DANGER, MUSEUM AHEAD

Introduction:

In a May, 1995, His Eminence Michael Sabbah, Roman Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem, said to his Toronto audience that Christians in the Holy Land will soon disappear, and Holy Places will become museums. Also noting that St. Paul had boasted that Christians in his time became a "show for the world", Sabbah observed that today Christians of the Holy Land are becoming a "show" for the world media: Many reporters, indeed give the feeling that they are only story makers for their papers".

To a normal, secular westerner - albeit one dimly aware of his or her Judaic-Christian heritage (especially at Christmas time) - this would all sound rather odd. First oddity would be the notion that Christians in Jerusalem are a very small minority and, caught up amid the Palestinian/Muslim/Israeli/Jewish conflict, they are fleeing in ever greater numbers. Second oddity would be the idea that somehow the Christian Palestinians' sincere and deep rooted Christian faith (after all one of the world's largest in following) could be trivialized as a media show, in the manner that Hollywood movies exploited native Indians, or generations of anthropologists have "studied" the Sepic River aboriginal of Papua New Guinea. Third, and particularly odd to museum professionals, would be Sabbah's somewhat derogatory use of the term "museum" as if these "cultural properties" would thus descend into a state of mnemonic detritus - at best tourist attractions, at worst some sort of memorial stele - marking the passing of an ethnic oddity that somehow got lost, or was unintentional "collateral damage" in wars among the major tribes.

Yet almost every day, in every continent of the world, minorities (be they children, women, aboriginal, ethnic or religious minorities) are consigned simultaneously to brief media stardom of the ubiquitous 30 second television news clip, obliteration through mines, crossfire, strategic starvation, or cultural genocide by forced dispersal (for which the modern world has coined the clinically neutral term "ethnic cleansing"). It is now normal for 90% of casualties in regional conflicts to comprise the civilian non-combatant population (mainly women and children). However, and in contrast to Sabbah's expectation that at least the museums would remain, in our modern times even these also have become the target and object of destruction. What differentiates today's tribal and ethnic conflicts from those previously of nation states, is the extent to which erasing not only ethnic identity but also ethnic memory has been raised to the status of a legitimate goal. This is quite different from the 1000 years of systematic looting which was part and parcel of the military system. Museums, historic sites, libraries, archives, places of worship and community gathering have become prime targets. In a paper written in 1995 Thomislav Sola noted that by that time damage to Croatian cultural property spread throughout some 200,000 habitations counted as follows: Churches and Monasteries: 262 damaged, 65 destroyed; 90 archives and libraries destroyed; 37 museum damaged, 4 destroyed; 500 monuments damaged, 107 destroyed; 223 historic sites damaged, 60 destroyed. The city of Dubrovnik and this building were included in the targets. Human casualties: 15,000 killed; 92% civilians (compared to 50% in W.W.II). On June 13, 1994, I received an e-mail which contained a detailed list describing the destruction of 250 Bosnian architectural monuments of Islamic significance - and the war was still in progress!

Unfortunately the Croatian/Bosnian situation is not unique.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT: MUSEUMS & WAR

Unfortunately also, museums have been anything bust innocent bystanders in times of war. In fact they have enjoyed a long and illustrious history as beneficiaries. Gold and silver art works, war trophies of the conquering armies of Alexander, were proudly displayed in Greek Temples, ancestors of the modern museum. The armies of Napoleon looted Europe to found the modern Louvre; and likewise British generals and colonial administrators scoured an Empire to develop the British Museum. American and Canadian museums conjointly acquired almost the entire cultural wealth of North West Coast aboriginal through distress sales of artefacts forced by disease induced depopulation, scientific manipulation and legal contrivance. As to the collections thus acquired, an entire academic discipline, art history, for nearly 100 years, variously differentiated between the "high arts" of western (mainly white) civilization and "primitive arts" of the mainly all other places (colored) people.

Is it surprising therefore that minority cultures, the financially disadvantaged, or in times of war - subject populations, should exhibit at least deep seated suspicion, if not outright fear and distrust, of museums?

HISTORICAL CONTEXT: ICOM & WAR

Perhaps understandably, museums have not faced up to the exigencies of armed conflict very well. Because of the uniqueness of historic monuments, and all cultural artefacts and scientific specimens, their loss is irretrievable. They comprise a singular asset base. Museums have therefore put their greatest efforts into loss prevention during times of armed conflict.

The first formal international treaty to protect churches and other cultural monuments during land and sea bombardment was produced in 1899 at the Hague Conference. The Hague was also the site for the larger 44 nation conference convened by the United States and Russia in 1907 to adopted a series of treaties relating to the conduct of war. It protected non defended buildings and towns, and particularly structures dedicated to religious, artistic and charitable or historic purposes. Such buildings needed to be marked by flags or visible signs. In 1935 the U.S. sponsored a pan-American treaty which declared neutral all historic, artistic, cultural and scientific monuments, and religious institutions during times of war. In the late 1930 the League of Nations undertook numerous initiatives to solidify and promulgate the Hague rules. These broke down following the British bombing of the Lubeck civilian population, itself a prelude to Dresden and the German retaliations on London and elsewhere. Post war, the United Nations working with a newly formed ICOM, took on the task of updating Hague; this resulted in the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954). This both protects in situ cultural monuments and institutions and makes it illegal to export moveable cultural property from occupied zones. These protocols are substantially in force today among signatory nation-states. They of course don't extend to non signatories, those often being the sub-populations or "factions" who, equipped with enormous firepower, are most often the subject (or object) of hostilities within dissolving states or warring territories.

More recently UNESCO/ICOM, ICCROM and ICOMOS and the International Red Cross have co-operated in the Blue Shield Initiative. The International Committee of Blue Shield co-ordinates the responses of various NGO's and professional bodies before, during and post armed conflict, or natural disasters, to facilitate international responses, co-operation, and if necessary action under the terms of the Hague Convention.

In this context we might say that the role of museums in the prevention and mitigation of war damage has been self serving; no doubt many target populations would also agree.

CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT: MUSEUMS & PEACE

Here at last we are beginning to approach the subject of our meeting here in Dubrovnik.

There have been several movements which have brought museums officially into the service of Peace. In more recent times National War Museums, such as those in Ottawa, London, and Dresden - and the City Museum, Amsterdam, have through realistic representation - particularly through the immediacy of period film and photography - focused on the horrors of armed conflict. Even so, there remains both a mandate and tradition for these institution to also celebrate heroism and regimental glory in battle. No where is this dual role more apparent than in the Japanese Peace Museums. The exhibitory of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, and the Osaka Peace Centre demonstrate this tension, between recalling the devastation and suffering of the civilian populations which resulted from the bombing and the need to memorialize those who suffered and died. Where the former theme has been too explicit, Japanese right-ring political elements have mounted a campaign to discredit these institutions in that they "shame "the honour of Imperial Japan. A planned Peace Museum for Tokyo has remained on ice since 1983 and now seems a long way off. However a National War Memorial Museum is now under construction.

Another memorialization theme has been developed by Holocaust Centres. There are 75 in the United States alone, founded within the last 15 years, including the (240,000 sq. ft.) 168 million dollar Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the 50 million dollar Simon Wiesenthal Centre/Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and the 35 million dollar New York Centre. Others are spread from Vancouver, Canada to Johannesburg S.A. and Montevideo. Critical assessment of their success even within the Holocaust Centre movement is divided; indeed there has been no single lesson. For some the memorialization of this genocide teaches the need for generosity toward suffering minorities; for others the need only to help your own people; some have been inspired to become hawks, other doves; those of religious persuasion have had their spirituality either diminished or deepened. Overall, there has been a recognition that at least the public display of Holocaust has helped a generation unburden the heavy of weight of a repressed guilt (either that of "standing by" or surviving); now there is a desperate fear that in the next generation the memory may be lost.

In Canada the proposal to include a Holocaust Centre in renovations to the National War Museum has unleashed a storm of controversy, particularly from veterans who fear the "memorialization of heroism" will be overshadowed or diminished.

In may parts of the world, Ireland and Denmark for instance, regional museums have adopted a peace-making role. Two museum on the Schleswig Holstein border, an area traditional riven by two national constituencies, one Danish and one German, have played a role in toning down minority factionalism. One museum in Schleswig will present regional history from a Danish perspective, the one in Sonderberg will present a German perspective. This reflects the fact that in 1955 both the German and Danish governments extended full duel citizen rights to the respective minorities on either side of the border.

CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT: MUSEUMS & RECOVERY

In recent times the role of the international museums community has centred on what might be called mutual salvage assistance. And indeed there has been no shortage of heroism in this regard.

An international group of museum professionals formed BHHR (Bosnia - Herzegovina Heritage Rescue) and sent representatives to advise and assist the remaining skeleton museum staffs in Sarajevo during the war. The Committee on Culture and Education of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg also sponsored ICOM nominated experts to visit Krajina and Vukovar. However it appears lack of preparedness, and experts, resulted in the complete destruction of the Chechnya Art Museum and Regional History Museum during the hostilities of 1995. While international teams of experts came to the assistance of Kuwaiti museums after the Gulf War, in particular to assemble and return their looted contents from Iraqi storage depots, little has been said, and nothing done, to reconstitute the collections (3,080 items, 485 manuscripts) of the Iraqi regional museums which were looted in reprisal during the allied offensive. The ruins of the National Museum of Kabul (its wealthy Silk Rout status and 10th Century fame as a city of gardens now obliterated) have been surveyed by a consultant to UNESCO's World Heritage Centre and a mission to war torn Liberia's ruined museums was sponsored by UNESCO's Technical Assistance programme in 1995. However a large scale effort, mainly a French initiative through UNESCO has recently undertaken work to re-open, secure and restore and the Cambodian World Heritage Sites at Angkor. Canada has supported these efforts through its ICOM Committee's Museologists without Borders operation. In the United States Charles E. McConney has promoted the formation of a "Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Unit" for cultural property salvage and protection operations within the U.N. Peace-Keeping Forces. Along with the failure of the U.N. to establish a permanent reserve Peace Keeping Force, proposals such as have little hope of execution.

Recently the popular press has sensationalized recent past, and ongoing efforts to negotiate the repatriation of cultural property. This ranges from the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum to sacral artefacts and human remains collected by European and North American museums from tribal village sites, and groups, in the American Pacific North West. The excruciatingly painful negotiations that characterize these initiatives are no better illustrated than those of the European States (all Hague signatories) with respect to the stashes of trophy art (estimated at some 200,000 items) still stored in Russian museums as a result of systematic collecting during the Russian offensive and occupation. This includes the gold treasures from Schliemann's 1870s excavations at Troy (now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow) and the famous Baldwin collection of old masters (now in St. Petersburg). An important consideration, in Russia's reluctance to repatriate these items, is the view that they are in part payment for the extensive loss of cultural heritage during the Axis army's blitzkrieg across Russian soil.

What characterizes all these initiatives, either larcenous - or heroic and altruistic - as many of them are, is however the common focus on cultural property for its own sake. This begs the question of the centrality and importance of the assets and thereby avoids the problem we have set ourselves here: the role of museums vis a vis their constituent communities in times of, and after, the traumatic and tragic events of mass belligerency.

CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT: MUSEUMS & RECONCILIATION

However, it is by pursing the theme of repatriation that we can begin to sense the complexity of public attitudes, and responses, to the role of museums as their referential publics attempt to deal with the trauma of a post-war society and in some cases an even newer post-national situation. Investigative Russian art historians Constantin Akinsha and Grigory Kozlov, who unearthed the stashed Russian art holdings, commented:

"The second world war is the last holy cow of the USSR. It's true it was a patriotic war, but we forget its results. We still think we liberated the Poles. (In fact) We enslaved half of Europe and hid its art. We still do not understand that."

Indeed, nowhere do these issues become more evident, than in the (almost tortuous) planning process involved in Chancellor Kohl's initiative to create a Museum of German History. An extensive account is given in Charles Maier's recent book The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and the German Identity, particularly chapter 5, "A Usable Past? Museums, Memory, and Identity?".

According to Maier, as the committees of scholars moved forward to articulate the thematic structure and "curriculum" of the museum, the debate resolved into various critical positions: (1) history as a source of national consciousness and orientation, or (2) history as a means to master the past.

Maier writes:

"The Germans will package and subdue their history by suitably arranging its relics. But even a museological mastery of the past remains a false conception. ... No one can master the past; one can only interrogate it. This task does not exclude trying to ask about identity ... How else, except through awareness of "identity", could a museum help later generations feel a sense of involvement with the crimes of their ancestors during the Third Reich? Again, the question must be what concept of identity is at stake: a passive infusion by some mystical history, or an active commitment? Identity is the result of accepting responsibility. "

This is not "infotainment". This is hard work. And it could be dangerous!

Yet the museological path to reconciliation is fraught with problems, not least because of an "inherent vice" in the way curators and preservationist deal with material (and non material) culture. On this very topic, some of the most recent important work has been done by British scholar David Lowenthal. In his 1985 book The Past is a Foreign Country, Lowenthal argues that we must get used to the idea that their is no such thing as objective writing (as in history books) or neutral presentation (as in museums).

"Once aware that relics, history, and memory are continually refashioned, we are less inhibited by the past, less frustrated by the fruitless quest for sacrosanct originals. We must reckon with the artifice no less than the truth of our heritage. Nothing ever made has been left untouched, nothing ever known remains immutable; yet these facts should not distress but emancipate us. It is far better to realize the past has always been altered than to pretend it has always been the same...

What our predecessors have left us deserves respect, but a patrimony simply preserved becomes an intolerable burden; the past is best used by being domesticated - and by our accepting and rejoicing that we do so." (p.412)

As we look around the world today: Northern Ireland, the countries of former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, or aboriginal peoples in many parts of the world, the destructive potential of this burden of history remains very evident.

Lowenthal also provided an analysis of various "uses" of the past which he treats as a sort of museological eschatology. In popular culture museums have defined and confirmed "tradition" as a means of validating the present. We did things this way in the past, so we should do so now! Or the presentation of a "pedagogical past", the past (or what we present) sets an example for contemporary practice. Or even more unsettling, the perpetuation of the myth of an "ideal past", for instance some "golden age", "the good old day" of pure ethnicity, and therefore happiness! And its heroic equivalent, musealizing the cult of personality by setting up models for uncritical imitation or objects for "communion" can be equally problematic, no matter what level of sophistication is represented by the museum goer. We might even think that "rumination" - particularly over ruins - is a lost 18th art; in fact it survives in a vast class of historic sites throughout the world. In fact each of these effects can be benign, or - manipulated with disastrous consequences. One thinks of the vast ruined Temple complexes of Angkor Wat inspiring the likes of Pol Pot in Cambodia to recapture for his people a "mythic agrarian age of Kmer national magnificence" with the subsequent genocidal implications treated as necessary "collateral damage". Yes, museums can be dangerous!

STOP OF INTEREST: TOWARD A VOCABULARY OF RECONCILIATION MUSEOLOGY

We must conclude on a more sanguine note for our task here is to begin to map out a "museology of reconciliation", in short a strategy within which museums, and institutions dedicated to cultural conservation, can find solidarity with those actively promoting world peace. There are numerous sources and precedents to which we might go, and I will only touch briefly on once source and model. This is the recent work of the American Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict. The work and findings of the commission easily accessible, along with a veritable library of related material on their web site. The McArthur Foundation and the world-wide Soros "Open Society" network of trusts have also sponsored extensive academic research in global peace studies.

One of the Carnegie Commission's key position papers (by Larry Diamond, December 1995) calls for the construction of a "culture of prevention". Diamond goes on to articulate a world-wide strategy for creating and promulgating this culture ; and he does so by assigning roles to various influential nodes in modern society.

For example:
Education: Much conflict relies on group self-definition, making an "us" and a "them"; could we not educate in favour of internal cohesion, inter-group accommodation, - how about a "museology of inclusion and pluralism".

The Mass Media: Societal blindness caused by ignorance, secrecy, and inability to communicate freely engenders superstition and mistrust. Freedom of information and critical discussion engenders clarity in governance and inter-group relations; for us how about an "accessible inter-cultural museology?"

Religious institutions: Generic espousals of peace and brotherhood often breakdown into bigotry, fanaticism, deprecation of "outsiders" and inter group violence. Yet the core creed of most religions is tolerance. What would constitute a "museology of tolerance"?

The United Nations through UNESCO: Building on the 1996 Unesco initiative "Culture of Peace" a core curriculum for "peace studies" was developed. Based on this conceptual framework local educational institutions could develop education materials, teacher training resources, and related education strategies. Could a similar role be found for ICOM in animating, throughout the world, exhibitions promoting peace, pluralism and reconciliation?

World Leadership: The peace movement certainly does have its heroes, and although our view of them need not be uncritical, they deserve exposure: Mohandas Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Pope John Paul, the Dalai Lama - a long list of Nobel Prize winners - do these people have role in our nation's war museums?

Law: A fundamental tenant of peace maintenance is rule of law, and following from that the renunciation of force as a means, by any sub national or ethnic group, of obtaining their ends. One way to achieve this is to create law giving "supra-national" bodies so that states themselves can be more flexible in the evolution of their governance. The European Union is one example. How does the current generation of museums, born out of the very notion of nation-statehood espouse supra-national values?

The Scientific Community is probably the closest extant approximation to a truly international community, sharing fundamental interests, values, standards, "the spirit of inquiry about the nature of matter and life, indeed the mysteries of the universe". Cannot the role of science museums and technology centres be enhanced to better delineate the global interdependence of our ecological support systems, our technological infrastructure?

People: The real strength is in mass movements: Solidarity, Nonviolent resistance, the Civil Rights Movement, Mass mobilization in the streets, Peace Marches, Amnesty International: such seemingly anonymous energies can be harnessed. Could we circulate international blockbuster exhibitions which would properly resurrect from the dustbin of history, the echo of Neville Chamberlain's now sadly infamous remark "Peace in Our Time"?

In these few days we are meeting in a territory which has recently witnessed three of the bloodiest and most destructive wars of recorded history. The toll in human lives and resources has been massive. Psychological damage must now be inter-generational. As we approach the 3rd millennium, here all about us, is the constant reminder that there must be a better way. Hopefully, with the prompting of this setting, over the next few days we will begin to find some answers.

Martin Segger
May 11, 1998
Dubrovnik