It will be four years this coming week since the horrendous lootings and vandalism wrecked havoc upon the Iraq National Museum (INM) and the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA). Stories about the destruction and loss were prevalent in the news in the spring and early summer of 2003. Since then there has been relatively little coverage of them. As a way to pay remembrance to the magnificent cultural heritage of Iraq, this diary will review what has happened to both institutions since 2003 and will address the continued and escalating crisis for Iraq’s archaeological sites, which are important not only to the Iraqis but to all humanity.
More below
The Iraq National Library and Archives
Last week I posted a diary here about finding the on line blog of Dr. Saad Eskander, the Director General of the Library. This blog gives a detailed account of conditions in the Library from November 2006 to the present. It is a devastating and heart breaking story. Just this Saturday an article was published in the Washington Post An Archive of Despair, which discusses the blog and includes excerpts of a recent interview with Dr. Eskander.
As to the state of the collections, the front page of INLA’s website provides an accounting of the losses sustained to the Library collections due to the looting:
Immediately after the collapse of the Saddam regime and in the middle of the ensuing chaotic situation (9-12 April 2003), some arsonists set fire to various parts of the INLA’s main building, causing considerable structural damages. Almost all the equipments were destroyed or carried away. Most importantly, serious damages were inflicted upon the INLA’s collections of book, journals, files, records, photographs and maps. The Republican archive (1958-1979) was destroyed in its entirety. It is estimated that the library lost 25% of its collections, including its rare books, whereas the archive lost 60% of its collections, including invaluable Ottoman records.
The website of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, provides another detailed assessment of damages to the INLA and other libraries and archives throughout Iraq, here.
The Iraq National Museum: 2003 – 2004
I’m sure all of you remember the first reports in the news when the Museum was looted. With the confusion of the invasion and the typical misinformation coming out of the Bush Administration it was difficult to know what was fact or fiction. Some early reports indicated that over 100,000 artifacts had been stolen. Here is a link to a long list of articles from a variety of sources about the looting and immediate aftermath between April and June, 2003, which illustrate the many different opinions about what had happened.
A little over a week after the looting ended the US Government assigned a task force led by Matthew Bogdanos, who had been in Basra conducting counterterrorist operations, to investigate the allegations of US misconduct and to find out what exactly had happened. Bogdanos summarizes the investigation and his findings in a long article, “The Casualities of War: The Truth About the Iraq Museum.” in American Journal of Archaeology 109(2005): 477-526, available in pdf here.
Based on the results of this investigation, I have put together a time line of the major events regarding the looting and the immediate aftermath.
April 5-7, 2003: US troops invade Baghdad
April 8: INM staff locks up and leaves the museum
April 8-10: Iraqi Army sets up positions in museum compound
April 9: INLA looted and burned
April 10-12: INM looted after Iraqi troops abandon the compound
April 12: INM staff return to museum and chase off remaining looters. INM staff immediately request assistance from US troops.
April 16: US troops finally arrive to protect the museum
April 21: Bogdanos and team arrive at the museum to begin the investigation
May 9: Former INM staff protest against senior Museum staff, accusing them of being Baathists.
May 22: The United Nations passes a Security Resolution (#1483) to ban international trade of Iraqi cultural property. June 5: The Treasure of Nimrud is discovered in a Baghdad bank vault where it had been taken for safekeeping years before.
July 3: The museum opens to the public for one day for a special exhibition
December 2003: Bagdanos task force ends its investigation
December 7, 2004: President Bush signs into law the Emergency Protection for Iraqi Cultural Antiquities Act. More here
The answer as to why US troops did not protect the museum until April 16th is not adequately explained by Bogdanos in my view, nor has it ever been adequately explained by the US government. The Director of the Museum at the time, Dr. Donny George, describes his recollections of the events and his thoughts on the lack of US troop security in this interview. George says,
Then we met Colonel Sarkony. He was from the Marines, from the civil affairs. We told him about what had been happening to the museum and we asked him for help to protect the building and the area there. He said, “Of course, it is our duty, and it is very important, we should protect it.” We showed the location of the museum. We said, we were going to the museum. And he said, “Well, perhaps, you will go and see the armored cars there now. I will call immediately, and they will be there for sure.” But we went there, and there were no guards.
Only Wednesday morning [April 16], we did have the guards at the museum. We had four tanks and a lot of personnel from the Army.
EIR: That’s one full week after they entered Baghdad officially on April 9.
Donny George: Exactly. Afterwards, I learned that there was a list issued by the American Central Command, for some places that the Army should protect. And the museum, I learned, was No. 2 on that list, and the Ministry of Oil was No. 16 on that list. Some of the journalists made some jokes, saying that maybe the American forces had read the list upside down, so they went directly to the Ministry of Oil and left the museum. I don’t know, but they did not come to the museum at that time. If they had been there, it would have been a completely different situation.
Bogdanos summarizes his thoughts on the reason here:
Coalition forces experienced unprecedented battlefield success, with their advances outstripping the ability of the Iraqi armed forces to respond. Ironically, it also outstripped the ability of Coalition planners to plan for the security needs attendant to the fall of a city the size of Baghdad.
-snip
Second, military planners did not recognize the extent of the Iraqi perception of the museum’s connection to the former regime…Thus, despite the prior warnings, planners simply did not believe that the museum-unlike the presidential palaces and governmental buildings that were more overt manifestations of the regime-would be looted.
In other words, as we all know by now, they didn’t have a plan. When directly confronted with the need for protection by the museum staff, they were very slow to respond. They didn’t plan and their response was incompetent. This is the method operandi of the Bush Administration. US troops were able to protect the Ministry of Oil, but not the major national cultural institutions as they had been requested to do before the invasion began. For a detailed discussion of the US troop protection of the Oil Ministry, read here.
Bogdanos concluded that the looting involved three different thefts by three different groups of people. One involved 300-400 randomly destructive Iraqi citizens primarily in the public galleries and administrative offices. Another involved another group of Iraqi citizens in the upstairs artifact storage rooms. The third was considered to be an inside job in a well hidden storage area in the museum basement.
Bogdanos and his team quickly set up a recovery plan that included an amnesty program as well as raids and seizures, both in Iraq and abroad. The following table shows the results of the numbers of artifacts stolen and the numbers recovered by the end of December 2003.
The Iraq National Museum: 2005 – present
I recently bought a book, Milbry Polk & Angela Schuster, eds. 2005. The Looting of the Iraqi Museum, Baghdad: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia. New York: Harry Abrams, which is a collection of essays by a variety of scholars and journalists. The foreward is written by Dr. Donny George, at the time of the writing still the Director of the Iraq National Museum. In it he notes that nine regional museums had been looted in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War from which more than 4000 objects had been stolen.
He mentioned that nearly half of the 15,000 or so artifacts stolen from the INM in 2003 had been recovered by the end of 2004. He also wrote with hope about the progress that was being made in the museum in regards to the restoration of many of the damaged artifacts and about improvements being made to the museum infrastructure. That sense of hopefulness was to be short lived, however.
By August 2006 the conditions had become so intolerable for Dr. George that he resigned from his position as Director of the museum as well as from his position as the President of the Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH) and moved to Damascus for his and his family’s safety. He has since taken a position as a visiting professor at SUNY Stony Brook. One of his last acts as Director of the museum was to have it completely sealed off with concrete to protect it from further looting and damage. Other than the one day opening in 2003, the museum has remained closed to the public throughout. In this article from the Guardian, Savior of Iraq flees to Syria, the author writes,
Dr George painted a bleak picture for the future of Iraq’s ancient treasures. He said that excavation and conservation projects in Iraq had stalled and that all the foreign archaeologists had left the country.
He said the 1,400 members of the special antiquities protection force would be going without pay, meaning there would be little to stop further looting at the country’s 11,000 archaeological sites. “From September there is no more money for their salaries,” said Dr George. “The coalition has to do something about this.”
Francis Deblauwe provides an in depth discussion of Dr. George’s departure on her blog, IW&A. Here she explains how the influence of Sadrists in Al Maliki’s government made Dr. George’s continuation in his job impossible. His son had also received a death threat, making the sudden departure from Iraq necessary.
In early August, when it became clear that the internationally renowned and respected Dr. George no longer enjoyed the support of the Minister of State of Tourism and Archaeology, he filed for his retirement rather than be fired. It was immediately granted. The minister, Liwa Sumaysim, is a dentist by training and a member of Muqtada el-Sadr’s radical Shi’ite party in the governing coalition of Nuri el-Maliki. Ever since the beginning of his tenure earlier this year, he seems to have been engaged in a systematic campaign of replacing seasoned archaeological and museum professionals with ideological party apparatchiks with little or no relevant knowledge, esp. regarding pre-Islamic periods. Burhan Shakir, Director General of Excavations, was ousted as well as the inspector for antiquities in Dhi Qar province, Abd el-Amir Hamdan. The latter was arrested in April on corruption charges and thrown in jail for three months; the charges were eventually dropped. He had been very active in protecting sites in his region and has now been replaced by a Sadrist-allied Fadhila party loyalist.
Rumor has it that looting is on the upswing in Dhi Qar province although the Italian Carabinieri’s wrapping up of their Iraq mission has to be a major factor in this too. Dr. George’s good contacts with foreign colleagues, essential to secure assistance now and to prepare for the future of the field in Iraq, were severely also frowned upon by the Sadrist ideologues.
Deblauwe ends this article on a depressing note. She asks,
Where do we go from here? The museum and archaeology institutions in the West have officially reacted by saying that they wish to continue their co-operation with the SBAH and so on. The proof will be in the pudding though. Most projects have already been scaled down substantially if not put on hold or cancelled altogether, so I don’t really see how this is going to help…
-snip
Initially, the minister quickly placed a party-loyalist at the head of the SBAH, Haider Farhan, who is said to have a background in Islamic manuscripts. Dr. George was dismissive of his qualifications to say the least.
-snip
Haider Farhan serves as his deputy. The Director General of Museums/Director of the National Museum is now Amira Eidan, another Sadrist.
Only two weeks later, Deblauwe writes a brief post that says, “Bye, Blog and site are going on indefinite hiatus.” Sigh. Heavy sigh.
In spite of these disturbing developments there are a couple of hopeful signs with regard to the Iraq National Museum. One is that the British School of Archaeology in Iraq is still funding professional training for museum staff Link. Another interesting development is the Kish Project being conducted by the Field Museum in Chicago. Here is a brief description of the project.
The museum plans to create a digital catalog of the more than 100,000 Kish artifacts held in Chicago, London and Baghdad. The catalog will be made available in English and Arabic on the Internet and in print. Also, a more complete database of all the objects will be created and made available on the Internet. “This project will make possible, for the first time, a true reckoning of the site’s historical and archaeological significance,” said William Pestle, Field Museum Collection Manager and one of the principal investigators on this project. “It will also serve as a model for intellectual repatriation of exported archaeological collections.”
source
and here is a youtube clip of some of the staff from the Field, the Ashmolean and Dr. George still of the INM going through the Kish collections at the Field.
Archaeological Sites
The story about Iraq’s tens of thousands of archaeological sites, known and unknown, is as grim and horrible as the war itself. After the looting of the Museums and Libraries in 2003 the international community came together with new legislation and new ambitious projects to help protect and salvage Iraq’s incredible and ancient heritage. Information about these plans and activities can be found in the following links:
Getty Conservation Institute-World Monuments Fund (GCI-WMF): Iraq Cultural Heritage Conservation Initiative
Saving Antiquities for Everyone: SAFE
Iraq War & Archaeology Blog: IW & A
Oxford University: Sites Under Threat in Iraq
Oriental Institute:Photos of Iraqi Archaeological Sites
Here is an illustration of the Upper Tigris River area to give a visual sense of the enormous number of sites in Iraq. Maps of Iraqi Archaeological Sites
Since the advent of the civil war in Iraq and the appointment of Shia hardliners to the cultural ministries by Al Maliki, the security situation has become such that it is impossible to protect the sites. Funding for protection by the Iraqi government has essentially been shut off and looting has escalated to outrageous proportions.
In an article from the Chicago Tribune on March 22, 2007 the author writes,
Concerned and unable to get into the country, Mesopotamia scholars from around the world have been forced to rely on satellite images that show the cratered landscape left by thieves at southern Iraqi sites where important cities once stood nearly 2,000 years ago.
The images show holes as small as a few feet in diameter spreading across sites throughout the autumn of 2003, a pattern that continued in some places through 2005. The destruction appeared to slow in the last satellite photos available, in early 2006, but the impact of the damage is clear.
“We’re losing an enormous amount,” said anthropologist Elizabeth Stone of the State University of New York-Stony Brook, who has studied the satellite imagery. “We look at the sites and say there have to be thousands of objects taken. Perhaps tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of objects.”
-snip
The pictures were enough for her to assess the extent of looting of historical sites in southern Iraq. Between 49 percent and 60 percent of sites dating to 1900 B.C. had been looted, Stone found. About 155 million square feet of ground at the sites were affected, with a quarter of that total surface dug up.
At sites dating to 1700 B.C., 63 percent of sites were looted, with 84 million square feet of ground torn up and some 30 million square feet of the surface illegally excavated.
There is an additional fear: that locals are holding valuable artifacts to sell later. After brief exposure to sun and open air, many of Mesopotamia’s clay artifacts, particularly cuneiform tablets, quickly decompose and therefore could be lost forever.
If that is the case, “a huge amount of Mesopotamia is turning to dust,” Stone said.
source
In another article published in the American Association of Museum’s magazine, Museum News, the archaeological sites of Iraq are compared to the moon,
The only real comparison is to the surface of the moon. Craters as deep as 16 feet cover multi-acre sites that are remnants of what is widely considered the cradle of civilization. The craggy, arid earth, all but barren of vegetation, lies in mounds alongside the deep pits where thousands of Iraqi antiquities–cuneiform tablets, ancient scrolls and kings commemorated in stone that might give clues to how civilization began–have been ripped from their resting places and sold to nefarious (or unsuspecting) dealers and collectors. Some sites have been so ravaged that the top 10 feet of earth and all of the irreplaceable artifacts buried there for centuries are gone.
Amid the catastrophe of the war in Iraq–the violence, bloodshed and loss of human life–is the loss of the world’s cultural heritage in the form of hoards of antiquities. It is an ongoing, silent tragedy for which there seems to be no viable solution.
No viable solution. That seems to be a predominant theme where Iraq is concerned. The problems facing the cultural heritage of Iraq are the same problems facing every other aspect of the reconstruction of the nation. The Bush Administration has backed another sectarian who appoints the party faithful to Ministry positions who often have no professional training or experience for the important jobs they have taken. Damn, that sounds so familiar, that tactic. FEMA? Department of Justice? etc, etc, etc. In a certain sense I’m beginning to believe that our government does mirror that of Iraq’s though without so much violence.
The solutions to both of our nation’s immense problems will come from electing leadership that serves the good of the entire nation rather than sectarian faction or political party above all else. Such a leader will appoint administrators based on their qualifications rather than loyalty to the leader or faction or party. Until this happens, the Iraqi cultural heritage and American society will continue to face disaster and not respond to disaster well.
Is there still something we can do?
1. Candlelight Vigil for Iraq Museum
This week there will be candlelight vigils in different cities around the US in remembrance of the Museum and Iraq cultural heritage. Read more about these events at the above link.
You may also watch a video of Dr. George discussing the planned events.
So far vigils are planned for the following locations:
USA
April 10: Boston, Massachusetts
April 10: Ceres, California
April 11: San Francisco, California
April 11: New York, New York
April 11: Ithaca, New York
April 11, Eugene, Oregon
April 12: San Francisco, California
April 12: Stony Brook, New York
April 12: New York, New York
Canada
April 11: Toronto, Ontario
April 12: Vancouver, British Columbia
April 12: Toronto, Ontario
- List of things to do from SAFE
- Donate
Here are a list of organizations that have accepted donations in the past. Be sure to check that their projects are still active.
British School of Archaeology in Iraq: BSAI Appeal
Chicago Oriental Institute: Iraq Working Group
UNESCO: Ongoing Iraq Projects
World Monuments Fund: Iraq Cultural Heritage Program, How to donate
US Department of State, How to Donate to the Reconstruction of Iraqi Cultural Heritage and another USDS link
- END THE IRAQ WAR!!!!
- Stay informed – Keep on top of the story by familiarizing yourself with the issues. Several resources and references are listed below to assist with this.
Resources/References
ICOM Emergency Red List of Iraqi Antiquities at Risk
Lost Treasures of Iraq
Art Newspaper Catalog of INL Artifact Photos, 1975(300 b/w photos)
Treasures of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad Museum Project (color photos of collections)
The Iraq War & Archaeology Blog(on hiatus as of 11/06)
UNESCO, Crisis in Iraq
Oxford University: The threat to world heritage in Iraq– rebuilding heritage
International Council of Museums (ICOM): Resources on Iraqi Museum Collections
American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR): Iraq Resources