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Articles:
1) War Imperils an Iraqi Trove Of Antiquities and Monuments [WSJ] -- 3.27.03
2) Looters plunder in minutes Iraq's millennia-old legacy [Christian Science Monitor] -- 4.14.03
3) Iraq's clerics help put lid on looting [Christian Science Monitor] -- 4.15.03
4) UNESCO to make a preliminary assessment of the state of Iraq�s Cultural Heritage [UNESCO] -- 4.15.03
5) Ko�chiro Matsuura: Libraries and Archives must be protected as essential parts of the rich heritage of Iraq [UNESCO] -- 4.15.03
6) The Director-General of UNESCO calls for all measures to be taken to ensure the protection and surveillance of Iraqi cultural heritage and effectively fight against illicit trafficking [UNESCO] -- 4.12.03
7) British Museum, UNESCO Hope to Restore Artifacts [Associated Press] -- 4.15.03
8) Rumsfeld Denies U.S. Blame for Iraq Museum Plunder [Reuters] -- 4.15.03
9) Museum looting likely well-executed theft, officials say [Knight Ridder] -- 4.16.03
10) Experts Scramble to Identify Iraq's Plundered Treasures [WSJ] -- 4.16.03
11) Out of the Ruins -- It's Time To Secure Iraq's Treasures [WSJ] -- 4.16.03
12) Buy Back the Looted Artifacts [WSJ] -- 4.16.03
13) Iraqis Say Museum Looting Wasn't as Bad as Feared [WSJ] -- 4.17.03
14) Missing in Action [New York Times] -- 4.17.03
14) U.S. Says It Has Recovered Many Artifacts and Manuscripts in Iraq [New York Times] -- 5.09.03
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March 27, 2003
WAR IN IRAQ
FROM THE ARCHIVES: March 27, 2003
War Imperils an Iraqi Trove
Of Antiquities and Monuments
By KAREN MAZURKEWICH
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The city of Nasiriyah, where Iraqi soldiers have engaged in fierce combat with U.S.-led ground troops in recent days, isn't just the site of two strategically important bridges across the Euphrates River.
It is also very close to the ancient city of Ur, the biblical birthplace of Abraham and the home of a ramped ziggurat that dates to the third millennium B.C. -- a historical treasure that was damaged by gunfire during the 1991 Gulf War.
As troops wage war against the regime in Baghdad, scholars and archeologists are warning that more harm could be inflicted on the greatest trove of antiquities and monuments in the Middle East. They are fighting their own battle to protect Iraq's ancient cultural heritage from the devastation of war and human greed.
Mesopotamia, a cradle of civilization long before the Egyptian, Greek or Roman empires blossomed, gave rise to the world's first cities, its first written language and its first monumental architecture and art. Treasures that document this legacy fill thousands of archeological sites and museums across Iraq.
As a result, the invasion of Iraq could be a serious "setback for archeology and heritage," says John Malcolm Russell, an archeologist at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. "The more fighting," he says, "the more possibility for damage."
Among the sites at risk: the palace ruins of Nineveh, the seat of power for Assyrian kings until the seventh century B.C.; the expansive brickwork ruins of the sixth-century Ctesiphon audience hall on the outskirts of Baghdad; and the "Warka" site -- also known as Uruk -- just off the road between two rivers in Basra, where fighting is taking place between British troops and Iraqi militia loyal to the Saddam Hussein regime.
While U.S. policy calls for avoiding the targeting of historic sites, Iraqi practices could test the military's resolve. At a Central Command briefing in Qatar yesterday, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks showed images of Iraqi military-communications equipment positioned in ancient ruins marked with the international symbol for a historical site. Once Iraqi military units take up residence near civilian structures, a Central Command official says, those protected sites "are legally subject to attack."
A U.S. Defense Department spokeswoman says that so far there is no record of any damage to historical sites tied to U.S. bombing. But the Washington Post has reported that during the recent bombing of Baghdad, blasts damaged the student union at Mustansiriya University, a 13th century school that is one of the oldest in the Arab world.
Concerned about the fate of Iraq's antiquities, an international group of archeologists, academics and art lawyers made a presentation in late January to Pentagon officials, asking them to take the utmost care to preserve Iraq's cultural relics. The delegates presented them with a catalogue of 5,000 -- just a fraction, they said, of the countless sites that dot the countryside. "We wanted to make it clear that Iraq is Mesopotamia, and the major cradle of civilization in the world," says McGuire Gibson, a professor of Mesopotamian archeology at the University of Chicago and the head of the American Association for Research in Baghdad.
The U.S. military isn't supposed to attack historical sites, public-service buildings, nongovernmental organizations, medical facilities, schools or mosques. U.S. planners note that the list of Iraqi targets has been honed over 12 years and is regularly updated with the latest intelligence to ensure that civilian buildings aren't targeted. And they say precise guided missiles and sophisticated targeting mean that collateral damage to historical sites can be averted.
But in times of war, even the best of intentions can offer only so much protection. "If the army has to hunker down, their natural inclination will be to trench into a hill," says Patty Gerstenblith, a law professor at DePaul University College of Law in Chicago and one of the petitioners to the Pentagon. But mounds or hillocks aren't a natural part of the flat, desert landscape in Iraq, she says, adding, "We pointed out to them that 99% of hills are ancient sites."
Looters represent another threat. Iraq's treasures have long fed the insatiable market for antiquities abroad. But since the 1991 Gulf War and its sanctions, Iraq's culture cops have lacked sufficient funds to guard key sites, making theft easier than ever.
Six years ago, robbers operating in daylight raided a museum in Babylon and seized rare cylinders bearing cuneiform writings from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II (605-563 B.C.). Since the mid-1990s, Iraq has reported the theft of about 4,000 objects from its regional museums to Interpol, the international police organization, and Unesco, the United Nations agency responsible for the preservation of cultural relics. Countless other unknown artifacts have been dug from the ground and smuggled out. Thieves hacked off the 1.5-ton head of a winged bull that once graced the royal palace at Khorsabad. Before it was transported out of the country, Iraq was able to recover the head. It now sits on the ground floor of the Iraq National Museum of Baghdad, along with colossal Assyrian reliefs from the ninth century B.C.
Even overseas diplomats in Iraq have been implicated -- one was caught with 500 smuggled objects in his car, according to the University of Chicago's Mr. Gibson. Several years ago, Donny George, the director general of research and studies at Iraq's Board of Antiquities and Heritage, showed journalists dozens of confiscated stone artifacts and bowls that he says were discovered in a large mailbag stamped "United Nations Diplomatic Mail." Genuine pieces even show up regularly on eBay, says Mr. Russell, of the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.
The looting could get a lot worse if there is a breakdown of order after the war. That is why some archeologists are pushing for Mr. George -- who says he camped out in the National Museum of Baghdad during the entire 1991 Gulf War to ward off looters -- to stay on as Iraq's top man for chasing down stolen antiquities even after a regime change in Baghdad.
Among his fans is Mr. Russell, who collaborated with him to identify stone reliefs stolen from Nineveh. "The present directors of the Iraq State Board of Antiquities are internationally respected professionals," says Mr. Russell. "They should continue to lead the department as they have in the past, with the full support of the international community."
-- Michael Schroeder contributed to this article.
Write to Karen Mazurkewich at [email protected]
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Updated March 27, 2003
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from the April 14, 2003 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0414/p08s02-wome.html
Looters plunder in minutes Iraq's millennia-old legacy
By Mary Wiltenburg and Philip Smucker
BOSTON AND BAGHDAD - He could see the mob coming, and feared not for his life, but for the treasures of Iraq's ancient past - some of them 7,000 years old - that had been left in his care.
"I took my white underpants off and put them on a stick and ran up the street to the US Marines," says archaeologist Mohsin Kadun. "I asked them - no, begged them - to help me preserve our treasures, but they would not drive down the street."
This past weekend, the frenzy of looting that has engulfed Baghdad since US troops took control of the city last Wednesday spread to the one place archaeologists worldwide hoped might be spared: the Iraqi National Museum. As hundreds of looters ran down the halls, stealing or smashing almost 70 percent of the repository's valuable statues, carvings, and artifacts, Mr. Kadun, a 30-year museum employee, stood helpless at the gates, screaming.
Iraq has been called one giant historic site, and for 80 years its national Museum has been the repository of irreplaceable records and collections of ancient art and artifacts from the country's Babylonian, Assyrian, and Mesopotamian past. The ransacking has caused incalculable loss to Iraq's, and the world's, cultural heritage, experts say. "If Iraq has anything besides oil, any meaning for humanity, it is in this history," says Paul Zimansky, professor of Near Eastern archaeology at Boston University.
Before the war began, Kadun was in charge of moving artifacts into two giant vaults to prevent them from crashing off their pedestals as US bombs shook Baghdad. Other archaeologists also took protective measures. A group of scholars, conservators, and collectors, including MacGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago, the leading US researcher in Mesopotamian archaeology, drew up a list for the Pentagon of more than 4,000 crucial Iraqi museums, monuments, and archaeological digs, urging commanders to spare them. "The museum was at the top of that list," Dr. Gibson says.
When the bombs stopped falling, the museum stood intact, its marvelous stores untouched. But US forces apparently made no plans for defending it against plunder.
Kadun, and one lone guard watched as the thieves pried open the vaults, grabbing gold necklaces and precious stones. When those were gone, they fell upon the magnificent, inscribed carvings. With carts, cars, and blankets, they hauled off the treasures of seven millennia, taking with them the cultural memory of this already traumatized nation. Among the losses: two Babylonian lions, made of baked clay, a 4,000-year-old collection of tablets laying out exercises for schoolchildren, a 5,000-year-old statue of a bearded man holding a vase.
Dr. Gibson learned of the looting on Friday, when the mob had only sacked the museum's first floor, and not yet its vaults. "That's as if somebody had gotten into the Metropolitan [Museum in New York] and taken everything out of half of it," he said, his voice shaking.
Sunday, with the threat of more vandalism, US forces still had not arrived to secure the museum. "It reflects badly on us as Americans," says Dr. Zimansky. "We've behaved like absolute barbarians. OK, you can blame a mob, but they looted because law and order was broken down, and we broke it down. Then we stood by and watched."
The losses are particularly galling, experts say, because unlike in Afghanistan, where looting and destruction of artifacts had been under way for decades before US forces arrived, Iraq had a long history of exquisite record-keeping and official protection, although in the past 13 years the country saw the defiling of provincial museums and historic sites, first in the chaos after the 1991 Gulf War and then during the economic devastation of the embargo.
James Armstrong, assistant curator of Harvard University's Semitic Museum, says he hopes that once order is restored in Iraq at least some of the stolen treasures can be recovered. In postwar Afghanistan, authorities set up checkpoints and caught some of the smugglers trying to take Buddhist artifacts into Pakistan. Iraqi artifacts will be more valuable to international collectors, but scholars say some stolen items are so well-known that they'll be impossible to sell and could in time be returned.
www.csmonitor.com | Copyright � 2003 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.
For permission to reprint/republish this article, please email [email protected]
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0414/p08s02-wome.html
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from the April 15, 2003 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0415/p10s01-woiq.html
Iraq's clerics help put lid on looting
After almost a week of chaos, Baghdad sees the first glimmers of a return to order.
By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
BAGHDAD, IRAQ - Sheik Ali Jaburi used the loudspeaker at the top of his mosque's ochre minaret to do more than call the Muslim faithful to prayer on Monday.
He also broadcast his sermon to his neighborhood, demanding that people give up the loot they have plundered in the wave of mass theft that has swept Baghdad in recent days. And his call is being heeded.
"Our people know in their hearts that what they are doing is wrong," Mr. Jaburi says. "I am asking God to help us make people understand that they must give stolen things back."
After almost a week of chaos and lawlessness, the Iraqi capital is showing the first tentative signs of a return to order. Though fires still burned in some government ministries Monday, some public buses are running again and vendors have reappeared on some streets.
Across the capital and elsewhere in Iraq, Muslim clerics are playing an important role in the recovery of looted valuables.
"Our first aim is to bring order," says Ali al-Gharawi, an imam at a Shiite Muslim mosque in Saddam City, a teeming slum in northeastern Baghdad. "Iraqi people have always been in contact with religious organizations, so they respect them."
In the western suburb of Al Doura, where Mr. Jaburi's mosque is located, life was still far from normal Monday. There was still no electricity in Baghdad, nor water in most of the city - but a few shopkeepers had pulled up their shutters for the first time in a week, barbers and bakers were doing brisk business, and black-shawled women sat on the sidewalk behind piles of vegetables and eggs.
At the Al Doura power station, which normally supplies three million Baghdadis - half the population - with their electricity, US Army officers met Monday with Iraqi officials to start bringing the dilapidated plant on line.
"We've liberated the people, now we want to get the place up and operational," says Brig. Gen. Steve Hawkins, the top US military official dealing with the capital's engineering problems.
The Al Doura plant suffers not only from age and a lack of spare parts, but from damage done by US bombs during the war, and from a lack of fuel to power it. Pipes carrying both natural gas and fuel oil from the Kirkuk oilfields in northern Iraq were damaged during the war, according to Tony Matteus, a technician who stayed at the station throughout the war.
"We want to get the basic, minimum essential services up as soon as possible," General Hawkins says. "But it's a complex system, a big country and a big city," he adds, refusing to estimate how long it will take to restore electricity - and thus clean drinking water - to Baghdad.
In the meantime, a few of the city's institutions are struggling to work normally with power from emergency generators.
At the main door of the al Kindi hospital in central Baghdad, doctors, nurses and other staff returning to work for the first time in days added their names to lists of those reporting for duty on Monday. "Now they are trying to organize themselves," says Morton Rostrup, a Norwegian doctor with Doctors Without Borders. "The first phase was pretty catastrophic, and many hospitals were looted. There has been a kind of improvement, and we expect more people once this starts."
Outside, an ambulance pulled up, bringing not a patient but oxygen tanks, cardboard boxes of medicines and bundles of operating gowns which armed hospital staff had collected from mosques, warehouses and sometimes - by force - directly from looters.
On the other side of town, at the Al Doura power station, Nasser Ali pulled his pickup over at the gates to let soldiers from the 101st Airborne who are guarding the site check his load of filing cabinets, office chairs and other furniture.
"We found this in civilian homes, but the people who stole it are giving it back," says Mr. Ali, a driver at the plant. "This is my fifth trip today. The mosques are spreading the word that this (looting) is against the rules of our religion, and when religious leaders say something, people obey. They feel ashamed."
In a storehouse by his mosque, Mr. Jaburi picked through boxes of returned computers, bathroom fittings, electrical cable, military clothes, and transformers Monday, and showed off a gaudy purple wall clock.
"We are talking to people kindly, reminding them what Islam says, and asking them to search their consciences," he says. "We are asking them to go back to behaving like normal Muslim people."
Other clerics are less diplomatic. Outside one mosque in Al Doura, a knot of men emerging from noon prayers was abuzz with a fatwa - a religious ruling - said to have been issued by an imam in the holy city of Najaf, ordering wives to abstain from sexual relations with their thieving husbands until they returned their loot.
� Scott Peterson in Baghdad contributed to this report.
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www.csmonitor.com | Copyright � 2003 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.
For permission to reprint/republish this article, please email [email protected]
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0415/p10s01-woiq.html
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UNESCO to make a preliminary assessment of the state of Iraq�s Cultural Heritage
Editorial Contact: Sophie Boukhari, Bureau of Public Information, Editiorial Section, tel : 33 (0)1 45 68 17 03
Lucia Iglesias-Kuntz, Bureau of Public Information, Editiorial Section, tel : 33 (0)1 45 68 17 02
- Email
Audiovisual Contact: Carole Darmouni, Bureau of Public Information, Audiovisual Section, tel. : 33 (0)1 45 68 17 38 or 33 (0)1 45 68 54 81
A B-roll can be obtained by calling +33 (0) 1 45 68 00 68
Photographs are also available at +33 (0) 1 45 68 16 91 - Email
15-04-2003 12:00 pm In the wake of the heavy losses to Iraq�s cultural treasures, notably in Baghdad, Mosul and Tikrit, some 30 leading experts will meet at UNESCO Headquarters on April 17 to attempt a preliminary evaluation of the state of the country�s heritage. The meeting will seek to determine the urgent measures required to safeguard this heritage, which dates back thousands of years.
Following the looting of the National Archaeological Museum of Baghdad, UNESCO Director-General Ko�chiro Matsuura, who on April 11 had exhorted US and British authorities to preserve the country�s archaeological treasures, called on them �to take immediate measures of protection and surveillance of Iraqi archaeological sites and cultural institutions.�
The Director-General also called on the authorities of countries bordering Iraq, international police, customs organizations and the principal actors of the art market, to join forces with UNESCO in a �comprehensive mobilization so that stolen objects should not find their way to acquirers.�
At the April 17 meeting, which, apart from the opening session at 9 a.m., will be held behind closed doors, the group of about 30 Iraqi and international experts* will attempt to draw an inventory of recent cultural destruction. They will also make recommendations on those elements of Iraq�s heritage that require priority action and the way this should be coordinated. A press briefing will be held at 2.45 p.m.**
Iraq is often described as the "cradle of civilization". From the end of the fifth millennium B.C., Ancient Mesopotamia gave rise to a host of technical and cultural innovations. Thanks to an exceptional combination of geographical and climatic factors, a surplus of agricultural production led to the development of sophisticated societies, the invention of writing and the establishment of the first urban settlements and legal codes. In more recent history, Baghdad was the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate and the political and cultural centre of the Muslim world.
Numerous sites, and those collections in national museums that were spared from the pillage, bear witness to an invaluable legacy for all humanity. Before it was sacked,
The Baghdad Museum, for example, housed around 100,000 artefacts that testified the glory of the civilizations that succeeded each other in the "Land between the two Rivers", from pre-historic to Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Persian, Parthian, Sassanide, Greek and Islamic.
Outstanding sites include the cities of Ur of the Chaldees, the supposed birthplace of Abraham; Babylon and its legendary Tower of Babel; Nineveh, Ashur, Samarra and Hatra. This great, fortified city, which combines Greek, Roman and Oriental influences, is the only Iraqi site inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List (1985).
Another seven sites feature on a �tentative list�, which was supplied in 2000 by the Iraqi authorities with a view to their inscription on the World Heritage List, including Mosul, Nimrud, Ashur, Samarra, Al-Ukhaidar, Wasit and Ur.
After the meeting on April 17, conditions permitting, UNESCO will send a mission of experts to Iraq. This mission should allow for a preliminary assessment of the state of conservation of the museums, monuments and the main heritage sites, in order to identify most urgent needs; evaluate the capacity of local authorities to rehabilitate cultural heritage; identify Iraqi and international partners and to draw up a plan of action and a strategy to raise the necessary funds. Italy has already announced that it will place an initial sum of 400,000 Euros at UNESCO�s disposal.
UNESCO began working with the Iraqi authorities in 1976 to safeguard the country's cultural heritage. In the 1980s, the Organization contributed to the restoration of Babylon and Basra. More recently it has worked in three main directions.
UNESCO first engaged in the fight against looting and the illegal trade of cultural artefacts that developed during and after the 1991 conflict. UNESCO forwarded a list of missing items supplied by the Iraqi authorities to many museums and auction houses, to the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and INTERPOL. In 1995, UNESCO alerted the art market and the international community to the theft and looting of artefacts from the site of Hatra.
Beginning in 1998, UNESCO participated in the modernization of the museum in Baghdad, which had suffered from a lack of maintenance. The Organization notably contributed to the installation of a closed-circuit television security system and new air conditioning. UNESCO also supported the rehabilitation work in Baghdad of Qasr Al-Abbasi, which houses the renowned cultural institution Bayt Al Hikma, founded in the 9th century by the Caliph Al-Mamun.
UNESCO sent several missions to Iraq between 2000 and 2002, in particular to find ways to save Ashur, the first capital of the Assyrian kingdom, from a planned dam construction project. The proposal to inscribe this site on the World Heritage List is due to be considered at the next session of the World Heritage Committee in June 2003.
"UNESCO's recent experience in other war-torn and post-conflict situations has shown that culture can play a key role in consolidating the peace process, restoring national unity and building hope for the future," said UNESCO Director-General Ko�chiro Matsuura. In recent years, UNESCO has contributed to rehabilitating heritage and encouraging cultural activities in Cambodia, the States of the former Yugoslavia and in Afghanistan, among others.
Source Press Release No.2003-24
Author(s) UNESCOPRESS
Keywords cultural heritage
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php@URL_ID=11303&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
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Ko�chiro Matsuura: Libraries and Archives must be protected as essential parts of the rich heritage of Iraq
- Updated: 15-04-2003 4:54 pm
15-04-2003 11:30 am
As the evidence of the destruction of many parts of the cultural heritage in Iraq is increasing, the Director-General of UNESCO, Ko�chiro Matsuura, today warned of the devastation and looting of libraries and archives in the country, which may have irreversible consequences for maintaining and strengthening the country's cultural identity. "I reiterate my urgent call to take immediate measures of protection and surveillance of Iraqi cultural institutions to which libraries and archives belong", declared Mr Matsuura.
"Libraries, archives and manuscripts must be preserved as essential parts of the rich heritage of Iraq. Libraries are the essence of knowledge societies. Nearly twenty centuries of written history of mankind are in danger; everything must be done to protect them from looting and destruction �, Mr. Matsuura said.
�Measures must be taken to protect governmental records that are held by archives, since they are vital for the functioning of public administration after the war, for example, to protect the legal, financial and contractual rights of Iraqi citizens�, Mr Matsuura added.
Through its Memory of the World Programme , UNESCO is recognized as the international lead agency for the protection of the world�s documentary heritage in libraries and archives and has established Guidelines both for the safeguarding of vital records in the event of armed conflicts and for the management of state security archives of former repressive regimes.
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php@URL_ID=11290&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
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The Director-General of UNESCO calls for all measures to be taken to ensure the protection and surveillance of Iraqi cultural heritage and effectively fight against illicit trafficking -
Updated: 12-04-2003 12:56 pm
12-04-2003 1:00 pm
Following the acts of looting committed yesterday in the National Archaeological Museum of Baghdad, UNESCO Director-General Ko�chiro Matsuura has contacted the American and British authorities and asked them to take immediate measures of protection and surveillance of Iraqi archaeological sites and cultural institutions.
In a letter of 11 April 2003 addressed to the American authorities, the Director-General emphasized the urgent need to preserve collections and a heritage considered to be one of the richest in the world. He particularly insisted on the necessity of assuring military protection for the Archaeological Museum of Baghdad and the Mosul Museum. The same request was formulated to the British authorities concerning in particular the Basra region.
In order to prevent the illicit export of Iraqi cultural goods, the Director-General also undertook contacts with the authorities of the countries bordering Iraq and international police and customs officials to ensure respect of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. He again requested INTERPOL, the World Customs Organization, the International Confederation of Art and Antiquities Dealer Associations (CINOA), the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and the principal actors of the art market to join forces with UNESCO in a "comprehensive mobilization so that stolen objects should not find their way to acquirers".
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php@URL_ID=11238&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
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April 15, 2003 1:41 p.m. EDT
WAR IN IRAQ
ENDANGERED
British Museum, UNESCO
Hope to Restore Artifacts
Associated Press
PARIS -- Rallying to salvage one of the world's most treasured troves of antiquities, the British Museum and an agency of the United Nations said Tuesday they plan to send experts to Iraq to restore museums and artifacts ransacked after the U.S.-led invasion.
The looting in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities in recent days has dealt a harsh blow to the Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian collections that chronicled some 7,000 years of civilization in ancient Mesopotamia.
Much anger at the destruction has been directed at U.S. troops who stood by and watched it happen. On Tuesday, U.S. officials acknowledged they were surprised by the rampage and said troops were too busy with fighting to intervene when they first arrived in Baghdad.
"I don't think anyone anticipated that the riches of Iraq would be looted by the people of Iraq," said U.S. Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks at a U.S. Central Command briefing Tuesday in Qatar.
The Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization said its team would study the conditions of museums and historical sites, identify ways to restore them and find potential donors. Unesco said the team would travel "when conditions permit." About 30 experts were to meet Thursday for an initial assessment at Unesco headquarters in Paris.
"The recent experience of Unesco ... shows that culture can play a key role in the consolidation of the peace process," Director-General Koichiro Matsuura said in a statement.
In London, the British Museum said it would also send a team, and it called on the U.N. to ban the sale of antiquities looted from Iraq.
"Although we still await precise information, it is clear that a catastrophe has befallen the cultural heritage of Iraq," said British Museum director Neil MacGregor.
The British Museum, which holds the greatest collection of Mesopotamian antiquities outside Iraq, has been criticized for failing to return antiquities taken from their homelands in the 18th and 19th centuries.
After the fall of Saddam Hussein's government last week, Iraqi looters stole and smashed priceless archaeological treasures from Iraq's National Museum. The museum holds items of incalculable cultural value, perhaps the most famous being the tablets with Hammurabi's Code -- one of mankind's earliest known legal codes. It couldn't be immediately determined whether the tablets were at the museum when the war broke out.
Thieves smashed or pried open row upon row of glass cases and pilfered -- or just destroyed -- their contents. Among the missing treasures: The four-millennia-old copper head of an Akkadian king, golden bowls and colossal statues, ancient manuscripts and bejeweled lyres.
The museum in the northern city of Mosul also was pillaged, and Baghdad's National Library -- with one of the oldest surviving copies of the Quran -- was set afire Monday.
On Tuesday, the library was a smoldering three-story shell, its floor covered with the ashes of books. Its collection included some irreplaceable, centuries-old Arabic manuscripts. Nearby, the library of the Religious Affairs Ministry, home to invaluable religious texts, also was looted and gutted by fire.
Donny George, director of antiquities at Iraq's National Museum, told CNN that U.S. laxity allowed looters to come back repeatedly. He said he went to the Marine headquarters in Baghdad three days ago and waited for hours to talk with a colonel about security issues. "That day he promised that he will send armored cars to protect what's left from the museum," Mr. George said. "Three days ago till now, nobody came."
Unesco's Mr. Matsuura urged U.S. and British forces to take immediate measures to guard Iraq's archaeological sites and cultural institutions. He also called on several groups -- countries bordering Iraq, customs officials, police and art dealers -- to do all they could to block the trading of stolen antiquities.
Copyright (c) 2003 Associated Press
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Updated April 15, 2003 1:41 p.m.
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Rumsfeld Denies U.S. Blame for Iraq Museum Plunder
Tue April 15, 2003 04:19 PM ET
By Charles Aldinger
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Tuesday rejected charges that the U.S. military was to blame for the looting by Iraqis of priceless treasures from the antiquities museum in Baghdad.
Rumsfeld expressed sympathy over the plunder of the Iraqi National Museum last week, when U.S. troops stood by as looters walked off with antiquities or smashed what they could not steal. But he denied at a Pentagon briefing that the war plan for Iraq had not adequately prepared for such a threat.
"To try to lay off the fact of that unfortunate activity on a defect in a war plan it strikes me as a stretch," he said in response to questions from reporters.
"Looting is an unfortunate thing. Human beings are not perfect," Rumsfeld said. "No one likes it. No one allows it."
But he added: "To the extent it happens in a war zone, it's difficult to stop."
Rumsfeld noted that the United States had offered rewards for return of the artifacts and for information on their whereabouts, and he suggested museum officials had hidden some treasures ahead of the war for safety.
"I would suspect that over time we will find that a number of the things were, in fact, hidden prior to the conflict," he said. "That's what most people who run museums do prior to a conflict which was obviously well-publicized well in advance."
The museum housed key artifacts of ancient Mesopotamia, one of the earliest civilizations.
It was ransacked and its contents taken or destroyed in looting that swept the Iraqi capital after the collapse of President Saddam Hussein's rule last week.
MAY NEVER BE RECOVERED
Antiquities experts, dismayed that U.S. officials failed to heed their warnings to protect Baghdad's artifacts during the war, said on Monday they were concerned that the priceless treasures may never be recovered.
U.S. archeological organizations and the U.N.'s cultural agency UNESCO said they had provided U.S. officials with information about Iraq's cultural heritage and archeological sites months before the war began.
"Not to my knowledge. It may very well have been," Rumsfeld said when asked it he had received such advance warnings.
"But certainly the targeting people were well aware of where it was and they certainly avoided targeting it. Whatever damage that was done was done from the ground."
Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. military Joint Chiefs of Staff, quickly added that Rumsfeld did receive advance warnings about archeological sites around Baghdad and that these warnings were passed on to the military's Central Command with responsibility for the war.
"I think it was the American Archeological Association -- I believe that was the title -- wrote the secretary with some concerns," Myers said. "We tried to avoid hitting those sites ... to my knowledge we didn't hit any of them."
Myers also rejected criticism of the U.S. war plan, which has seen American-led forces topple Saddam's rule in a four-week war.
He said the ground war was launched quickly and with fewer forces than expected by many in order to gain surprise and save both military and civilian lives.
"I think as much as anything else it was a matter of priorities," he said.
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=2571384
Reuters
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Posted on Wed, Apr. 16, 2003
Museum looting likely well-executed theft, officials say
By MATTHEW SCHOFIELD and NANCY A. YOUSSEF
Knight Ridder Newspapers
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraqi museum officials and U.S. military authorities now think that the much-publicized looting of antiquities from the world-renowned Iraq Museum was most likely a well-executed theft, perhaps planned before Baghdad fell.
Museum officials have determined that most of the looting that did take place at the museum, home to more than 170,000 artifacts of human civilization, was focused on office machines and furniture, as at other government buildings, and that only selected antiquities were taken.
"The people who came in here knew what they wanted. These were not random looters," Donny George, the director general of Iraq's state board of antiquities, said Wednesday in front of the museum as he held up four glass cutters - red-handled with inch-long silver blades - that he found on the floor of the looted museum.
He pointed out that replica items - museum pieces that would have looked every bit as real to an angry mob as authentic items - were left untouched. The museum's extensive Egyptian collection, which is valuable, but not unique to the world, also was left alone.
The news cheered some experts in the United States. Clemens Reichel, a University of Chicago archaeologist who specializes in Mesopotamia, said the idea that the theft might have been carried out by knowledgeable thieves lessened the likelihood that priceless artifacts would be melted down for the value of their metal.
George said he hoped the United States would be able to help recover the items. "We always have hope here," he said.
Behind him stood three M-1A1 Abrams tanks, a show of protection by the U.S. military that many in the crowd were muttering arrived five days too late.
American soldiers on guard duty here said that while the damage in the museum areas seemed bad, the appearance was deceiving.
"It looked pretty bad inside, much worse than it was," said 2nd Lt. Erik Balascik, 23, of Allentown. Pa. "The administration building, the library, they are a mess. In the museum, there is broken glass and papers on the floor, but a lot of the collection was pulled before the war. And not as much is missing as first thought."
In fact, in the main collection, it now appears that few items are missing, and very little seems to have been the victim of mob violence.
Among the most valuable stolen pieces were the vase of Warka, from 3200 B.C., and the Basiqi, a bronze Acadian statue.
Still, the damage is grave, George said. "What we have lost and what has been broken is priceless. We will never put a number on it."
"Human civilization was here," he said. "There may have been other museums in the world that have small pieces of this story, but there was no collection so detailed with the evidence of human civilization."
The day began angrily at the museum, as an Army tank with the words "Compliments of the USA" squeezed through the main gate just after 10 a.m. As the tank pulled in, the first of three, it smashed a flowerbed, broke a water pipe and toppled a light post. Museum workers shook their heads, and complained that during the looting they had begged the military to protect the museum. While the Army did respond sporadically, it left and the looters, or thieves, returned.
"We have lost masterpieces from the Syrian and Sumerian ages, from 5,000 years ago," George said. He turned to a soldier, pointed his finger and said: "You are too late."
The decision finally to send a military guard to the museum is part of the next phase of protecting the city's buildings. The military already is protecting the electric company, the new police station and two large downtown hotels frequented by the international media.
George said he was shocked that the United States began guarding the country's Ministry of Oil before the museum, saying that told him where the American priorities stood. The American Archeological Association had appealed to Pentagon officials to spare the museum during the war and protect it afterward.
Hannah Abd al Khalid worked at the museum 35 years ago, and has been a devotee of it her entire life. She said she had trouble thinking about what the museum looked like now.
"Everything was valuable," al Khalid said. "I have been crying for two days."
The military perspective is that it did all it could to protect the museum at the time. During the looting, "the fighting was still going on. The Republican Guard headquarters are across the street, and they were far from secure," Army Maj. Michael Donovan said. "Frankly, we were here to protect people and property, but in the early days we had to choose, and we chose people."
The Iraq Museum isn't the only museum to succumb to looters. It's not even the oldest. Sixty miles southeast of Baghdad is Babylon, part of what is considered the cradle of civilization and home to the Hanging Gardens, which is one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
During the war, Babylon was abandoned and the small museums leading to the ancient city were stripped to the walls.
Mohammed Ali, 30, a museum security worker, walled the doors of one building with cinderblocks to prevent looting. Born in Babylon and part of a third generation of Babylonians who have worked at the museum, Ali also was schooled at the museum.
"They took everything. They broke everything. Nothing is left," Ali said. "Babylon is surrounded by towns where the people are not educated."
But there was some hope: Most of the museum artifacts were replicas. The originals were in the Iraq Museum.
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/special_packages/iraq/5648587.htm
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April 16, 2003
WAR IN IRAQ
Experts Scramble to Identify
Iraq's Plundered Treasures
Global Effort to Save Antiquities
Is Now Racing the Black Market
By BROOKS BARNES and KAREN MAZURKEWICH
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
It took only 48 hours to strip Iraq of the 7,000-year-old record of its cultural history.
Now, in the wake of widespread looting at Baghdad's National Museum of Iraq and the Mosul museum to the north, officials with international museums, customs services and the United Nations are racing the clock to identify the pillaged treasures and prevent their sale on the black market.
Mobs stormed the Baghdad museum and ransacked its highly regarded collection of Mesopotamian artifacts in a two-day rampage starting Friday. Among the thousands of items stolen, according to a spokesman for Unesco, the United Nation's cultural arm, were 4,000-year-old Sumerian gold jewelry, a gold-and-silver harp and 5,000-year-old tablets bearing some of the world's earliest known writing.
Unesco has convened an emergency meeting in Paris for Thursday to assess the damage and attempt to inventory the missing or destroyed antiquities. Over 30 experts from around the world -- including Donny George, the National Museum of Iraq's director general of restoration -- are expected to attend. Unesco also plans to send a mission of experts into Iraq to identify damaged or vulnerable monuments and historic sites and assess what help local authorities require to restore them.
Officials at the U.N. agency estimate about 150,000 items, with a combined value in the billions of dollars, have been lost. "It's one of the greatest cultural disasters in recent history," says Torkom Demirjian, president of Ariadne, a New York antiquities gallery.
Following the 1991 Gulf War, thousands of artifacts from museums across Iraq vanished, only to resurface on the international Middle Eastern art market, where prices have been climbing in recent years. "An enormous amount has been illegally exported since 1991," says Christopher Walker, a deputy keeper at the British Museum in London. Over the past decade, he says, British customs officials have brought to the museum "maybe hundreds" of objects that they suspected were smuggled out of Iraq. "People bring us material constantly with a story that it's been in the family for years or that it came from Syria," Mr. Walker says. These are "things we assume are from Iraq."
Art experts have begun compiling a catalog of what they believe was taken over the weekend and hope to disseminate it to art institutions, customs agents and art dealers world-wide as quickly as possible, in a project coordinated by Unesco and the American Association of Museums.
Complicating the cataloging task is the neglected state of the Baghdad museum, which had been closed to the public during much of the 1990s. Most of the museum's records were kept in a card catalog, most of which looters destroyed. Until recently, only high-ranking Iraqi officials and some international curators had access to the collection. Many curators believe Saddam Hussein displayed some of the most valuable items in his palaces. It isn't clear whether these pieces were destroyed by bombs or stashed far away from Baghdad.
Several governments and cultural organizations, including Italy, the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, have pledged financial and curatorial support to the documentation effort. Italy has announced a pledge of about $400,000. "If middlemen have a sense that no serious museum or collector will buy this material it will seriously limit the amount of it that gets out of the country," says Philippe de Montebello, director of the Met.
Prices for Islamic and Middle Eastern art have been soaring in recent years, as museums rich in Ancient Roman and Greek works have sought to expand their holdings into the once-neglected area. In 1994, an Assyrian relief, circa 883 B.C., fetched a record $12 million at Christie's International; in 2000, an Islamic painting brought nearly $3 million at auction. Still, much of the trading in this market has been done privately.
Among the items most likely to hit the market are gold necklaces, bracelets and earrings from the Sumerian dynasties, which would ordinarily change hands at a few thousand dollars to $50,000 each, experts say. "These items are small enough to carry off and hide, and could be easily traded to unsuspecting buyers who aren't particularly familiar with ancient art," says Jerome Eisenberg, president of Royal-Athena gallery, New York.
In fact, many of the museum's most valuable pieces were small enough to fit in a pocket. Among them: A seven-inch-tall limestone statuette of a praying prince, circa 3300 B.C., and a series of ivories about five inches tall, including a Nubian figure carrying a lion, dating to the eighth century B.C.
Art experts say agents trying to bring such items into the U.S. would most likely describe them as originating in neighboring countries. The U.S. embargo on Iraqi imports includes antiquities. The U.S. Customs Service will be monitoring Middle Eastern antiquities and imports from Iraq's neighbors, says Lawrence Mushinske, the customs service's national import specialist for art and antiques. "To say that we're on a heightened state of vigilance is an understatement," he says.
Curators worry looters will prize some of the antiquities more for their gold and silver content than for their historic and artistic importance. Mr. de Montebello, of the Met, is urging Unesco to coordinate an amnesty fund that would pay looters for the items and agree not to file charges. "One of the greatest fears is that people will melt these precious items down rather than risk getting caught by selling them untouched," he says.
The International Foundation for Art Research, New York, has offered to take the lead in coordinating recovery efforts. Executive Director Sharon Flescher says it isn't clear when international curators and conservators will be able to enter Iraq. "At this point we're still trying to sort out what was looted, what was destroyed, and what was already cached away for safekeeping or some other illicit purpose," she says.
The speed and ease with which the museums were plundered left many experts dumbfounded, despite their own weeks of warnings. "This kind of cultural institution should have been protected by the army, and we thought the population would respect the cultural identity of Iraqis," said Mounir Bouchenaki, Unesco's assistant director-general for culture.
At a Pentagon briefing Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the U.S. was offering rewards for people who return plundered items or help in recovering them. He refused to accept blame for failing to protect the museum in Baghdad. "Whatever damage was done was done from the ground," he said.
Write to Brooks Barnes at [email protected] and Karen Mazurkewich at [email protected]
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April 16, 2003
Out of the Ruins -- It's Time
To Secure Iraq's Treasures
In the Fray
By NORMAN HAMMOND
The Pentagon has coined a term for what happened: catastrophic success. Victory comes so swiftly that the victor is overwhelmed. In Iraq, the breakdown of civil administration created a vacuum that was rapidly filled by gleeful anarchy. Unfortunately, it was not just the symbols of Saddam's bloated regime that suffered: Like Cronos devouring his children, Iraqi looters destroyed the Iraq Museum in Baghdad and thus their own past.
But it is our past, too: Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, saw the birth of civilization -- the first cities at Eridu, Ur and Uruk, the emergence of writing as a means of recording tax and tribute, the first palaces of kings and temples of their gods. Much earlier, the cave of Shanidar in the hills of Iraqi Kurdistan yielded the first evidence for human feelings: More than 70,000 years ago a crippled Neanderthal man was sustained into old age by his companions, and burials were accompanied by bright spring flowers.
Sixty millennia later but close by the cave, the shepherds of Zawi Chemi Shanidar were among those who ushered in the beginnings of an agricultural self-sufficiency that eventually underpinned the rise of Sumerian civilization and spread east to India and west around the Mediterranean and through Europe.
Two centuries of increasingly sophisticated research documented these distant roots of Western culture, and the museum in Baghdad became the repository of much of the evidence. While 19th-century pioneers such as Austen Henry Layard and Paul-Emile Botta had hauled away the great winged bulls of ancient Assyria to the British Museum and the Louvre, the new antiquities laws put in place by Gertrude Bell after World War I ensured that the new Kingdom of Iraq retained much of its heritage. Foreign expeditions continued to work, and to receive a good share of the finds: The Oriental Institute in Chicago and the University Museum in Philadelphia both have impressive collections of well-excavated and legally acquired objects. After what has happened in Baghdad, they become an even more precious resource.
None of this excuses the opportunism of the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), a coalition of prominent collectors and curators that seems to want Iraq's antiquities laws relaxed under U.S. occupation, so that objects can make their way on to the world market and into private collections, or to the less scrupulous museums; the tragic looting of the Baghdad Museum will inevitably result in a vastly increased flow of antiquities onto the international black market. Their patron saint would appear to be Joe T. Meador, the World War II G.I. who "liberated" the medieval treasures of Quedlinburg Cathedral in Germany, and kept them in a Texas safe deposit box until he died. (His heirs, disgracefully, blackmailed Germany into paying a "finder's fee" before they would return the loot.)
Since the ACCP's proclaimed aim is to save Iraq's archaeology, they would do better to put their money into reconstruction and restitution within that country. A U.S. foundation to support such work would let the ACCP's members and others show their commitment to saving Iraq's past through tax-deductible donations. Nobody would get looted treasures on their museum or living-room shelves, but a devastated country might recover some of its, and our, vanishing past.
One way of doing this would be to establish a cultural commission within the new civil administration, perhaps along the lines of the successful Allied effort in Europe to protect, recover and return cultural property at the end of World War II. Iraq's demoralized archaeological and museum personnel -- starved of resources since the first Gulf War, but still managing to get their museum reopened just in time for last week's disaster -- could be brought in to staff it, along with a contingent of American and European scholars and conservators to help with emergency protection for sites, artifacts and records. The British Museum's prompt initiative in offering expert assistance to Iraq is an excellent example. France and Germany also have a long and honorable history of archaeological work in Iraq: This would be an opportunity to mend some of the breaches in confidence and cooperation caused by the war.
The first priority, however, must be to protect museums and sites from further devastation. At first, things went well: Archaeologists had supplied the Pentagon with detailed lists of vulnerable ancient sites and historic buildings, and even when Saddam Hussein's army parked its armor close beside the great arch at Ctesiphon -- potentially the most fragile monument of all -- it was noted, publicized and avoided. And explicit and sensible efforts were made to avoid damage to the Shia shrines in Najaf and Karbala despite provocation.
Then came the Iraqi looting and the American failure to stop it. The liberation of Iraq must embrace not just the hearts and minds but the collective memory of the people. That past enshrines and creates national identity and pride. Iraq desperately needs its pride restored and we must show we are serious about making restitution for this catastrophe. Securing the country's archaeological sites and what is left of its museums is an urgent first step.
Mr. Hammond is a professor of archaeology at Boston University.
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Updated April 16, 2003
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COMMENTARY
advertisement
Buy Back the Looted Artifacts
By HERSHEL SHANKS
Baghdad's museums , deplorably, have been looted. Determining the extent of the loss and assessing blame will take months, if not years. But there is an immediate question for the archaeological establishment to face: What to do now? Do we try to rescue what is left? Or do we simply write off the whole thing as a total loss?
My solution: Buy back the looted artifacts.
* * *
The archaeological establishment, represented primarily by the leadership of the Archeological Institute of America (AIA), condemns the sale of all antiquities, vilifying collectors and suggesting that antiquities dealers are simply middlemen between looters and immoral collectors -- the latter including the Metropolitan Museum in New York and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. The idea of rescuing a looted artifact by purchasing it is anathema to the AIA.
There was some destruction in Baghdad and elsewhere for destruction's sake -- senseless, pointless. But most of the looting was undoubtedly purposeful -- to obtain valuables that could be sold. Many of the pieces will have been damaged (beyond what occurred in antiquity), but still they are valuable, in some cases immensely so, on the black market. Of one thing we may be sure: Most of the looted objects will eventually find their way to the market.
Will these pieces go to collectors who will secrete them for private pleasure? Or should the public attempt to influence or participate in the market in an effort to rescue the pieces for public institutions, including, perhaps one day, the National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad?
The more hands through which these treasures pass, the higher the price will be and the more difficult they will be to locate. The time to buy, if that is what we are going to do, is now, or as soon as things quiet down. Just as we are trying to enlist former Iraqi civil servants and constabulary, we could plug into the network of international middlemen who deal in antiquities in the Middle East, including those who handled stolen artifacts in the period after the Gulf War.
Since there is no good solution, we must look for the least bad one. Dealing with this unsavory market may be better than a complete loss of these treasures. Until now, the AIA's solution has been utopian: If there were no collectors and no antiquities dealers (as a result of their campaigns), there would be no demand for looted artifacts, so the looters would have no incentive to loot and would therefore stop looting.
But many prominent archeology scholars are accustomed to dealing in the antiquities market, despite the condemnation of the AIA. Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls were rescued by purchase. All scholars who deal in ancient inscriptions work with artifacts that come from the antiquities market. The same for numismatists; over 90% of ancient coins come from the antiquities market.
It is critical in this crisis that the archaeological community -- including museums , philanthropists, collectors, scholars, and representatives of the AIA -- meet to formulate a policy on whether some attempt should be made to retrieve what is left, and, if so, how. The news reports naturally emphasize the destruction -- and it is doubtless vast. But it is also true that there will be much that can be rescued -- thanks to the profit motive. Amidst the tragedy, we must look to the future.
Mr. Shanks is the editor the Biblical Archaeology Review and Archeology Odyssey.
Updated April 16, 2003
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April 17, 2003 12:00 a.m. EDT
WAR IN IRAQ
MISSING TREASURES
�Iraqis Say Museum Looting
Wasn't as Bad as Feared
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Last week's looting of the Iraq National Museum, which saw numerous items disappear from a vast collection spanning eight millennia of Mesopotamian history, has provoked world-wide outcry -- and criticism of the U.S. military for its failure to protect Iraq's priceless cultural heritage.
But, thanks to Iraqi preparations before the war, it seems the worst has been avoided. Donny George, the director-general of restoration at the Iraqi Antiquities Department, Wednesday said his staff had preserved the museum's most important treasures, including the kings' graves of Ur and the Assyrian bulls. These objects were hidden in vaults that haven't been violated by looters.
"Most of the things were removed. We knew a war was coming, so it was our duty to protect everything," Mr. George said. "We thought there would be some sort of bombing at the museum. We never thought it could be looted."
In a city where frequent shooting occurs day and night and the telephones don't work, reliable information is often hard to obtain. Earlier this week, some museum workers reached foreign journalists to complain about an orgy of looting in the museum, saying that little of the collection remains. As secrecy long enveloped the museum -- where part of the collection had been siphoned off by Saddam Hussein's family and sold abroad -- it isn't clear whether these museum workers knew about the prewar preparations to hide the most-valuable artifacts.
Along with the destruction of ancient manuscripts at the Iraq National Library and other acts of vandalism throughout the city, the museum's looting has prompted a wave of anti-American anger. A belief often voiced in the streets of Baghdad holds that U.S. soldiers themselves stole the most-precious objects in the collection and used the looters to cover up the crime. Mr. George, standing side by side with the American commander in the area, Lt. Col. Eric Schwartz of the U.S. Army Third Infantry Division's Task Force 1-64, dispelled this view. But he said many valuable items are still missing.
Among the antiquities unaccounted for so far, Mr. George said, are the sacral vase of Warqa, from Sumerian times, and the bronze statue of Basitqi, from the Accadian civilization.
The museum compound was occupied Wednesday by a company-size tank unit, and a notice by the gate says the site is protected by the U.S. military. The museum floor is littered with debris, and access inside is forbidden because Iraqi specialists are working to catalogue what remains and to try to restore some of the items, Lt. Col. Schwartz said.
"There was a tremendous amount of looting just for destruction purposes -- and there were artifacts that were not destroyed at all," he said. "It was not as bad as I thought it would be."
Lt. Col. Schwartz, whose functions also include feeding the lions in the abandoned Baghdad Zoo next door, said he couldn't move into the museum compound and protect it from looters last week because his soldiers were taking fire from the building -- and were determined not to respond. There is an Iraqi army trench in the museum's front lawn, and Lt. Col. Schwartz said his troops found many Iraqi army uniforms inside. "If there is any dirty trick in the book," he said, "they sure used it."
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at [email protected]
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April 17, 2003
Missing in Action
By BENJAMIN R. FOSTER and KAREN POLINGER FOSTER
When looters descended upon the Iraq Museum in Baghdad last week, they despoiled one of the world's pre-eminent collection of artifacts from the Tigris and Euphrates Valleys. Founded in 1923, the museum displayed thousands of objects in a score of galleries, from prehistoric stone tools to medieval manuscripts. The most important finds from archaeological excavations in Iraq in the last 80 years were housed there, plus their records and photographs. Tools and painted pottery bore witness to the beginnings of human agriculture and settled life. Indeed, the whole range of human productive endeavor for 5,000 years was there: sculpture, metal work, glass, ceramic, ivory, textiles, furniture, jewelry, and parts of ancient buildings. Inscriptions and documents told the story of peoples, states, empires, and civilizations every school child can name: the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Parthians, Jews, Sassanians and Arabs.
Only a few of the most famous objects and inscriptions in this enormous collection have been published. The rest of a collection of more than 170,000 objects awaited study and publication, including a Babylonian library whose cuneiform tablets told a creation and flood story closely related to the one found in the Bible. That library is now scattered or destroyed. And it was only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of unread documents stored in the Iraq Museum.
We can only hope that Unesco and the Mesopotamian scholars meeting today in Paris can find ways to recover artifacts like the ones on this page. For now, we mourn both the loss of the treasures we knew and those we will never know, all once painstakingly preserved in this great museum for us and for future generations.
Benjamin R. Foster is professor of Assyriology and Babylonian literature and curator of the Babylonian Collection at Yale. Karen Polinger Foster is a lecturer in art history and Near Eastern civilization at Yale.
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U.S. Says It Has Recovered Many Artifacts and Manuscripts in Iraq
May 8, 2003
By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON, May 7 - Teams of American investigators
searching in Iraq have recovered more than 700 artifacts
and tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts that had been
missing from the collection of the National Museum in
Baghdad, some of them stored in underground vaults before
the American invasion, American officials said today.
The investigators located the vaults in Baghdad over the
last week, including five within the museum complex, and
forced them open, revealing hundreds of artifacts that had
apparently been stored away to protect them from being
damaged in an American assault. The finds included ancient
jewelry, pottery and sarcophaguses, officials said.
The discovery of so many valuable artifacts would support
the view of Iraqi museum officials and American
investigators who have said that while many irreplaceable
antiquities were looted from the museum during the fall of
Baghdad last month, the losses were less severe than
thought.
Earlier this week, a top official of the British Museum,
John E. Curtis, disclosed that his Iraqi counterparts had
told him that they had largely emptied display cases at the
Iraq Museum in the months before the start of the Iraq war,
storing many of the most precious artifacts in secure
hiding places.
The teams of investigators, United States customs agents
working with American soldiers, did not provide a detailed
inventory of the items that were found in the underground
vaults this week, nor would they say if the artifacts
included any of the 38 high-value items that had been
confirmed missing by museum administrators.
But they did offer a partial list of the items recovered by
American investigators before the vaults were forced opened
this week, including a vase reported to date from the fifth
century B.C. and a broken statue of an Assyrian king from
around 900 B.C. Both were handed over to American forces by
Iraqi citizens in the last month.
The United States has offered amnesty to Iraqis who turn in
looted objects from the museum and other archaeological
collections.
The officials offered few details today on the 39,400
ancient manuscripts from the museum collection that were
also reported found. Officials said that the American
investigators had been uncovering the artifacts and
manuscripts so quickly in recent days that there had been
no time to try to determine exactly what much of the
material was, or its value.
"The recovery of these items was the direct result of a
superb, cooperative effort between U.S. law enforcement,
the U.S. military and the Iraqi people," said Michael J.
Garcia, acting assistant secretary of the Bureau of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an investigative arm
of the Department of Homeland Security.
The department said in a statement that investigators had
found evidence in some of the vaults that "certain select
high-value pieces" had been stolen from the storage sites.
Officials said that an Iraqi museum curator who was taken
to one of the vaults in Baghdad in recent days had fainted
on discovering that some of the most valuable items stored
there before the war had vanished, apparently stolen by
someone with access to the vault.
American officials said the new Homeland Security
Department, which took control of the Customs Service
earlier this year, dispatched several agents to the Middle
East in the weeks before the American invasion of Iraq, in
the hope that their expertise would be valuable in
searching for Iraq's chemical and biological weapons and in
tracking down assets of Saddam Hussein and his family and
associates.
After the first reports of looting at the museum, long
recognized as possessing one of the Middle East's largest
and most valuable archaeological collections, the customs
agents shifted their focus to the hunt for those artifacts.
American investigators have complained that their work has
been hindered by a lack of cooperation from museum workers,
who have so far been unable to provide a full inventory of
the museum's collection, and by uncertainty over how many
objects were on open display when the looting began.
American officials say there is a growing suspicion that
insiders within the museum's administration were to blame
for much of the thefts.
The Homeland Security Department said that its teams in
Iraq had recently identified other storage areas in the
vicinity of Baghdad that are believed to contain artifacts
from the museum. Officials said the investigators are
following up on reports that many artifacts are stored in
several vaults beneath the headquarters of the Iraqi
Central Bank in Baghdad.
In his comments earlier this week in New York, Mr. Curtis,
the British Museum official, who is the curator of its Near
East collection, said it appeared that the vast majority of
the looting at the National Museum in Baghdad had not taken
place in its display halls but rather in its basement
storage rooms, where more commonplace objects were kept.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/08/international/worldspecial/08CUST.html?ex=1053455620&ei=1&en=0af48521dd040e25
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CONTENT COPYRIGHT THE USA TODAY, AFP, CNN, & REUTERS. THIS CONTENT IS INTENDED SOLELY FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES.
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