Welcome to One CA Podcast. today, we have Cori Wegener, Director of the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, discussing cultural heritage preservation, Monuments Men, black market sales of antiquities, the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, and work in Syria and Iraq.
---
Background song "Something Elated" by Broke For Free.
---
Transcript:
00:00:00 SPEAKER_02
There's a discussion going on right now about Mosul, about preserving or trying to reconstruct historic sites. Is that really what the local population wants, or do they really want their houses rebuilt, et cetera? So it's really good to be aware of the ongoing conversation and what the local values are.
00:00:39 SPEAKER_01
And welcome to the 1CA podcast. My name is John McElligot, your host for today's episode. We're joined today by Cori Wegner. She's the director of the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, SCRI, an outreach program dedicated to the preservation of cultural heritage and crisis situations in the U .S. and abroad. She's a former member of the civil affairs community for the Army, former CA officer, and has been working extensively on projects in Syria, Iraq, Haiti, Nepal, and elsewhere throughout the world. Corey Wagner, thank you very much for being on the One State Podcast, and welcome.
00:01:12 SPEAKER_02
Yeah, thanks a lot for having me.
00:01:14 SPEAKER_01
So we met in 2015 when we were doing, it was my first introduction, actually, to the civil affairs world training session at the Smithsonian. So you were working there at that time, and you walked us through essentially the history of the laws regarding cultural preservation. Talked a little bit about the modern -day mission of Monuments Men because I think this was shortly after the movie had come out. And it was still fresh in people's minds, so we made that connection as well. And then we went out to a satellite location, I guess, for the Smithsonian where a lot of items are preserved and maintained. And we talked sort of hands -on about that process for preserving cultural heritage. I thought it was amazing training. I think it's something that a lot of other CA soldiers and Marines should be able to go through, especially in the D .C. area. We're kind of fortunate to have so many federal agencies right there. So I want to get to some of those items later in the conversation. But first, talk about your connection to civil affairs. So you retired as a major in the Army Reserve. You spent 13 years in CA. I want to ask you who or what brought you into CA?
00:02:28 SPEAKER_02
Well, first of all, I enlisted right out of high school in the Army Reserve, and I did a couple different things. And then I got my ROTC commission, and I was in the Quartermaster Corps, and I went to the first Gulf War. I deployed to Germany, which was awesome, but I also was a little bit bored and thought I missed out.
00:02:45 SPEAKER_02
I also was a little bit bored and thought I missed out. My undergrad was in political science. I learned about civil affairs, and it kind of seemed like an obvious fit for me. I was living in Kansas City, Missouri at the time, so I switched branches and I went to the 418th Civil Affairs Battalion. So with that emphasis on political science and the cultural landscape and understanding what's going on in the communities that we're engaged in, I was hooked. And I also made my husband Paul switch branches as well. He was also a civil affairs officer.
00:03:18 SPEAKER_01
That's great.
00:03:19 SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
00:03:20 SPEAKER_01
So you've been working in cultural heritage for quite a while. Can you talk to people about what cultural heritage means and who says whether something is worth preserving?
00:03:29 SPEAKER_02
Well, yeah, that last part is the really tough one, right? Because it can be different. People can have different values depending on, you know, even in the same community, people can have different values. For instance, just the conversation about Civil War memorials here in the United States, and that's just one example. But so cultural heritage is what we inherit from past generations. that really informs our sense of identity and community and history, how we see ourselves. It's also what we create now and hand down to future generations. So a lot of people divide cultural heritage into two parts. There's tangible, that you can touch, see, and feel, and then there's the intangible, things we know or things that we express. Tangible heritage can be museums with all kinds of different collections of art, history, archaeology, scientific collections. or libraries, archives, cultural and historic sites and monuments, cemeteries, architecture, even whole urban landscapes of buildings that are historic, and also archaeological sites. So that subset, some people also call cultural property, which is important when you think about the Hague Convention, which I think we're going to talk about maybe a little bit later. And then there's the intangible. expressions like music, dance, and poetry, and also craft and traditional practice like cooking and recipes or traditional craft making. And then even the really important ones like wine making and beer brewing. Those are all forms of intangible cultural heritage that we pass down.
00:05:07 SPEAKER_01
Okay. So I see why the Smithsonian cares about preserving cultural heritage. It's connected to the mission of the Smithsonian. But there is an overlap with civil affairs and the Department of Defense. Why does DOD care about cultural heritage?
00:05:21 SPEAKER_02
I think DOD should care about it or does care about it in part because it's an international treaty, of course, the 1954 Hague Convention. So it's part of the law of war. It's the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in Armed Conflict. So what we just talked about, the tangible and intangible, the Hague Convention doesn't really protect intangible heritage, but mostly the tangible, the sites, museum collections, etc. Another interesting thing that a lot of people don't realize is the Hague Convention of 1954 was drafted. in the aftermath of world war ii and a lot of the elements of it they were looking back to what they considered the successful work of the monuments men in world war ii so there was a lot of input from people who observed that that protective element of what they were trying to do and thought it was a good thing so hence the treaty um but implementing the Protections of Hague, it's not just about compliance with international law. I think DOD and military operators should be interested in it because it's also part of understanding the civil information environment. Cultural heritage is a subset of cultural awareness. So it's not enough to know how to drink tea or that you should avoid showing the soles of your shoes in a meeting if you're in the Arab world or things like that. Cultural heritage is... More, it's like knowing where these religious and historic sites are located, establishing the connections with those cultural caretakers and understanding the local value that populations place on these sites. And that can make or break mission success if you choose poorly. So it's particularly true in ethnic and religious conflicts, as one would guess. So it's part of governance, too, because. Unlike the United States, most other countries in the world have a Ministry of Culture, and so the management of all those cultural sites is a government responsibility. So I think that's why DOD should care about it.
00:07:27 SPEAKER_01
So you talk about how DOD should care about it. Has DOD been caring about it for the last several years?
00:07:34 SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I think we're definitely miles ahead of where we were. Say, for instance, in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq, there was there was attention paid to the planning. But then the execution, we just, you know, didn't have enough people and there wasn't enough attention paid to the particular sites. And there are a lot of good, viable reasons for that. And I think we learned a lot from that. Like it can really be a bad thing if internationally. There's this attitude that the U .S. didn't care about Iraq's cultural heritage enough to protect those sites. And so it's been a gradual thing, but I think they do care about it more now. There's become many different training programs. The Marine Corps CMO school at Quantico teaches 12 hours of cultural property protection in their civil affairs school. The SWCC teaches. some cultural heritage elements as part of their training and especially in their field training for the CA school.
00:08:34 SPEAKER_02
CA school. So it's gradually becoming more and more. There's stuff in various field manuals. We actually have GTA 41 -01 -02 Civil Affairs, Arts, Monuments, and Archives Guide that's available out there both online and in print. But, you know, I think we could do more. I know the 38 Golf Program has cultural officers as part of that program, and I wish we had more of those and that there was a way for them to come together and train together more. But overall, we're making progress.
00:09:08 SPEAKER_01
That's good to hear. So you mentioned the connection to Iraq. Could you talk about what happened during and after the 2003 looting of the Iraq National Museum?
00:09:18 SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I can talk about that a little bit. I know the 352nd Civil Affairs Command was the command that was deployed for that mission, and I wasn't with them at the time. I was actually scheduled to go to Afghanistan with my unit at the time, which was the 407th out of Minneapolis.
00:09:39 SPEAKER_02
I mean, the story's out there for anybody who wants to read about it in various books about the invasion of Baghdad and what happened with the general looting around the city. And the Iraq Museum was one of the many places that was looted by sort of, you know, the local population. But the Iraq Museum was a little tough because... There was some insider knowledge about where to find some of the hidden storage areas of the museum. The museum staff had worked really hard to evacuate collections out of the galleries and into hidden secure storage. And as some of your listeners probably already know, that Iraq Museum in Baghdad was the repository for... the entire country the flagship museum of iraq and held some of the most important collections of ancient history of humankind there ancient mesopotamia and the the knowledge of some of those looters to go in and find that material and take it out they lost thousands and thousands of objects and looters also smashed a lot of objects in you know for whatever reason as as looters or want to do but in some cases it was because they displayed images or imagery of the human form things like that so it was really a terrible situation i got called up a few weeks later and when it was the fastest deployment i ever had i only spent one week at Fort Bragg, getting my shots and shooting and all the pre -deployment. And I went directly to Baghdad to join up with the 352 and started working at the museum with the civil affairs team there on the ground and trying to advise about stabilization of the museum.
00:11:21 SPEAKER_01
Okay. Were you there as an arts, monuments, and archives officer at the time?
00:11:22 SPEAKER_02
you there as an
00:11:25 SPEAKER_02
Yes, I was. I was designated as the Arts Monuments and Archives Officer as the liaison to the museum. And we had several other projects around the city as well, but that was my main function. And I served as liaison between the staff there and other international organizations trying to come in and assist. But it was tough because... There just wasn't that deployability for the type of organizations that can help in a cultural situation in the same way there are for humanitarian aid organizations. There was really no Doctors Without Borders. coming to help us with the Iraq Museum. And wait as I might, they didn't really come. So it was a gradual process to get expertise in there to assist besides just myself. I had some colleagues from the British Museum and some colleagues from the Italian Ministry of Culture. But it was a slow process.
00:12:20 SPEAKER_01
Okay. So you mentioned there's no group like what Doctors Without Borders have. So that's 2003. And then 2006, you founded the U .S. Committee of the Blue Shield. So it sounds like you created an organization to do what you just described had been missing previously. So what does that blue shield symbolize? And can you talk about, is the U .S. committee connected to a global organization like the Red Cross, the American Red Cross, is the U .S. affiliate for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies?
00:12:51 SPEAKER_02
Yes, there's definitely a link and a similarity. The International Committee of the Blue Shield was formed in the 90s as a response to the intentional destruction of cultural property in the Bosnian conflict.
00:13:06 SPEAKER_02
The Blue Shield, I should say, is the organization's name for the Blue Shield symbol. that's designated in the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property, as well as personnel who are working to protect cultural property. So it's very similar to the Red Cross is the international symbol for the Geneva Conventions, and for personnel, the Blue Shield is the symbol for the Hague Convention for Protection of Cultural Property. So the international organization existed, but it wasn't really deployable. It was more about policies in individual countries for implementing the Hague Convention.
00:13:45 SPEAKER_02
Hague Convention. And some of the Blue Shield organizations focus on natural disasters in their own countries as well, just much like the Red Cross also does natural disasters in individual countries. So I learned. At the time, when I went to Iraq, and I'm still ashamed to this day that I didn't know it, but in 2003, the United States had never ratified the 1954 Hague Convention. We followed it as customary international law, but we hadn't ratified. And this caused a lot of problems in my office with the Coalition Provisional Authority. office representing the Ministry of Culture for Governance. And we worked in a coalition office with Italians and Brits. The Brits had not ratified either. And the Italians were like, wow, you know, we we are not working under the same set of standards and rules for the law of war. And, you know, the Italians were pretty upset about the damage to cultural heritage sites. So they were that's part