Iraqi communities have been devastated by sectarianism and its myriad outcomes. Cultural heritage has been both a victim and an instrument of these problems, with politicized interventions damaging social cohesion and communal relations.
The present disconnection between society and heritage is a direct outcome of a post-2003 politics in which the latter has increasingly become the domain of unaccountable, non-transparent and self-serving groups. The entanglement of cultural heritage in competitive resource extraction in Iraq has meant that heritage is increasingly viewed by Iraqi society as pertaining to a specific group’s interests rather than as a symbol of shared histories or cultures. Attacks against heritage have been used to justify intercommunal violence, leading to severely diminished societal relations. Moreover, while sectarian groups often justify their actions as serving the needs of their particular community, they have demonstrated limited interest in supporting the constituencies they claim to represent.
In recent years, the negative image associated with most of Iraq’s heritage institutions, particularly religious endowments, has been strongly criticized by Iraq’s youth and by protesters in Baghdad, Basrah, Najaf and many other cities.
There are growing calls by Iraq’s heritage experts, including academics, to unify heritage policy across the country. However, this is enormously difficult in a context of institutionalized political fragmentation and muhasasa:
The sectarianization of a significant chunk of Iraq’s cultural heritage has aggravated social tensions across the country. It has led to the exclusion of constituencies, and to generalized sentiments that the country’s history, community identities and cultural property have been appropriated by political elites. Local communities are keenly aware of the political dimension to cultural heritage transformation and neglect. An activist in Baghdad, who spends a significant amount of time working with communities and raising awareness of Baghdad’s history, refers to the neglect of Abbasid-era heritage in the city:
Nearly 20 years of political and social engineering through the domain of cultural heritage and, more broadly, the institutionalization of sectarian quotas across the state system have gradually embedded society-wide divisions based on ethnicity and religion. As the case above attests, Iraq’s past is being reimagined according to sectarian discourses. By extension, cultural property and citizens’ relationships to heritage sites have similarly become susceptible to interpretations aligned with those sectarian narratives. Shia and Sunni religious events, for example, are today viewed as culturally and religiously separate occasions, pertaining to demarcated religious groups. This sense of inaccessibility and exclusion in respect of cultural heritage bodes poorly for social cohesion and is a direct outcome of heritage predation.
Systems to involve local communities in decision-making are weak or non-existent and are in large part a legacy of colonialism and dictatorship. Individual communities and the general public have each in effect been the victims of cultural heritage transformation, as built environments have been radically altered by unaccountable semi-state institutions answerable to their members rather than to wider society. Over time, heritage predation will disenfranchise Iraqis from their own histories and ensure that cultural heritage is no longer a common resource for the public interest.
As previously mentioned, forced evictions in the name of cultural heritage have been commonplace. In all major historical sites in Iraq, including cities such as Karbala, Khadimiyah, Najaf and Samarra, large sections of local populations have been forcibly evicted to make way for expansion, often induced to leave by generous compensation. An example is the multi-period site of the Shrine of Prophet Jonah, within the precincts of Mosul. The complex was looted and damaged by ISIS in 2014. A partially destroyed 20th-century mosque, managed by the Sunni Endowment, sits on top of the medieval shrine, which in turn is embedded in the remains of a large Assyrian palace dating from the seventh century CE. In June 2020, 700 families were forcibly displaced from the site to make way for an archaeological team from abroad to conduct excavations. The families’ houses were demolished on the basis that they did not have permission to be there.