criminal court that has focused so far on atrocities against humans – genocide, torture, mutilation, abduction, rape and the like.

The widening of war prosecutions was applauded as a landmark in recognition of heritage by the UN’s heritage agency, Unesco. It had supported woodworkers in Timbuktu in restoring and reinstalling that mosque gate just last week.

THE ICC will have to deal with more destruction like this. it is, sadly, in the pattern of hostility: the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, sculpted out of a sandstone cliff in central Afghanistan, were obliterated by the Taliban 15 years ago. When anti-aircraft guns and artillery failed to finish the job, a rocket and dynamite were used.

Then there was the IS devastation of archaeological and religious sites at Palmyra, Syria, and in Iraq.

These are recent examples, but deplorable crimes such as these date back thousands of years.

Al-Mahdi’s punishment at The Hague has, for the first time, expressed appropriate abhorrence at the erasure of history.

Our government should take its cue here in zealously guarding our own treasures.