Going Back to No-Go Zones

AS Israel seeks to flatten Tehran and Iran bombs Tel Aviv into a version of Beirut, here's a case for the revival of demilitarised 'open cities' of cultural significance.

- Kajal Basu

A post on the matter by G S Seda set me down the path of history, leafing and thinking about the past, present and future of demilitarised urban areas. Even as war-makers distinguish less and less between combatant and non-combatant, between logical targets and unreasonable collateral, between cultural inviolability and military vulnerability, entire conurbations have become acceptable as strike-worthy zones.

The history of war strategy deliberately levelling heritage cities is long—Timbuktu, Benin, Baghdad, Mandalay, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Aleppo, Afrin, Ypres, Sarajevo, Palmyra, Mostar, Narva, Magdeburg, Warsaw, Norrköping, Kyiv and London are just a few examples of cultural pulverisation in times of war.

We seem not particularly moved by entire cities blitzed by indiscriminate bombing, or historio-cultural sites of significance within cities being razed in attempts at ethnic eradication from history. We take heritage sites in the quotidian cityscape for granted, but bombs and missiles—or even rampaging soldiery—don't.

Until the Second World War—when bombs were directed not by live satellite feeds or GPS, but by cartography—maps had areas of protection mapped out. Bombs were aimed for maximum damage to armaments production or arms transportation facilities, at airfields set outside urban spaces, at dams located far from cities, at shipyards, at supply lines.