IT’S funny, but Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi doesn’t look like a terrorist. A handsome doe-eyed individual, it’s easy to imagine him as a poster boy for Berber culture, perhaps posing on a sand dune with a camel.
But here was the Malian scamp this week, in The Hague, being sent down for nine years by the International Criminal Court for war crimes — namely for directing attacks on historical mausoleums and the almost 600-year-old Sidi Yahya mosque in Timbuktu during the brief occupation of the city in 2012 by Ansar Dine jihadists.
Mahdi’s sentence gave us much to reflect on at the Mahogany Ridge. It marked, as Unesco director general Irina Bokova put it, “the day impunity for the destruction of heritage finally came to an end”.
Writing in The Guardian, Bokova said, “It is the first international trial to focus exclusively on crimes against historical and religious monuments. Fifteen long years after the blasting of the Bamiyan Buddhas [by the Taliban in Afghanistan], the ICC ruling on the destruction of the mausoleums of Timbuktu passed with the world still reeling over spectacular acts of devastation in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.”
Mahdi’s sentence, she continued, contributed greatly to a comprehensive response to such extremism. “The deliberate destruction of heritage has become a weapon of war, part of a broader strategy of cultural cleansing that includes murder and persecution of people in the short term, and the annihilation of identities and destruction of social fabric in the longer term.”
Mahdi was perhaps lucky in getting nine years. Had he not pleaded guilty — he was the first ICC accused to do — and expressed remorse for his crimes, he may well have been put away for thirty.