Heritage Under Siege—Military Implementation of Cultural Property Protection Following the 1954 Hague Convention

This book is part of the international response to the crisis in heritage protection triggered by the recent looting of the Iraqi National Museum and other world cultural heritage sites. The author is both a researcher at the University of Amsterdam Institute for Culture and History, and a reserve military officer. As Chair of the International Military Cultural Resources Working Group, he begins with the perspective that military involvement in cultural protection is both good and necessary. The book's subject is the training, logistics, and cooperation needed to create systems of military protection for cultural objects and sites in emergency situations; it addresses both what is ideal and what is feasible in practice. The limits of both are set for the book by the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (the Convention and other useful documents are provided as appendices). The scope of the book is therefore limited and specific. The prose is straightforward. The author deals not with larger questions of what is right but with practical questions of what can be accomplished and how it can be done. He points out basic issues, such as the tension between a military's goal of ending an armed conflict and civilian goals, which focus on what may happen when armed conflict is over. A variety of case studies including Afghanistan, Macedonia, Iraq, and Egypt are included; though the prose is impersonal, some are from the author's personal experience. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Joris D. Kila, PhD (Amsterdam, 2012) is researcher at the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Culture and History, reserve Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Netherlands Army and holds degrees from Leiden University and the University of Amsterdam. He undertook cultural rescue missions in Iraq, Macedonia, Egypt and Libya and is affiliated with several heritage organizations. He is Chair of the International Military Cultural Resources Working Group IMCuRWG and has written numerous publications on heritage protection.