The Protection of Cultural Property in Times of Armed Conflict: The Practice of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

Abstract

Destruction constitutes an inherent component of armed conflict. No war has been fought without damaging private or public property at least collaterally. In numerous conflicts, however, belligerents have tried to obtain psychological advantage by directly attacking the enemy’s cultural property without the justification of military necessity. Such was the case during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. In the same way that rape became an instrument to destroy the adversary’s identity, cultural aggression, i.e., the destruction and pillage of the adversary’s non-renewable cultural resources, became a tool to erase the manifestation of the adversary’s identity Both rape and damage to cultural property represented forms of “ethnic cleansing.”