Foreword by Dr. Thomas S. Kaplan, Chair of the ALIPH Foundation Board The ALIPH Way: Five Years and Counting

FOREWORD

The ALIPH Way: Five Years and Counting…

Dr. Thomas S. Kaplan

Chair of the ALIPH Foundation Board

“La reconnaissance est la mémoire du cœur”

Jean Massieu

The great dedications of adulthood tend to be imprinted at an early age, when one’s place on the trajectory of life is in the absorbing, learning phases. For myself, frequent youthful contacts with the antiquities’ wings of the British Museum, the Louvre, and The Metropolitan played such a role. Transported in my imagination to Lachish, Nineveh, and Ctesiphon, I was hooked, somehow convinced that my own personal destiny would be enveloped in an abiding fascination for classical history. If one is blessed with deepening passion as a child for the stories of civilization, these flashbacks not only enrich our formative years but indeed re-emerge later to engage with the subject even more profoundly — and, if fortunate, in being handed the means of giving back to one’s enthusiasms by promoting and protecting humanity’s shared birthright. As the French educator Jean Massieu put it so beautifully, “gratitude is the memory of the heart”. And so it was for me when, shortly before ALIPH’s first donors conference in the spring of 2017, I was asked to assume the newly established Foundation’s chairmanship. As I promised the co-founders of this extraordinary initiative, François Hollande, then President of France, and H.H. Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi — and later reiterated personally to President Emmanuel Macron — my Board colleagues, the Secretariat’s team and I would see to it that ALIPH would be characterized by a simple motto: “action, action, action.”

And so, we did. Temperamentally entrepreneurial rather than process driven, I will confess that the early days had their challenges and frustrations. In short order, however, the drive that prompted the “action, action, action” narrative kicked in and engendered a way of thinking that was crystallized in the

brilliantly inspired — and continually inspiring — exhortation of H.E. Mohamed Al Mubarak, the driven and driving tip of the spear for so many of the UAE’s cultural initiatives, to do things “The ALIPH Way.” The ALIPH Way became shorthand for getting things done through deeds, not words. It combines a special sauce of strategic vision in implementing a plan; a refreshingly nimble response to surprises that require tactical flexibility; and a laser-focus execution of both these strategies and tactics. It is, moreover, a recipe that has yielded splendid results.

Five years ago, ALIPH simply did not exist on the map. Today, the ALIPH flag has been planted in some 30 countries on nearly 150 projects. These ventures — and, all too often in light of the circumstances, adventures — represent epic undertakings that should conjure a sense of gratitude for all believers in the imperative of preserving humanity’s greatest cultural heritage treasures for future generations. They include the protection and rehabilitation of the museums of Mosul (Iraq), Raqqa (North-East Syria), Dhamar (Yemen), and Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire); the restoration of the Tomb of Askia in Gao (Mali), the Mar Behnam Monastery (Iraq), the Minaret of Jam in partnership with UNESCO, and Afghanistan’s Bala Hissar Citadel, in partnership with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC). Yet ALIPH’s footprints go far beyond, reaching Sondondo Valley (Peru), Agadez (Niger), Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Ghadames (Libya), Adulis (Eritrea), Gori (Georgia), Koh Ker (Cambodia), or just recently Maluku (Indonesia), to name but a few.

These reference points are mere snapshots of the tops of the waves of ALIPH’s work. And that is just what one can see. Many more interventions beneath the surface are in the works, being nurtured by what is now an entire ecosystem of activity and support to those on the front lines. In these noble efforts to protect vital heritage that is both tangible and intangible, I wish to salute the signal role played by the Secretariat, the Scientific Committee, and our network of over 200 experts who provide the Foundation with extraordinary knowledge, passion, and skill. I am also immensely grateful to each of the operators, local and international, with whom ALIPH works daily in the field. These women and men remain the true unsung heroes of our collective enterprise. Fortunately, both excellent results and the passage of time have provided these brave souls with the greater recognition they merit. In many guises, the senior leadership of our benefactors have themselves heard from those on the front lines — from their presidential and princely counterparts and senior government officials, all the way through to archeologists, our NGO partners, museum curators and security guards — that ALIPH has become something of a Gold Standard in carrying out its mandate.

For those less familiar with ALIPH’s origins, it is important to acknowledge that, while the validation and standing the Foundation now enjoys seems so inevitable, so foreordained… it really wasn’t. From the outset, the ALIPH enterprise faced multiple headwinds. While everyone could see that something outrageous was taking place on our generation’s watch — the 2010s were marked by wartime attacks on patrimony that were simply unprecedented in their scope, systematic nature, and media coverage — despite howls of horror, the assaults kept on coming. From Timbuktu and Gao to Palmyra and Aleppo, Mosul, and Hatra, invaluable sites were being vandalized and gutted in plain sight of the international community.

This called for a highly focused riposte. The first challenge was to mobilize a very distracted international community to respond to the barbarity. The visionaries who cried out for action needed to harness the outrage and channel it coherently into an action plan. This was accomplished with the release of the 2015 report “Fifty French proposals to protect the world’s heritage”, authored by Jean-Luc Martinez, President-Director of the Musée du Louvre (20132021), which proved critical to setting the stage for the 2016 International Conference on Safeguarding Cultural Heritage in Conflict Areas held in Abu Dhabi. This assembly, in turn, triggered in 2017 the Franco-Emirati initiative that, with the support of UNESCO, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Luxembourg, Morocco, China, and several private donors created the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas — ALIPH.

Words would then need to be translated into deeds. What was proposed was the establishment of a new type of vehicle: a Geneva-based foundation governed by Swiss law and benefitting from a headquarters agreement with the Swiss Federal Council — a unique status allowing for the development of a publicprivate partnership, flexible governance, and startup-like operations. Such an enterprise, which in 2017 received an extraordinary formal endorsement from the United Nations itself, constituted a fresh approach in harnessing goodwill around a targeted issue, as well as a novel contribution to multilateralism and leveraging the comity of nations. Thanks to the commitment of my predecessor and dear friend Jack Lang, President of the Institut du monde arabe (IMA), and with steadfast support from ALIPH’s vibrant and insightful Vice-Chairs, H.E. Mohamed Al Mubarak and Bariza Khiari, as well as H.H. Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Farhan Al Saud, our esteemed representative of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, we rapidly installed our Secretariat, empowered a wonderfully diverse and talented Board of Directors, and appointed our Executive Director, Valéry Freland, in Geneva.

This proved to be a tipping point, and we never looked back. Uniting ALIPH around that guiding spirit of “action, action, action!”, the results from Team Freland were quick to materialize. In just a few months, ALIPH was able to move to the forefront of securing heritage protection in conflict areas, assisting both ambitious projects and, thanks to a multitude of partnerships around the world, more modest initiatives geared towards the protection and rehabilitation of the world’s cultural endowment. Of course, even fairy tales have plot twists. COVID-19 emerged, disrupting the course of world events not to mention personal lives — including those whose work the Foundation was supporting. Yet together, we stood strong and adapted, like it or not, to videoconferencing and remote working, without ever giving up on concrete projects or field visits: from Gao to Beirut, Kabul, and Mosul — because at the core of ALIPH’s DNA lies the imperative to work for and with local populations and communities, without whom there can be no sustainable heritage protection in crisis-stricken countries.

In several respects, the exigencies of the pandemic resulted in what proved to be perhaps our finest hour — not just as an organization, but indeed as a mission. Realizing that the landscape was irreparably altered, in the very first weeks following the outbreak, we launched an ambitious multimilliondollar action plan of rapidly approved small grants in support of local heritage operators (museums, NGOs and groups of artisans, among others) to help them surmount, with minimal bureaucracy and maximum speed, the existential turmoil of COVID-19. Ultimately, some 100 actors in 37 countries benefitted from this initiative — a prime example of the ALIPH Way in action. The pandemic would reveal yet another example of ALIPH’s extraordinary flexibility. In addition to the small grants that were literally live savers from those stranded in the field, we responded with similar alacrity and efficiency to larger funding requests too. Thus, the Foundation was able to tackle the threat of impending collapse of remarkable national legacies on numerous occasions. This includes, for instance, an emergency stabilization project of the Arch of Ctesiphon, south of Baghdad, as well as the rapid rehabilitation of museums, libraries, religious buildings, and historical houses in Beirut following the devastating explosion in the Lebanese capital of 4 August 2020. We were present on the ground — alongside local institutions, NGOs, and international stakeholders — helping to find synergies and accompanying the efforts of Beirutis to preserve their society’s shared history and legacy, without which there can be no future.

ALIPH’s “battle-proven” ability to respond to crises in turn shaped our own organization even further. In weathering these various storms, the Foundation has shown itself to be exceptionally agile and displayed a rare capacity to quickly adapt to emerging needs, expectations, and challenges, thanks to its relatively small size, consensual style of governance, and fluid operating mode. These virtues provide the solid foundation on which to build our next chapter, firmly dedicated as we are to our mission of protecting humanity’s shared narrative — one that inspires as well as brings us together, beyond borders and cultural differences, and one that still represents an important source of both livelihood and meaning to populations who everyday face the trauma of war, terrorism, and the injustice of sacrificed memories.

And while dark threats continue to loom over this common inheritance of mankind, as in the case of terrorism and international conflicts, we and our partners shall remain — proudly and unwaveringly — by the side of these brave women and men, as humble yet critical enablers of reconciliation and peace through the preservation, sharing, and transmission of the epic phenomenon of human civilization.

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FIVE YEARS OF ALIPH 20

ALIPH IN THE WORLD 23

FOCUS ON BEIRUT: TO THE RESCUE OF BEIRUTI HERITAGE