As Israel seeks to flatten Tehran and Iran bombs Tel Aviv into a version of Beirut, here’s a case for the revival of demilitarised ‘open cities’ of cultural significance.
A post on the matter by G S Seda set me down the path of history-leafing and thinking about the past, present and future of demilitarised urban areas. Even as war-makers distinguish less and less between combatant and non-combatant, between logical targets and unreasonable collateral, between cultural inviolability and military vulnerability, entire conurbations have become acceptable as strike-worthy zones.
The history of war strategy deliberately levelling heritage cities is long—Timbuktu, Benin, Baghdad, Mandalay, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Aleppo, Afrin, Ypres, Sarajevo, Palmyra, Mostar, Narva, Magdeburg, Warsaw, Norrköping, Kyiv and London are just a few examples of cultural pulverisation in times of war.
We seem not particularly moved by entire cities blitzed by indiscriminate bombing, or historio-cultural sites of significance within cities being razed in attempts at ethnic eradication from history. We take heritage sites in the quotidian cityscape for granted, but bombs and missiles—or even rampaging soldiery—don’t.
Until the Second World War—when bombs were directed not by live satellite feeds or GPS, but by cartography—maps had areas of protection mapped out. Bombs were aimed for maximum damage to armaments production or arms transportation facilities, at airfields set outside urban spaces, at dams located far from cities, at shipyards, at supply lines.
In 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, the mayor of Kraków declared it an open city after a Polish army division moved out. It was occupied by the German army with little fighting. In 1940, the Belgian government declared Brussels an open city, minimising destruction. Also in 1940, the French government moved to Bordeaux after declaring Paris an open city, thus saving the city’s cultural sites. In 1941, the then Kingdom of Yugoslavia declared Belgrade an open city, preventing further destruction. In 1942, after the Dutch forces had left, Batavia (now Jakarta) was declared an open city, and the Japanese took it over with little destruction. In 1943, following the cessation of Allied bombing, the Italian government declared Rome an open city, halting razing even as German troops fled. In 1944, the retreating Germans declared Florence an open city, preventing rapine during the chase. Again in 1944, the harried Germans declared Athens an open city before departing. They did the same to Hamburg in 1945, leaving it preserved for the British troops to take over.
But missilery brought its own dynamics of lack of human supervision. London was never declared an open city, and Hitler may never have respected that status even if it was. During the Blitz that reduced London to a smoking ruin, Hitler’s V2 long-range ballistic missiles—the world’s first, and named Vengeance Weapon 2 for the civilian damage it wreaked— caused carnage far above and beyond military targets. Britain, like Germany, had embedded its weapons and defence machinery among thickets of civilians, both to hide them from scrutiny and to cushion them with human flesh.
The expansion of collateral-damage zones carried over exponentially into the US’s post-war missile and bomb development, built by expatriated Nazi rocketeers brought into the US through Operation Paperclip. The zenith of the idea of mass obliteration of civilians was Operation Meetinghouse in March 1945, during which Tokyo was fire-stormed with incendiary bombs in what became the deadliest conventional air-bombing in WW2. (This was followed by the since-unmatched civilian slaughter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later. But it might be instructive to note that more people died during the conventional bombing of Tokyo than in the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki.) By this time, war-makers had obliterated the combatant-noncombatant binary.
The prohibition on attacking open towns and undefended places was first included in the 1874 Brussels Declaration. It was first codified in the Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land annexed to the 1907 Hague Convention IV respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land.
But here’s the strange thing. The WW2 obliteration of cities took place despite the 1923 Hague Rules concerning the Control of Wireless Telegraphy in Time of War and Air Warfare, which were drafted by a commission of jurists appointed by France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US, and which provided that “air bombardment is legitimate only when it is directed against a military objective”, and that “bombardment of cities, towns, villages, habitations and buildings which are not situated in the immediate vicinity of the operations of the land forces, is forbidden".
The latest genuflection to the ideal of protected zones was Protocol I of the 1977 Geneva Conventions, which did not explicitly define ‘open cities’ but included the concept of ‘non-defended localities’.
It is time we returned to this idea of civilian inculpability, but the concept that peoples go to war, not just countries, has taken hold. In this implacable, scorched-earth view, entire populations are fair game, not just militaries. Cultures constitute the enemy, not just states. It is not enough to level Gaza, but to extirpate Palestinians.
Time to demilitarise Tehran and Tel Aviv. Time for attrition-attracting systems of offence and defence to be externed from cities.
Kajal Basu is veteran journalist.
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)