- Looting of archaeological sites and regional museums
is continuing in Iraq despite the responsibility under international law
of the US as the occupying power to protect cultural sites.
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- The journal Archaeology is documenting the extent of
looting. Journalist Roger Atwood, who specialises in the antiquities trade
and is in Mosul, reports that 30 bronze panels that once hung on a gate
leading into the Assyrian city of Balawat have been stolen from the museum
there along with numerous cuneiform tablets and 20 valuable books. At Hatra,
a first century B.C. world heritage site to the south of Mosul, looters
have hacked out a carved face from the apex of a stone archway.
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- Meanwhile in Baghdad some of the artefacts stored offsite
for safety have been recovered and some of the stolen items have been returned
to the city museum. Among those returned is the famous Warka vase, a 5,000-year-old
ceremonial vessel >from the city of Ur. According to the British Museum,
which has two members of staff working in the Baghdad Museum, at least
28 items from the exhibition halls remain missing along with numerous less
spectacular objects that have an important research value.
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- The major pieces that have been recovered are some of
the artefacts from the Assyrian city of Nimrud and some material from the
royal burials at Ur, which were stored in the vaults of the Central Bank
at the time of the first Gulf War. The presence of this material in the
bank vaults is not a revelation. A visiting Unesco delegation was told
about it in May, but it was inaccessible because the vaults were flooded.
Moreover, the recovery of these artefacts does not minimise the damage
that has been done and is still being done by organised looting.
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- Despite the devastating losses that have been suffered
and the continued looting, however, certain journalists have made it their
business to assert that the extent of the problem has been exaggerated
and even to claim that Iraqi archaeologists are responsible for stealing
whatever is missing. This campaign of denial and disinformation can only
compound the damage already done to Iraq's cultural heritage. Not only
will it distract from the task of >tracking down the artefacts that
are flooding onto the antiquities market, but it is also being used to
discredit Iraqi archaeologists and to take control of the country's history
out of their hands.
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- The BBC is leading the way in this scurrilous campaign.
In a prime-time documentary screened June 9, art and architectural historian
Dan Cruikshank made a number of unsubstantiated claims. He suggested that
the Baghdad Museum was a legitimate military target, that the looting was
"an inside job" and that the staff were unsuitable to be left
in charge of Iraq's cultural heritage because they had been members of
the Ba'ath Party.
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- Cruickshank's claims were immediately taken up by Guardian
correspondent David Aaronovitch, who declared that the staff of th e Baghdad
Museum were "apparatchiks of a fascist regime". He poured scorn
on the world's journalists and academics for believing the stories about
looting.
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- In an April 15 column Aaronovitch had already asked,
"Is this plundering really so bad?" "There is a lot of sentimentality
attached to archaeology by outsiders," he went on. He belittled the
importance of cultural history in giving the Iraqi people a sense of their
identity when compared to the evidence of mass murder in Abu Ghurayb prison.
It did not really matter if archaeological artefacts were looted and ended
up in western museums which were already full of material from all over
the world.
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- Aaronovitch was, therefore, understandably enthused by
Cruickshank's documentary. In a June 10 article, he accused Dr. Dony George
of Baghdad Museum and archaeologists internationally of deliberately creating
a false picture of "100,000-plus priceless items looted either under
the very noses of the Yanks, or by the Yanks themselves. And the only problem
with it is that it's nonsense. It isn't true. It's made up. It's bollocks."
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- It is, he claims, an "indictment of world journalism"
that anyone believed this story. Only Dan Cruickshank's "remarkable
programme" has exposed it as a lie.
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- Cruickshank's programme was indeed remarkable. But this
was mainly for the contrast between what it showed and what it claimed.
Cruikshank could not bring to bear a single fact to substantiate his allegations.
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- Some aspects of the programme might be dismissed as merely
bad journalism and a pathological desire for self-dramatisation. Clad in
a combat jacket and keffiyeh, Cruikshank insisted on being filmed camping
out on the doorstep of the museum with his primus stove because it was
too dangerous to move about the city. This impression of an intrepid reporter
braving a threatening city was belied by the crowds of smiling Iraqis who
cheerfully waved at the camera as he drove through Baghdad ostentatiously
wearing a flak jacket the next day.
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- To watch Cruikshank you would believe that he was the
only Westerner in Baghdad apart from the US Marines. He breathlessly entered
the vaults of the Central Bank as though he alone had made this discovery.
The presence of a team from the television series National Geographic Ultimate
Explorer, who had paid to have the vault pumped out, was not mentioned.
National Geographic magazine report that the vault had been flooded by
bank staff in an attempt to protect the stored artefacts from looting.
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- Far from the world being ignorant about the fate of Iraqi
archaeology until Cruikshank arrived, a number of international teams have
been present in Baghdad and elsewhere advising on conservation, reporting
on looting and attempting to itemise what has been lost. Few of them have
been accorded the assistance that Cruikshank seems to have received from
the US authorities. A team of international experts assembled by Unesco
met with considerable obstruction in their mission to Baghdad. British
Museum director Neil MacGregor told the Art Newspaper that negotiations
with the US authorities were "tortuous" and that the size of
the delegation had to be reduced.
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- That Cruikshank seems to have met with every assistance
from the US authorities is hardly surprising since it was their story that
he told.
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- He interviewed marines who told him that the museum had
been fortified and a centre of Iraqi resistance. Had that really been the
case it would have been reasonable to expect US forces to have occupied
the museum and not left it unguarded as they did. The only evidence of
fortification Cruikshank offered was a crude dugout roofed with corrugated
iron and earth on the lines of a World War II Anderson shelter. This, Dr.
Dony George told him, the museum staff had made for themselves to shelter
in during the air raids. There was some evidence that Iraqi soldiers had
used rooms in the museum, which in a city that had been the scene of a
running battle for several days was hardly surprising.
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- Cruickshank's aim was to implicate the staff in the looting
of the museum. He criticised them for not clearing up the looted galleries,
ignoring the fact that international experts had advised them to leave
the debris. The whole scene will have to be treated as an archaeological
excavation so that broken material and scattered pieces can be retrieved
scientifically and forensic evidence gathered for a future war crimes trial.
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- The fact that the staff were reluctant to talk to him
and refused to open store rooms Cruikshank took as evidence that they were
guilty of looting. He ignored the obvious explanation that they were unwilling
to reveal the whereabouts of hidden artefacts with Baghdad under armed
occupation by a hostile power. They were, he claimed, all members of the
Ba'ath party as though this were damning evidence of guilt. In a one-party
state, membership of the ruling party is almost inevitable for people who
want to hold official posts in museums or universities. It does not implicate
them in the crimes of the regime.
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- Aaronovitch was quick to take up Cruickshank's allegations
and to amplify them, going so far as to accuse Dr. Dony George of being
a fascist. By throwing such emotive language about he is attempting to
create the atmosphere of a witch-hunt against Iraqi intellectuals.
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- There is a serious agenda behind this vicious journalism.
Wealthy collectors in the West are casting avaricious eyes on the museums
of archaeologically rich countries like Iraq. The American Council for
Cultural Policy (ACCP), which advised the US government in the run-up to
the Iraq war, has led the way in calling for legislation restricting the
export of art objects and archaeological artefacts to be ignored in the
US courts.
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- The ACCP has evoked a storm of opposition in the US,
where even the robber barons saw the wisdom of putting their money into
public museums and libraries and the selfish acquisitiveness of the ACCP
runs counter to a strong sense of the importance of such public institutions.
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- The Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) has vociferously
opposed the ACCP and is campaigning for legislation that will prevent plundered
artefacts being brought into the country. So strong has opposition been
that the Wall Street Journal÷a paper that could be expected to warm
to the ACCP's free market attitudes÷has carried an article calling
on them "to put their money into restitution and reconstruction within
that country [Iraq]." It would, the article points out, be tax deductible.
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- For the obscenely wealthy and criminal clique that surrounds
the Bush administration, however, the benefits of tax deductible charity
are no longer enough. They may have been warned off in the US, but it is
their attitude to the history of semi-colonial countries that finds an
echo in Cruickshank's film and Aaronovitch's article.
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- A former student radical from the Euro-wing of the Communist
Party of Great Britain, Aaronovitch has cultivated a particular brand of
educated philistinism that mixes a passing acquaintance with culture and
ugly right-wing rhetoric. It is to the credit of Guardian readers that
they have found Aaronovitch's articles thoroughly repugnant. His defence
of looting elicited a response from the Assistant Keeper of the Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford, who criticised his flippancy in "sniggering over the
genitalia of Greek gods". His latest article accusing the staff of
the Baghdad Museum of being fascists produced a defence of these internationally
respected scholars from chairman of the British School of Archaeology in
Iraq, Doctor Harriet Crawford; Doctor Eleanor Robson of All Souls College,
Oxford; and Doctor Jane Moon of the Centre for the Study of Global Ethics.
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- Doctors Crawford and Robson write, "Our high opinion
of the character of Dr. George and his colleagues has been formed over
two decades of working with them throughout an era of extraordinarily difficult
circumstances÷from the Iran-Iraq war to the few months leading up
to the most recent conflict. George deserves the world's praise, not its
condemnation, for saving so many of >Iraq's treasures, and strong practical
support in restoring the museum to functionality."
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- Cruickshank and Aaronovitch's unfounded and ignorant
comments lend themselves to a deliberate campaign of vilification against
Iraqi intellectuals that aims to dismantle the entire system of laws and
institutions that has been built up in Iraq to protect the country's archaeology
and to further research into its history. This is looting on a grand scale.
The intention is not merely to acquire this or that artefact, but with
regime change to declare open season on the Middle East's great museums.
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- http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jun2003/loot-j14.shtml
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