To Protect and Serve

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http://www.uscbs.org

To Protect and Serve

In May 2003, Minneapolis Institute of Art Assistant Curator Corine Wegener stepped off a U.S. Air Force cargo plane and into the sweltering heat of a Baghdad summer. One month earlier, the Iraq Museum, home to some of the most significant artifacts in the history of archeology, had been looted.

Prior to her arrival, Wegener, also a major in the U.S. Army Reserve, expected to serve as an advance scout for the teams of curators, conservators, and other specialists she anticipated would soon arrive to help rebuild the museum’s systems and conserve its objects. Reality proved otherwise. “I thought some group of international crisis response conservators would parachute in,” Wegener recalls ruefully. “Instead the few conservators who made it into the country . . . were only able to stay for a day or two.” During Wegener’s 10 months working with the Iraq Museum, no organized team of U.S. cultural heritage professionals ever arrived for extended relief work. The problem was not a shortage of U.S. museum professionals willing to go, according to AAM’s Helen Wechsler, then director of International Programs. “Within a few weeks of the fall of Baghdad we had a list of 18 highly qualified people willing to travel to Iraq,” says Wechsler. “The trouble was getting them in.” Wegener understands why it was difficult for the Pentagon to take up ad-hoc offers of assistance from organizations like AAM. “The U.S. military likes to deal with organizations that have a concrete track record of being able to both provide assistance and support themselves logistically,” she notes. “In an emergency situation, the military doesn’t need more problems; they need solutions.”

After returning to the United States and retiring from the Army, Wegener looked for a way to prevent the military-civilian disconnect she witnessed in Iraq from recurring. A relatively young international organization, the International Committee of the Blue Shield, caught her attention. “The Blue Shield symbol is the cultural equivalent of the Red Cross,” Wegener explains. Under the 1954 Hague Convention, the shield was used to mark protected monuments and sites. It is also the name of an international committee set up in 1996 to respond to armed conflicts that may threaten cultural property. As a military specialist, Wegener immediately saw the possibilities. Non-governmental organizations like the International Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders “provide a civilian partner the military can turn to with a single phone call,” she said. “A U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield can do the same for cultural heritage issues.”

Finding that no U.S. committee of the Blue Shield had ever been established, Wegener created one. She gathered support from the U.S. wings of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), International Federation of Library Associations, International Council on Archives, International Council on Monuments and Sites and Co-ordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations. “Because I’m a museum person I turned first to my own professional associations, AAM and AAM/ICOM, and they were the first to come on board,” she said. The U.S. Committee has already begun practical work in advance of receiving these official recognitions. Soon after returning from Iraq, Wegener collaborated with Roxanne Merritt, the civilian director of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Museum at Fort Bragg, N.C., on the first major revision since 1983 to the Army’s manual on protecting monuments, arts and archives. “The manual provides guidance to soldiers who, in the course of their duties, are going to be responsible for cultural property or historic sites damaged by both natural and man-made disaster,” Merritt explains. “It gives practical guidance on actions they should or should not take until professionals arrive.”

Wegener notes that involving civilian experts was crucial to the manual’s development. “We had advice from civilian professionals like Barbara Roberts and Jane Hutchinson, who supplied basic, common-sense information on field conservation, especially what not to do – ‘first do no harm.’” The John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School is currently working on a CD-ROM and Web materials to support the printed training aid. Next year, the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield will begin a pilot program to train U.S. military civil affairs units in recognizing cultural property and emergency response to cultural property at risk. Training troops to recognize archaeological sites would be a significant step forward, notes John Russell, a professor of art history and archaeology at the Massachusetts College of Art and former senior advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Culture under the Coalition Provisional Authority, the transitional government following the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Untrained commanders have sometimes placed military installations directly on top of archaeological sites in Iraq, said Russell, also a Blue Shield board member. “Field commanders usually want to do the right thing with respect to heritage but lack the necessary information. Greater heritage awareness . . . should allow them to make informed choices and prevent needless destruction.”

For more information about the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, visit http://www.uscbs.org