A Malian extremist yesterday faced judgement in a landmark case before the International Criminal Court (ICC) for razing Timbuktu’s fabled shrines, with experts hoping it will send a strong message to safeguard the world’s ancient monuments.
A three-judge bench was to hand down its verdict and sentence against Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, the first extremist to stand trial at the tribunal in The Hague.
The historic verdict was to be the first to focus solely on cultural destruction as a war crime and the first arising out of the conflict in Mali.
Observers said they hope it acts as a deterrent to those bent on razing the world’s cultural heritage, which UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently condemned as “tearing at the fabric of societies.”
In an unprecedented move, al-Mahdi last month pleaded guilty to the single war crimes charge of “intentionally directing” attacks in 2012 on nine of Timbuktu’s mausoleums and the centuries-old door of the city’s Sidi Yahia mosque.
The slight, bespectacled man with a mop of curly hair asked the pardon of his people as videos were shown of him and other Muslim extremists knocking down ancient earthen shrines with pickaxes and bulldozers.
The residents of Timbuktu, which has now been restored, said they are ready to forgive him.
El-Boukhari Ben Essayouti, who oversaw the reconstruction with UNESCO assistance, said al-Mahdi’s trial was an important lesson.
The trial “has to be useful for something, showing to everyone that in the same way that we cannot kill another person with impunity, we cannot just destroy a world heritage site with impunity either,” he said.
Founded between the fifth and the 12th centuries by Tuareg tribes, Timbuktu has been dubbed “the city of 333 saints” and the “pearl of the desert” for the number of Muslim sages buried there.
Revered as a center of Muslim learning during its golden age in the 15th and 16th centuries, it was considered idolatrous by extremists who swept across Mali’s remote north in early 2012.
As the head of the so-called Hisbah or “Manners Brigade,” it was al-Mahdi, a former teacher and Muslim scholar, who gave the orders to ransack the sites.
Apologizing for his actions at the court, he said he had been overtaken by “evil spirits,” urging Muslims not to follow his example, and saying he wanted to seek the pardon of all Malians.
Prosecutors say al-Mahdi, born in 1975, was a member of the Ansar Dine, one of the extremist groups linked to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which seized the northern territory before being mostly chased out by a French-led military intervention in January 2013.
Prosecutors have asked for a jail term of between nine and 11 years, which they said would recognize both the severity of the crime and the fact that al-Mahdi was the first person to plead guilty before the court.
“The verdict is eagerly awaited,” said Lassana Cisse, Mali’s national heritage director, adding that it must be a “punishment which sets an example.”
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