Peter has said much that I would have said.  We have to decide whether we
continue to regard museums as "institutions in the service of society and
its development" (Definition of a museum in the ICOM Statutes since 1974)
and hence accept a wider role in society, or just a building housing
collections.

ICOM and its 1927 - 1946 predecessor, the International Museums Office of
the League of Nations, have been closely involved in issues of war and
peace for 70 years.  This does not mean that there has been involvement in
the political sphere, but because of the grave implications for our
particular specialist corner of civil society of armed conflict in
general, and - increasingly - of the growing scale and increasingly
indiscriminate effect of modern weapons, of which nuclear weapons are
potentially the most destructive.

The International Museums Office campaigned against the increasingly
destructive power of aerial bombing from the '20s, and especially after
the demonstrations of the new heights of this in the Spanish Civil War
and then through World War II, while ICOM has been actively campaigning
for the reduction of war risks to museums and the wider cultural heritage
since the 1940s, the Hague Convention of 1954 being a special landmark,
as will be (we very much hope) the updated Hague Convention due to be
adopted in 10 months time during a Diplomatic Conference to be held in The
Hague to coincide with the centenary of the first Hague Peace Conference
of 1899.

Too many examples over the past couple of decades, perhaps above all in
ex-Yugoslavia, has shown that these days destroying the physical symbols
of the national identity of the enemy, such as monuments and museums, are
amongst the first priorities of the attacking force, and the bigger and
more indiscriminate the weapons used, through to nuclear weapons, the
greater the risk to museums.  A further escalation of the arms race,
especially in a region with great tensions already, and containing some of
the world's richest areas of archaeological and historic heritage, must
therefore be a legitimate concern for the museum profession and for ICOM
as its global representative body.

It is also significant in this debate to note that the new governing party
in India which has resumed nuclear weapons tests in breach of the UN
Nuclear Non-proliferation and Test Ban Treaties has in recent years
supported the total destruction of an internationally important 400 year
old mosque, and is now supporting the building of a modern Hindu temple on
the site.  This is not a good omen in terms of its likely attitude towards
protecting museums and the wider cultural heritage of its regional enemies
if - God forbid - the present governing party actually uses its nuclear
weapons, as it says it is prepared to do.

Patrick Boylan