The government likes heritage when it helps in a fight. Otherwise, it just doesn’t care
Thankfully, as the prime minister once reminded us, “there are international conventions in place that prevent the destruction of cultural heritage”. At specific risk (from Donald Trump’s threats) at the time were 52 of Iran’s major cultural sites, 24 of them world heritage listed. Theoretically protecting them in 2020 was the 1954 Hague convention for the protection, in the event of armed conflict, of cultural assets: “Movable or immovable property of great importance to the cultural heritage of every people.” Places, for instance, such as Stonehenge.
In peacetime, however, alterations that might be resented as “adverse and irreversible” if inflicted on a great monument by a foreign power may be completed by a national government with consequences hardly more serious – for a leadership that routinely courts both – than international condemnation and contempt.
