The terrorist on trial for smashing up Timbuktu
At last, a “wanton” destroyer of ancient treasures is being brought to justice, said Dominic Johnson in Die Tageszeitung (Berlin). In the turbulence that hit Mali in 2012, a local Islamist group, Ansar Dine, overran Timbuktu, and during a ten-month reign of terror, its zealots took pickaxes to 14 of the city’s famed shrines of Sufi saints, which they deemed idolatrous. Now, one of the group’s leaders, Ahmad al-faqi al-mahdi, has gone on trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, charged with war crimes. The maximum penalty is 30 years; by pleading guilty, he hopes to get off with around ten. It was about time Islamists were held to account for these heinous acts. It’s a warning to jihadis that the world is starting to take this seriously.
Critics complain that the destruction of historical artefacts hardly compares with the taking of lives, said Guillaume Goubert in La Croix (Paris). Why fuss over a few old monuments when innocent civilians are being slaughtered in Syria and Yemen? But that is a failure to appreciate how a people robbed of its “cultural heritage” is gravely weakened – the legacy of the past is essential for its future. Nor should cracking down on such acts mean any slackening in the fight against the terrorists’ other crimes. If only that were so, said Marie Forestier in Foreign Policy (Washington DC). In the event, by going after al-mahdi for cultural vandalism, the ICC is wilfully ignoring the far worse crimes he carried out during the occupation of Timbuktu. Prosecutors are taking the easy route because the video evidence for the former can’t be contested: al-mahdi can be seen tearing apart the door of a mosque and encouraging his men to demolish shrines (his obvious guilt is precisely why he’s pleading for leniency). But al-mahdi, who was head of a group of Ansar Dine’s religious police, also oversaw the systematic abuse and sexual enslavement of women: teenagers were “married” to fighters and raped daily. The prosecutors have seen abundant testimony that implicates him, yet chose to ignore it. What a lost opportunity.
But let’s not pretend that the desire to pull down artefacts revered by people of different beliefs is alien to us in the West, said Russell Smith in The Globe and Mail (Toronto). We live in a culture obsessed with taking offence – witness the growing clamour against the public statues, murals and paintings seen to perpetuate “dangerous” racial or gender stereotypes, or to glorify racists and slave owners. “I am not demanding sympathy for this passion… I am suggesting we regard this destruction [in Mali] as a frightening warning of the danger – the dark side – of taking offence.”