 Fel pob, ddweud i am ymddangos. Fe wnaeth eich bod yn ddod i'r ffridag yn y ddweud o'r Llyfrgell Llyfrgell. Mae'r ddweud o'r ysgwrth yma yn ymddangos ar y cyflogion. Mae'r ysgwrth, os yw oedd yn y pwyng ysgwrth yma, o'i'r rhaid i'n gweithio ymddangos yma yn 2009. I did an update in 2013 and here is a second update and actually I think as you see some of the points I'm making this presentation, the journey has been an interesting one but an astonishing one in what we have achieved in a relatively short time and that's a very positive message to take from this. There are two emblems on the screen. The first one is Blue Shield and Blue Shield International in particular. The emblem in the middle of the circle is the emblem of the 1954 convention. The circle around it turned into the logo of the organisation and it's that organisation that I will be talking quite a lot about later in the presentation. But the other and perhaps in many ways more important one is this logo on the side which is the personal logo of the UNESCO chair at Newcastle University and I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank the university publicly for the effort it has put in, the resource it has put in and most especially the finance it has put in to underwrite this work. Much of the work that you hear about today and certainly that from Paul Fox and Emma Cungliff and much of what I've done and you'll hear about in a moment would not have been possible without financial contribution from one university in the UK. That university is leading the way in what we do and it's an astonishing accolade to two vice-chancelors who have identified not only that this is something that is good to do in terms of academic reputation in terms of profile for the university but it's good to do because it is what we should be doing and both of them have committed to that process and I thank them publicly for that. This is a very if not extraordinarily topical issue and I'm not going to go through all of this but if you had told me in 2003 that the protection of cultural property would be part of five UN Security Council resolutions while I first got involved in this I would have just simply laughed at you and said you're barking mad. If you would have told me that in 2013 the protection of cultural property was an explicit element of a UN peacekeeping deployment in Mali I would have said that you were start raving bonkers. That may have been a step too far in many instances but it shows the international commitment to this sort of activity. Much of which, as the President has just said, prompted by the actions of the so-called Islamic State, Dayesh, Boko Haram and many others, and of course there are a wide range of UNESCO initiatives relating to this sort of work, not least in many ways the establishment of the UNESCO chair at Newcastle. So it's very topical, it's on lots of people's minds, it gets into the newspapers on a frequent basis. I am however constantly reminded by friends and people I sort of talk to over glass of wine somewhere but come on it's war, get real, things get blown up and damaged in war, there is nothing you could do about it. So the question I always ask is do things have to get damaged, can't we do anything? One of the things that I find some reassurance in is that for the last 2,500 years military theorists and practitioners have all said that the destruction of cultural property during conflict is a bad thing to allow it to happen. Simply, and I haven't got time to go through all of these characters, but from Sun Shao top left as you look at the screen, Polybius, the Greek philosopher and historian, Hugo Grotus on the other side, the Dutch 17th century academic writing on war and peace, on Classwitch writing in the 19th century and later in the 19th century Francis Lieber, all make the point that if you allow cultural property to be damaged during a conflict or worse if you do the damage you are starting to identify the first reason for the next conflict and if you are in an occupation area then you are making that occupation more difficult and there are sadly unfortunately as we all know probably more examples of failing to follow that theory than practice. But a couple of good things, so one person who springs to mind, if that can be said, is Theodoric the Great, occasionally referred to as Theodoric the Barbarian who was in charge of Italy at Ostrogath but who set up the title and the office of Keeper of Monuments in Rome all that time ago and the Keeper had to preserve all that is ancient and whatever you may add will conform to it in style but that filed a similar to quite a lot of relatively recent in the last 150 years legislation in the UK. But Theodoric went one stage further and started to actually restore properties that had been damaged during conflict and joined action there. So an early example of cultural property protection actually having a positive impact because the Rome that we all go to and visit today simply would not be there without this work from Theodoric. Something again glossed over ignored in many instances are ordinances written specifically for particular campaigns for English and other medieval armies and this one, the 1385 Durham ordinances is the first existing ordinance that actually identifies the protection of conflict. Theodoric is a cultural property as a responsibility of English forces under Richard II as they attack Scotland. I haven't got time to go into that but if some are interested I'll be happy to talk over Christmas or coffee or lunch or possibly Christmas if you can get me out of Christmas. The person who most people go to in terms of the first codification of cultural property protection certainly in the West is this gentleman Francis Lieber who wrote General Order 100 for the Federal Forces in the American Civil War and article 35 in that identifying classical works of art, libraries, scientific elections, presset instruments as well as hospitals must be secured against all avoidable injury even when they're contained in a fortified place while being besieged or bombarded. The first codification for a Western armed force perhaps since the medieval period to make sure that we try and protect this stuff. I'm glossing through and jumping over all sorts of things but then came along a somewhat catastrophic event let's say the First World War. Unlike any previous war the unprecedented use of new legal technology just enabled massive destruction on a scale hitherto unforeseen or unrealised and an appalling impact on cultural property. However there are a few gems that you can pick out of the First World War not necessarily on the Western Front that lead to having some sense of hope. So in 1917 the British Empire's Egypt Expeditionary Force, wonderful title, commanded by Phil Marshall Allenby took, liberated, occupied, depending on which way you look at it, Jerusalem. Allenby, to make a point, walked into Jerusalem to show that he was not conquering but liberating Jerusalem, whether that PR exercise worked very much we simply don't know. However what we do know is that the next day Allenby made a declaration saying every sacred building, monument, holy spot, shrine, traditional site of the three league religions that he maintained and protected. Very clear, very precise the next day that this happened. Somebody on Allenby's staff however was thinking to the next stage and the next level because here you have an image in fact taken from the defunct Northumberland Gazette showing British soldiers protecting them and in this instance protecting a mosque in Jerusalem but the caption goes on to say, you probably can't read it, that the British troops deployed were actually not British troops but Muslim troops of the Indian army. So somebody on Allenby's staff was thinking about the fact that let's do this properly and let's have Christian troops protecting the Christian and Jewish sites but Muslim troops who we've got, they need something to do protecting the Islamic sites and as a result of that there was no damage done to any of those monuments during that Allied or British occupation. Then we go to the Second World War, we're going to hear much more about this later in the day so I'm not going to talk about it in any detail but just to flag the fact that the monuments men, if any of you have had the misfortune to see the awful film of George Clooney of that name, why did he save his worst film for his most important topic? But that area both created in the US and the UK for very different reasons but again too much detail to go into but you'll hear more of that. However in the Second World War the Supreme Allied Commander picked up on this and for a number of amphibious landings made the point in memos to the officers involved in those landings that inevitably in the advance were going to be things historic monuments and cultural centres which symbolised to the world what we are fighting to preserve. So there's a senior military voice understanding exactly what should be happening but then the next bit is a really important bit, it is the responsibility of every commander to protect and respect these symbols wherever possible. So in that sentence you've got two things, it is military responsibility but also wherever possible which introduces an interesting concept of military necessity. If this is the only way of achieving a military aid then we may be able to or we may have to blow something up that we don't necessarily want to but that again is an issue to detail to go into in any detail here. Immediately following the Second World War effectively all of those monuments made on both sides of the Atlantic and from Europe as well had been conscripted into the armed forces and as they would demobilise the last one out simplistically turned off the lights and closed the door behind them and there was very little relationship between the armed forces and heritage sector over the next 40, 50, 60 years and again extraordinarily simplistically that was because as the military became slightly more right wing the academia became extensively more left wing and never twain would talk. There was as the President has already said some limited work before the Yugoslavia and again time to gloss over that but I'm happy to discuss later but that idea that Eisenhower brought in in terms of responsibility was then encapsulated in three key bits of international humanitarian law legislation. You've heard already about the 54 convention and you'll hear more about that through the day. Also in the 1977 additional protocols to the Geneva Conventions protection of cultural property established as part of those conventions and then in 1998 the establishment of the Roman Statute which set up the international criminal court in the Hague. Interestingly the primary piece of legislation the Hague Convention has never been used in real activity to convict anybody or to push anything and one of the problems of the Hague Convention is it hasn't been implemented properly probably by any country or state party to the convention although there are notable exceptions to some good word that's gone on there. The most recent current prosecution for war crimes against cultural property is happening at the Hague in the moment under the Roman Statute and the most recent major conviction for destruction of cultural property was through the Roman Statute in the ICC about three years ago now when Mr. Almadi, who had been responsible for the destruction of Nile, Morsyria and the Mosque in Timbuktu was sentenced to nine years imprisonment specifically for that destruction. And there is also a current initiative from the UN Special Rapporteur for Cultural Rights to establish access to cultural heritage as an explicit cultural right. It's sort of mentioned off to the side in the 48 convention but not explicitly there. So there's a lot of legal responsibility around there. Very briefly the Hague Convention you've heard its title is two protocols the first one mainly about reparation of materials if they've been removed joint conflict and the second one about so called enhanced protection and the potential for criminal liability. All of that part of international humanitarian law or what those in uniform tend to refer to as the laws of armed conflict but also now legally speaking morthing into international customary law so even if a country hasn't ratified the convention formally itself under customary law it is expected to abide by the rules of that convention. Most of Hague, a lot of Hague is about what countries state parties should do before a conflict, produce lists of cultural property, if appropriate identify so there are three levels there is cultural property being protected under general, category of special protection and then the second protocol brings in this category of enhanced protection. To put in place emergency plans to either protect in situ or remove to these designate competent authorities if appropriate to mark with the blue shield and then the military obligations which you'll hear more about from Tim in a moment are all identified under article 7 of the convention. I don't want to dwell on Iraq but it's a good benchmark for where we were and where we've come from. So in Iraq in 2003, in fact in America in 2002 the Americans set up six so-called think tanks to plan for the invasion and post-sadam Iraq. One of those had a subcommittee on culture which never met. As a result, partly as a result of that, no coalition combat troops had any orders to protect any of the heritage buildings or organisations. They weren't even marked on combat maps. There was an extraordinary limited expertise within the coalition, much of which was still stateside because the coalition were planning for a six month, possibly chemical war and the Iraqi army essentially disappeared in front of their eyes and so there the Americans were within three weeks in Baghdad. And of course neither the US at the time nor the UK had ratified the convention or either of the protocols. So what went wrong? Well again, all of this is the content of more than another lecture but there weren't enough troops deployed. There was a complete utter failure on those planners to understand the possible post-conflict scenarios in Iraq. There was a failure to understand the importance of cultural heritage and historical relationships in Iraq between some of the coalition partners but probably most critically there had been a complete utter failure until a few months before the event of the heritage community to maintain a relationship with those in uniform. And we cannot complain if we do not have that liaison and build that relationship and develop that trust between the two sides if we want the military to take CPP seriously and I think we would all agree we do. And that's part of the result of our failure to integrate and to be involved and build that relationship. So if you go back to 1917 Alan would be saying everything is going to be protected and we'll look after this because they knew in 1917 the importance of religious and cultural science. Wide forward to 2006, no planning for culture, no planning for protection of sites and the second bombing of the Al-Aqshiri mosque in Samara, which you see the results of on the screen, is identified by most commentators as the tipping point from a population getting increasingly brassed off with the fact that the coalition was still there three years after the invasion and the toppling of Saddam into a full scale sectarian civil war which caused the coalition to have to stick around for most of the number six years. Six years worth of casualties, many fatalities and a losing essentially of the war, a disdain rising of the Middle East into the chaos that we see at the moment. I'm not saying that had all mosques and in particular such important mosques as the Al-Aqshiri mosque would have averted all of that but it would have been a nice thing to see if it might have done and it might well have contributed to some of that. So another question I am constantly asked is are historic objects as important today as people? And the answer to that is simple, absolutely not, of course. People first, every time nobody should be asked to put their life at risk protecting cultural property. And yet the German playwright not writing about any Islamic extremism but in fact writing about Christian extremism in Spain under the Inquisition where they burn books they will in the end burn people too. People first 100% but cultural heritage is about people, the two are completely indivisible. I want to talk briefly now about some of the work of the Blue Shield. Many of you will have heard of it, I hope, I won't embarrass people by asking if they heard of the Blue Shield or not but it's an NGO dedicated to the protection of heritage from conflicts and disasters. It comprises an international board and committee, the secretariat, as funded through the moment at the Castle University and is the emblem identified in the 54th Convention. But emblem there turned into a logo of bottom left. A very brief history just for some of you who may have heard of parts of this, the international committee of the Blue Shield was established in 1996 by the four primary heritage NGOs from museums, sites and buildings, libraries and archives. ICBS had the potential to have national committees. 2008 the association of national committees of the Blue Shield was created. Those two were simply amalgamated in 2016 to become the Blue Shield and they are no longer used. So if you are responsible for any website that still has ICBS or ANCBS on it, please remove them and just put links to the current websites of the Blue Shield. That's us. 25 registered committees at the moment. I think that may now be 26, I'm not sure. A number under construction, a number of others being planned and from 1996 not a bad coverage in the world but I'm not going to be happy until that whole map is blue and that is part of our agenda. The Blue Shield mission committed to the protection of the world's cultural property and is concerned with the protection of cultural and natural heritage, tangible and intangible in the event of armed conflict but also natural or human-made disaster. The reason that's expanded away from the very focused work of the 54 convention is that the first responders in most natural and human-made disasters are of course the military. So if you're training them to do one thing in armed conflict it is relatively simple to train them to do something similar in following natural disaster and armed conflict. So this is members of the Argentinian Blue Shield National Committee who have produced a series of 6 TV programmes about their work. Blue Shield, our primary context is 54 convention, as I've said, underpinned by UN of UNESCO and supported by something we call the Blue Shield approach. Here you've got Paul who you'll see later on doing some of that specific training for NATO. We identify as part of that approach four times when people like us need to interact with people in uniform. And again we haven't got time to go through this in a detailed but long term immediately pre-deployment that's proactive protection getting it right in the mindset before something happens. Getting it right immediately pre-deployment about a specific set of cultural property during conflict and post conflict stabilisation. We have identified six areas of activity that we want all national committees to prioritise themselves and work under. And you'll see and we haven't again got time to go through these but these areas of activity overlap and activity could be put in one or possibly another. That really doesn't matter. Part of the rationale behind this is to create a structured organisation that is immediately recognisable as the same organisation whether you are in Australia, Argentina or Iceland and that essentially becomes a fundable organisation. And there you've got training for UN peacekeepers in Lebanon. It's a responsibility. Eisenhower flagged out very clearly and others have done since. But it's also just simply good practice for the military. It's about the people. If military occupiers or during conflict unnecessarily kill civilians, unnecessarily force internal migration, displacement, etc. That is not good practice for the military point of view. They've got that one completely. It's a legal responsibility. They need to understand the political uses of cultural property during conflict. The fact that it might provide looting and pillage might provide funding for the opposition. If you destabilise a country's economy where much of that economy may be based on tourism, which may be and is frequently in the Middle East based on cultural tourism, you destabilise that country for a longer period. That brings in the economic value of CP and whether you actually protect cultural property as what the military call a force multiplier making their job, if not easier, not more difficult, or whether you allow the out-of-sharing mosque to be blown up without trying to protect it, thereby perhaps making their job significantly more difficult, those sorts of things. Of course, mission first, I understand that. It's taken me a long time to understand that, but I've got that message, but we need to work with the military to try and embed CPP as part of their mission delivery. We have identified not one the fact that it's war and it's things that are going to get blown up, collateral damage, as a risk to cultural property. But Blue Shield have identified eight different risks, all of which could be mitigated if you begin to work long term with those in uniform and also their political masters. And we have to work on that basis. Again, no time to go through that and you'll see Emma talking later on this afternoon. We've had some success to date. Both the US and UK national committees of the Blue Shield were heavily involved in pressurising their governments, respectively, to ratify the 54 convention. The US did that in 2009. Only the convention, neither of protocols. The UK did the full path in 2017, as we've heard earlier. One that I still see as a great success, others less so, is the publication of a book, Cultural Property Protection Makes Sense, by the Civilian Military Centre of Excellence based in the Netherlands affiliated to NATO. The reason I see that as a great success is you've got a 78-page booklet written by somebody in uniform for those in uniform as one of the first commitments that CPP is an important thing to deliver. It's not a brilliant document. It desperately needs updating and changing, not least because of other successes that we've had and that the military have had. And the centre in the Netherlands is in the process of redoing that. There's the merging of ICBS and ANCBS creating an effective, we hope, force in the future. There's a development of the approach and a lot of that, and the implementation of that, is Emma Cungliff's hard work working with the National Committees to try and bring that together. It's building the relationship with NATO. I first worked with NATO in 2009. We were sort of working on a very slow upward trajectory there. 2017, when Paul Fox was pointing, that slow upward trajectory just went vertical and Paul's work has been astonishing in building that relationship and proving to the armed forces in the alliance the value of CPP. In 2012 is the result of some work primarily done by the US National Committee identifying cultural property in Libya that we would prefer not to be destroyed if possible. The result of some protection, and in particular of one site, got NATO to creating their own internal inquiry. And that reported in December 2012 with its primary recommendation that NATO should have its own CPP doctrine. The creation that we'll hear much more about in a moment of the CPP unit in the UK, we'll hear from Colonel Tim. And the first training of that, mainly orchestrated by input from Paul Fox, led by Paul Fox, but obviously very closely connected with military training. So again, if I've been standing here, when I was standing here in 2009 and 13, almost none of that had been achieved. We are doing an awful lot, currently, to try and build on that and move forward. So we're working on NATO about the template for targeting information. You'll hear more about that from Emma later. With NATO, you'll hear again more about that from Paul. Building capacity of the National Committees, that's the Blue Shield approach, and we have a general assembly of the Blue Shield National Committees next November in the Czech Republic. Started developing, working for UN peacekeeping deployments, which is a similar basis, but a slightly different approach to the approach for armed conflict deployment. And we have trained twice now the Fijians who only deploy as UN peacekeepers, and about three weeks ago the Irish Defence Forces, again, who only deployed overseas as UN peacekeepers. We're going to be developing that with other peacekeeping organisations over the next 12 months or so. We're developing a working relationship with the humanitarian sector, predominantly based in Geneva, and we're on the back of that discussing MOUs with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the final version of which is going around back and forth, and I hope will be finalised next week, with NATO and UNESCO and with all or two other organisations. We are actively now looking for funding for a central office for Blue Shield International, and Newcastle University has committed to looking for funding for a university centre to research the whole breadth and scope of CPP. The future, along this, earlier I had on one of my slides, which I didn't prompt, that many people call the Blue Shield a cultural equivalent of the Red Cross. Well, yes, but not yet. But if we don't build the foundations now, it won't be in 50 or 100 years time. And what you've got on that screen is sort of my aspirational agenda for where we will get to, quite possibly not in my lifetime, but where we need to start now if we're going to get there in 50 or more years time. So an essential office, yes, I want that in the next couple of years, influencing politicians across the board, etc. An annual training programme, I would like to instigate that next year, continuing to support national committees, continuing the message with the military that it's not a distraction, a responsibility and an opportunity. I want all state parties to the Convention to have a National Committee of the Blue Shield. I want all UN countries to ratify the Convention. I want the integrated approach with those in uniform, and I want to be the cultural equivalent of the Red Cross. Absolutely, but as I say, that may take a little bit of time. I talked at the beginning and said people first in every instance, and nobody should put their lives on the line for that, for the protection of cultural property. And I still abide by that. We're not doing this alone. There are a plethora of other organisations involved. The niche, the difference with what we do and what most of these on here and others work for is that those organisations are essentially coming from a very heritage perspective. We are the one who is clearly accepting and agreeing and taking on that role of liaison with the military. Lots of work there, lots going on, and obviously lots going on around the Middle East, and I'd like to end just on a somewhat sobering thought and slide, which is now very sadly significantly out of date. But I say people first, nobody should risk their lives. Here are nine colleagues from the Syrian Director General of Antiquities who have actually made that final supreme sacrifice. Six killed by sniper fire, two by IED, one by torture and beheading. These are the guys who are living this work on a daily basis and in these instances giving their lives for it. It's lovely to have a meeting about this in the calm, refined environment in which we sit. It's a different thing when you're trying to do it on the ground during a conflict area. And all of the work that we're trying to do, all of the work at Blue Shield, is trying to support characters like this on the ground delivering it. Thank you very much for listening.