Major Wegener leads the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, which she coordinates with the Association of National Committees of the Blue Shield and the International Committee of the Blue Shield. Her task is to save artworks and archaeological finds from the “Islamic State” (ISIS) which is currently terrorizing the region which many historians call the “cradle of civilization.”
Sculptures and clay tablets are the main evidence of the great civilizations which once inhabited that region: Babylonians, Akkadians, Sumerians, and others. The ‘Islamic State’ terrorists are bent on not only tyrannizing the present, but also on destroying much of humanity’s past.
The United States Army, and Major Wegener in particular, is hoping to protect these artifacts so that future generations can study them.
In case this sounds familiar, the 2014 movie The Monuments Men tells a similar story. George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, and John Goodman star in this film which show how the United States Army preserved paintings and sculptures during WWII in the 1940s.
Seventy years later, the same logic is at work. Authors Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra and Gordon Govier report on Major Wegener’s efforts:
“We teach various emergency methods for protection and evacuation,” she said. Last summer, the committee trained 14 Syrian archaeologists and museum professionals who risked their lives both to attend the training and to hide museum artifacts.
In addition to Major Wegener’s activities with the army, other groups are trying to safeguard these ancient finds. Columba Stewart is the executive director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library in Minnesota.
Blue Shield isn’t the only organization working on the problem. Stewart’s library has digitized 2,500 manuscripts from Syria since 2005, and about 5,000 more from Iraq since 2009. Manuscripts are small enough to move and hide, so they are relatively easy to protect from looters. But they are also relatively easy to sell on the black market, he said.
Terrorists from the “Islamic State” are not only destroying artifacts, papyri, parchments, and other documents, but are sometimes selling texts on as a way to fund their attacks. These “blood antiquities” are sold to private collectors, not to museums or universities, and become unavailable for further research and scholarship. Such manuscripts often degrade and decay, as private collectors do not usually have access to the best preservation methods.
ISIS is violating its own propaganda: it destroys artworks because it claims that orthodox Islam demands such destruction; but it preserves other artworks in order to sell them.
Small items can be smuggled out of Islamic countries to safety. Buildings cannot. For archaeological sites,
taking photographs is the only way to preserve them, said Stewart. “A statue or a carving you might be able to hide, but if somebody is intent on destroying [a building] for ideological reasons, there’s not a lot you can do.”
Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra and Gordon Govier note that “ISIS bulldozed the ancient city of Nimrod,” just as the Taliban had destroyed the Buddha statues of Bamiyan. International cultural treasures are at risk: many of the items destroyed by the Islamic State and by the Taliban were UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
