Destruction of Timbuktu sites shocked humanity, prosecutor tells ICC

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Destruction of Timbuktu sites shocked humanity, prosecutor tells ICC

8:07 CAT | 02 Mar 2016

Reuters / Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi at the international criminal court in The Hague.

The international criminal court’s chief prosecutor has said the world must “stand up to the destruction and defacing of our common heritage”, at the opening of a war crimes case against a Malian jihadi leader accused of demolishing ancient mausoleums in Timbuktu.

“Humanity’s collective consciousness was shocked by the destruction of these sites. Such an attack must not go unpunished,” Fatou Bensouda told the tribunal in The Hague.

Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, aged about 40, is the first jihadi to appear before the ICC and the first person to face a war crimes charge for an attack on a historic and cultural monument.

His lawyers defended their client as “an intelligent, reasonable and educated man” who they said had sought to do good in response to a “divine message”.

Prosecutors are seeking to persuade three judges that there is enough evidence to proceed to a trial.

Faqi, a member of an Islamic court set up by Malian jihadis to enforce strict sharia law, is said to have jointly ordered or carried out the destruction of nine mausoleums and Timbuktu’s famous Sidi Yahia mosque, dating back to the 15th and 16th centuries.

Prosecutors allege that jihadis set upon the shrines with pickaxes and iron bars as well as vehicles, in what Bensouda said was a “callous assault on the dignity of an entire population and their cultural identity”.

Timbuktu, founded between the 11th and 12th centuries by Tuareg tribes, was listed as a Unesco world heritage site in 1988. Despite having been a centre of Islamic learning during its golden age in the 15th and 16th centuries, it is considered by jihadis to be idolatrous.

ICC prosecutors say Faqi was a leader of Ansar Dine, a mainly Tuareg group that held sway over Mali’s northern desert together with al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (Aqim) and a third local group from early 2012 until being routed in a French-led intervention in January 2013.

Faqi listened intently as Bensouda accused him and his co-perpetrators of showing their contempt for the shrines.

“I’ve understood the charge well,” Faqi told the presiding judge, Joyce Aluoch, in Arabic.

His lawyer, Jean-Louis Gilissen, said his client “wanted to make a contribution to what he thought and understood to be the divine message [by] doing what is right and seeking the means of good over evil to prevail.”

He said Faqi “never meant to attack the contents of the mausoleums, but what was built on top of them.”

Faqi is also the first person to appear at the ICC on charges arising from the violence in Mali, where stretches of the remote north still remain out of government control. He was arrested in Niger and transferred to the ICC in September 2015.

Recently there has been outcry over the razing of historic sites in Iraq and Syria by Islamic State. Jonathan Birchall, a spokesman for Open Society, an NGO, said a trial would “set a precedent for trying individuals for this crime at a time when attacks on historic and cultural monuments as well as other cultural crimes have gained prevalence and attention in Syria and elsewhere”.

Source: The Guardian