Iraqis Robbed

The wholesale looting and destruction of Iraq’s cultural heritage—described as a “global catastrophe”—occurred when U.S. military forces were withdrawn from sites, allowing the plundering to continue.

 

By Christopher Bollyn

 

The U.S. military, which became the occupying power after ousting the regime in Baghdad and other cities, is being blamed for allowing the wholesale plundering and destruction of Iraq’s museums and libraries. Because the U.S. military chose not to protect important cultural sites, places that it had been advised in advance to guard, while it protected others, some say there appears to have been a secret agreement to allow Mesopotamia’s cultural treasures to be stolen or destroyed.

Adding to the controversy, a number of historians and archaeologists have claimed that some of the looters targeted specific priceless artifacts and had keys to vaults.

“It looks as if part of the looting was a deliberate planned action,” said McGuire Gibson, president of the American Association for Research in Baghdad and a University of Chicago professor. “They were able to take keys for vaults and were able to take out important Mesopotamian materials put in safes. I have a suspicion it was organized outside the country.”

The looting of the National Museum of Iraq, considered to have been the world’s greatest repository of Mesopotamian culture with thousands of artifacts up to 7,000 years old, began early on Thursday, April 10, according to media reports, and continued through Friday.

“This is a terrible tragedy,” Dr. John Curtis of the British Museum said. “Iraq is the cradle of civilization and this was a museum which contained a large portion of the world’s cultural heritage.”

At midday on April 17, Raid Abdul Ridhar Mohammed, an Iraqi archaeologist went looking for U.S. troops to come to the museum to stop the plundering. As reported in The New York Times, Mohammed found a U.S. Abrams tank in Museum Square. Five Marines followed him to the museum and opened fire over the heads of the looters.

This drove several thousand looters away in minutes, Mohammed said, but when the Marines and the tank left after 30 minutes, the looters returned and the plundering continued.

Nothing more was done to prevent what became the total destruction of the contents of the museum. Not a single pot or display case remained intact, according to witnesses, after the 48-hour rampage at the museum.

Patty Gerstenblith, law professor at Chicago’s DePaul University, said the looting of the museums of Iraq was “completely inexcusable and avoidable.”

Mobs wrecked and sacked Baghdad’s government buildings, hospitals, museums and libraries, while U.S. troops protected the Ministry of Oil and Ministry of Interior.

Arsonists torched Iraq’s National Library, in which countless priceless artifacts and books were lost. Even the Ministry for Religious Affairs, where a building housing thousands of Korans, many of them illuminated and hand written, several thousand years old, had been burned to a charred shell.

“When Baghdad fell to the Mongols in 1258, these books survived,” said Abdel Karim Anwar Obeid, the ministry’s general manager, “And now they didn’t survive. You can’t put a price on this loss.”

Many Iraqis are convinced that U.S. troops encouraged the looting, according to Financial Times reporters in Baghdad. “I told the American major, you caused this,” said an Iraqi who leads a neighborhood committee in Baghdad. “You wanted to overthrow the government, so you should have taken responsibility for security. If you’d put just one soldier on each government building, this wouldn’t have happened.”

The German Embassy and the French cultural center in east Baghdad appear to have been left unprotected and were totally plundered. John F. Burns of The New York Times suggested that Iraqi mobs attacked the German and French buildings for political reasons rather than attributing it to the fact that they were left undefended by the U.S. military forces that controlled the capital.

Burns also suggests that the looting of UNICEF, the UN agency that has worked to relieve malnutrition and improve the welfare of Iraqi children, was done for bizarre political reasons rather than the more obvious lack of protection.

Under international law, the military occupation force is responsible for protecting embassies and cultural sites. The 1954 Hague Convention, which has not been ratified by the U.S. or Britain, requires the occupying military power to protect artistic and cultural treasures in wartime.

Robert Fisk of The Independent (UK) visited the looted museums and libraries shortly after they had been plundered. “The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling the statues and pots and amphora of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them on to the concrete floor.

“How could they do this? Why, when the city was already burning, when anarchy had been let loose—and less than three months after American archaeologists and Pentagon officials met to discuss the country’s treasures and put the Baghdad archaeological museum on a military database—did the Americans allow the mobs to destroy the priceless heritage of ancient Mesopotamia?

“The Iraqis did it,” Fisk claims. “They did it to their own history, physically destroying the evidence of their own nation’s thousands of years of civilization. Not since the Taliban embarked on their orgy of destruction against the Buddhas of Bamiyan and the statues in the museum of Kabul—perhaps not since World War 2—have so many archaeological treasures been wantonly and systematically smashed to pieces.”

Fisk, however, does not say how he knows that it was Iraqis who were responsible for the wanton destruction of Baghdad’s libraries and museums. Why Iraqis would indulge in such wanton destruction of their cultural heritage is not easily explained.

Glass cutters not available in Iraq were found in the museum and a huge bronze bust weighing hundreds of pounds missing its head which would have required a fork lift to remove it indicate that well organized professional cultural thieves were mixed in with the mob.

The missing artifacts are worth billions of dollars on the world market. A group of antiquity dealers and collectors known as the American Council for Cultural Policy has been lobbying the U.S. government to relax legislation that protects Iraq’s heritage by preventing sales abroad.

William Pearlstein, the group’s treasurer, said that Mesopotamian antiquities will be safer in American museums and private collections than in Iraq.

The Archaeological Institute of America, considered to be “more responsible” by serious archaeologists, has argued strongly against this.

While the large pieces will be harder to sell, the smaller unpublished items such as coins, cuneiform tablets, pottery, figurines, and bronze weapons are likely to dominate sectors of the antiquities market, according to David Keys, archaeology correspondent for The Independent.

“They will probably end up at the art markets of Paris, via Jordan, Israel, and Switzerland, New York, London, and Tokyo.” With billions in profits to be made “the more unscrupulous” dealers will find ways to erase the Iraqi provenance of the stolen objects, Keys said.