SEEKING JUSTICE AND PEACE

concern about the “severe targeting of Ukrainian cultural symbols,” including “Ukrainian literature, museums and historical archives,” and that “cultural and educational institutions” in occupied regions were seeing Ukrainian “culture, history and language” replaced by the “Russian language and with Russian and Soviet history and culture.”

The destruction of cultural artifacts is a fact of conquest throughout human history: the sacking of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade; the iconoclastic dynamiting of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban; book burning in China’s Qin dynasty and in Nazi Germany; forced assimilation of Indigenous children by the United States and Canada; the looting of African nations by colonial powers; and the destruction of cultural sites in Ukraine.

In 1933, motivated by ideological and sociopolitical developments, including in Nazi Germany, Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin defined two terms to describe these crimes of destruction. The first, “acts of barbarism,” referred to the premeditated extermination of a people; the second, “acts of vandalism,” referred to the premeditated destruction of cultural heritage.

He later coined the term “genocide” in his book “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,” published in 1944. Two years later, the United Nations incorporated Mr. Lemkin’s “acts of barbarism” into the official definition of genocide when declaring it a crime and codifying it at the 1948 Genocide Convention. Yet, “acts of vandalism” were not incorporated. While the current definition of genocide does not include cultural heritage crimes, this form of violence is still considered a war crime.

The International Criminal Court held its first trial pertaining to cultural heritage crimes in 2016 for attacks on mausoleums and a mosque in Timbuktu, Mali, about which Fatou Bensouda, then the