Monument and Crime: The Destruction of Historic Architecture in Kosovo

Abstract

While international accords prohibit the targeting of cultural artifacts during warfare, this legal protection implies that war is not waged over questions of culture and thus, that cultural artifacts can unproblematically be distinguished from legitimate military targets.' The 1998-1999 conflict in Kosovo, however, was sanctioned by recourse to little else than culture; competing versions of Kosovo's cultural identity were staged as the bases for competing claims for sovereignty over the province, and cultural artifacts were presented as precise evidence of those claims. The entanglement of the cultural and the political that led to the widescale destruction of historic architecture in Kosovo, then, was less an avoidable anomaly of the conflict than one of the conflict's constituent elements. As such, the war in Kosovo is characteristic of a new form of conflict that is produced not out of geopolitical or ideological disputes, but out of the politics of particularist identities. In this new form of conflict, behavior that was proscribed according to the classical rules of warfare and codified in the laws of war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as atrocities against non-combatants, sieges, destruction of historic monuments, etc., now constitutes an essential component. 2 The recruitment of cultural heritage as evidence in support of a political project is, if not inevitable, a prevalent dimension of discourse on that heritage. The situation in Kosovo, however, can be distinguished by the degree to which culture, and specifically, architecture, was-and remains-the symbolic centerpiece of Serb nationalist claims to the province. Kosovo's Serbian Orthodox buildings-both surviving medieval monuments and the products of twentieth-century church construction programshave served as proxy for a Serb population to substantiate Serbian state sovereignty over Kosovo, the population of which has been predominantly Albanian since Serbia claimed Kosovo as a province in 1912. Reciprocally, architectural heritage associated with Kosovo's Albanian majority has been subjected to institutionalized disregard in the management of Kosovo's cultural heritage and, during the 1998-1999 conflict, catastrophic destruction. While this destruction constitutes a war crime in violation of the Hague