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Man gets 9 years imprisonment for Timbuktu destruction

Hague - The sites, nine of them on the UNESCO World Heritage list, "had an emotional and symbolic meaning for the residents of Timbuktu", the panel of judges at The Hague said.

War crimes judges on Tuesday sentenced a former rebel who admitted wrecking holy shrines during Mali's 2012 conflict to nine years in prison, in the first such case to focus on destruction of cultural heritage.
Human rights groups and international legal experts hope Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi's case in the International Criminal Court may serve as a deterrent to a kind of devastation that continues to be a feature of global conflicts yet has gone largely unpunished.
Al-Mahdi expressed remorse for his involvement in the destruction of 10 mausoleums and religious sites in Timbuktu dating from Mali's 14th-century golden age as a trading hub and center of Sufi Islam.
The sites, nine of them on the UNESCO World Heritage list, "had an emotional and symbolic meaning for the residents of Timbuktu", the panel of judges at The Hague said.
By striking at their most meaningful religious sites, al-Mahdi participated in "a war activity aimed at breaking the soul of the people," said presiding Judge Raul Pangalangan.
Specifically, the judges said, he "exercised joint control over the attacks" by planning, leading and participating in them, supplying pick-axes and in one case a bulldozer.
 Such acts have rarely been prosecuted despite being illegal under international law, but have attracted increasing international outrage after the Taleban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan in 2001 and, more recently, Daesh smashed monuments in the Syrian city of Palmyra.
Those actions do not fall under the jurisdiction of the ICC because it is limited to prosecuting individuals for crimes committed in member countries, and neither Syria nor Afghanistan have joined the court.