Did staff help plunder Iraq National Museum Treasures?

A civilisation torn to pieces
A civilisation torn to pieces
Robert Fisk - 4/13/03

Baghdad, reports Robert Fisk, is a city at war with itself, at the mercy of thieves and gunmen. And, in the city's most important museum, something truly terrible has taken place

They lie across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq's history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling down the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them on to the concrete.

Our feet crunched on the wreckage of 5,000-year-old marble plinths and stone statuary and pots that had endured every siege of Baghdad, every invasion of Iraq throughout history ­ only to be destroyed when America came to "liberate" the city. The Iraqis did it. They did it to their own history, physically destroying the evidence of their own nation's thousands of years of civilisation.

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 the Second World War or earlier ­ have so many archaeological treasures been wantonly and systematically smashed to pieces.

"This is what our own people did to their history," the man in the grey gown said as we flicked our torches yesterday across the piles of once perfect Sumerian pots and Greek statues, now headless, armless, in the storeroom of Iraq's National Archaeological Museum. "We need the American soldiers to guard what we have left. We need the Americans here. We need policemen." But all that the museum guard, Abdul-Setar Abdul-Jaber, experienced yesterday was gun battles between looters and local residents, the bullets hissing over our heads outside the museum and skittering up the walls of neighbouring apartment blocks. "Look at this," he said, picking up a massive hunk of pottery, its delicate patterns and beautifully decorated lips coming to a sudden end where the jar ­ perhaps 2ft high in its original form ­ had been smashed into four pieces. "This was Assyrian." The Assyrians ruled almost 2,000 years before Christ.

And what were the Americans doing as the new rulers of Baghdad? Why, yesterday morning they were recruiting Saddam Hussein's hated former policemen to restore law and order on their behalf. The last army to do anything like this was Mountbatten's force in South-east Asia, which employed the defeated Japanese army to control the streets of Saigon ­ with their bayonets fixed ­ after the recapture of Indo-China in 1945.

A queue of respectably dressed Baghdad ex-cops formed a queue outside the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad after they heard a radio broadcast calling for them to resume their "duties" on the streets. In the late afternoon, at least eight former and very portly senior police officers, all wearing green uniforms ­ the same colour as the uniforms of the Iraqi Baath party ­ turned up to offer their services to the Americans, accompanied by a US Marine. But there was no sign that any of them would be sent down to the Museum of Antiquity.

But "liberation" has already turned into occupation. Faced by a crowd of angry Iraqis in Firdos Square demanding a new Iraqi government "for our protection and security and peace", US Marines, who should have been providing that protection, stood shoulder to shoulder facing them, guns at the ready. The reality, which the Americans ­ and, of course, Mr Rumsfeld ­ fail to understand is that under Saddam Hussein, the poor and deprived were
always the Shia Muslims, the middle classes always the Sunnis, just as Saddam himself was a Sunni. So it is the Sunnis who are now suffering plunder at the hands of the Shia.

And so the gun-fighting that broke out yesterday between property owners and looters was, in effect, a conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims. By failing to end this violence ­ by stoking ethnic hatred through their inactivity ­ the Americans are now provoking a civil war in Baghdad.

Yesterday evening, I drove through the city for more than an hour. Hundreds of streets are now barricaded off with breeze blocks, burnt cars and tree trunks, watched over by armed men who are ready to kill strangers who threaten their homes or shops. Which is just how the civil war began in Beirut in 1975.

A few US Marine patrols did dare to venture into the suburbs yesterday ­ positioning themselves next to hospitals which had already been looted ­ but fires burnt across the city at dusk for the third consecutive day. The municipality building was blazing away last night, and on the horizon other great fires were sending columns of smoke miles high into the air.

Too little, too late. Yesterday, a group of chemical engineers and water purification workers turned up at the US Marine headquarters, pleading for protection so they could return to their jobs. Electrical supply workers came along, too. But Baghdad is already a city at war with itself, at the mercy of gunmen and thieves.

There is no electricity in Baghdad ­ as there is no water and no law and no order ­ and so we stumbled in the darkness of the museum basement, tripping over toppled statues and stumbling into broken winged bulls. When I shone my torch over one far shelf, I drew in my breath. Every pot and jar ­ "3,500 BC" it said on one shelf corner ­ had been bashed to pieces.

Why? How could they do this? Why, when the city was already burning, when anarchy had been let loose ­ and less than three months after US archaeologists and Pentagon officials met to discuss the country's treasures and put the Baghdad Archaeological Museum on a military data-base ­ did the Americans allow the mobs to destroy the priceless heritage of ancient Mesopotamia? And all this happened while US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, was sneering at the press for claiming that anarchy had broken out in Baghdad.

For well over 200 years, Western and local archaeologists have gathered up the remnants of this centre of early civilisation from palaces, ziggurats and 3,000-year-old graves. Their tens of thousands of handwritten card index files ­ often in English and in graceful 19th-century handwriting ­ now lie strewn amid the broken statuary. I picked up a tiny shard. "Late 2nd century, no. 1680" was written in pencil on the inside.

To reach the storeroom, the mobs had broken through massive steel doors, entering from a back courtyard and heaving statues and treasures to cars and trucks.

The looters had left only a few hours before I arrived and no one ­ not even the museum guard in the grey gown ­ had any idea how much they had taken. A glass case that had once held 40,000-year-old stone and flint objects had been smashed open. It lay empty. No one knows what happened to the Assyrian reliefs from the royal palace of Khorsabad, nor the 5,000-year-old seals nor the 4,500-year-old gold leaf earrings once buried with Sumerian princesses. It will take decades to sort through what they have left, the broken stone torsos, the tomb treasures, the bits of jewellery glinting amid the piles of smashed pots.

The mobs who came here ­ Shia Muslims, for the most part, from the hovels of Saddam City ­ probably had no idea of the value of the pots or statues. Their destruction appears to have been the result of ignorance as much as fury. In the vast museum library, only a few books ­ mostly mid-19th-century archaeological works ­ appeared to have been stolen or destroyed. Looters set little value in books.

I found a complete set of the Geographical Journal from 1893 to 1936 still intact ­ lying next to them was a paperback entitled Baghdad, The City of Peace ­ but thousands of card index sheets had been flung from their boxes over stairwells and banisters.

British, French and German archaeologists played a leading role in the discovery of some of Iraq's finest treasures. The great British Arabist, diplomatic schemer and spy Gertrude Bell, the "uncrowned queen of Iraq" whose tomb lies not far away from the museum, was an enthusiastic supporter of their work. The Germans built the modern-day museum beside the Tigris river and only in 2000 was it reopened to the public after nine years of closure following the 1991 Gulf War.

Even as the Americans encircled Baghdad, Saddam Hussein's soldiers showed almost the same contempt for its treasures as the looters. Their slit trenches and empty artillery positions are still clearly visible in the museum lawns, one of them dug beside a huge stone statue of a winged bull.

Only a few weeks ago, Jabir Khalil Ibrahim, the director of Iraq's State Board of Antiquities, referred to the museum's contents as "the heritage of the nation". They were, he said, "not just things to see and enjoy ­ we get strength from them to look to the future. They represent the glory of Iraq".

Mr Ibrahim has vanished, like so many government employees in Baghdad, and Mr Abdul-Jaber and his colleagues are now trying to defend what is left of the country's history with a collection of Kalashnikov rifles. "We don't want to have guns, but everyone must have them now," he told me. "We have to defend ourselves because the Americans have let this happen. They made a war against one man ­ so why do they abandon us to this war and these criminals?"

Half an hour later, I contacted the civil affairs unit of the US Marines in Saadun Street and gave them the exact location of the museum and the condition of its contents. A captain told me that "we're probably going to get down there". Too late. Iraq's history had already been trashed by the looters whom the Americans unleashed on the city during their "liberation".

"You are American!" a woman shouted at me in English yesterday morning, wrongly assuming I was from the US. "Go back to your country. Get out of here. You are not wanted here. We hated Saddam and now we are hating Bush because he is destroying our city." It was a mercy she could not visit the Museum of Antiquity to see for herself that the very heritage of her country ­ as well as her city ­ has been destroyed.

Al Jezeera: Large traces of Iraqi, world history wiped out
Large traces of Iraqi, world history wiped out
K S Dakshina Murthy - Al Jezeera - 4/13/03

When mobs in Baghdad entered the Iraqi national museum and destroyed the artifacts, little did they know that they were wiping out large traces of history. Not just of Iraq, but that of the entire world.

So, when the museum deputy director Nabhal Amin openly wailed and cried in anguish it was perfectly understandable. She picked up the broken pieces of the artifacts, her helplessness on display for the entire world to see. "They have looted or destroyed 170,000 items of antiquity dating back thousands of years...They were worth billions of dollars," she said, sobbing.

The museum grounds were full of smashed doors, windows and littered with office paperwork and books.

Twenty eight galleries of the museum and vaults with thick steel doors were ransacked through Thursday and Friday with almost no intervention by the US troops. A 4000-year-old copper visage of an Akkadian king, golden bowls, colossal statues and ancient manuscripts were all looted and destroyed.

The museum housed items from ancient Babylon and Nineveh, Sumerian statues, Assyrian reliefs and 5,000-year-old tablets bearing some of the earliest known writing. There were also gold and silver helmets and cups from the Ur cemetery.

Iraq, a cradle of civilisation long before the empires of Egypt, Greece or Rome, was home to dynasties that created agriculture and writing and built the cities of Nineveh, Nimrud and Babylon -- site of Nebuchadnezzar's Hanging Gardens.

On the eve of the invasion in March, archaeologists around the world had warned the US government it had a responsibility to ensure the safety of Iraq's heritage, of the remnants of the Mesopotamian civilization. To no avail.

The museum deputy director blamed the US troops for failing to heed appeals from museum staff to protect it from looters. "The Americans were supposed to protect the museum. If they had just one tank and two soldiers nothing like this would have happened," she said. "I hold the American troops responsible for what happened to this museum."

The plundering was ruthless. "We know people are hungry but what are they going to do with these antiquities," said Muhsen Kadhim, a museum guard for the last 30 years but who said he was overwhelmed by the number of looters. "As soon as I saw the American troops near the museum, I asked them to protect it but the second day looters came and robbed or destroyed all the antiquities," he said.

According to archaeologists, a full accounting of what has been lost may take weeks or months. The only hope now is that at least some of the museum's priceless gold, silver and copper antiquities, ancient stone and ceramics, and perhaps some of its fabled bronzes and gold-overlaid ivory had been locked away for safekeeping elsewhere before the looting.

During the first Gulf war in 1991, nine of Iraq's 13 regional museums were plundered. Fortunately, the Baghdad museum was spared because the war did not replace the government and policing of the city was not disrupted. The museum incidentally, had been closed during much of the 1990s, and had been reopened only in April 2000.

The museum's deputy director has now asked the guards to keep guns and protect whatever remains -- a case of "too little too late" ? --- Al Jazeera with agency inputs

FBI to Probe Looting of Museum
FBI to Probe Looting of Museum - 4/17/03
By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

FBI agents are being sent to Iraq to help with the investigation and will cooperate with Interpol to interdict sales of Iraqi artifacts through legal or underground markets.

WASHINGTON -- Fresh from tracking suspected Iraqi agents in the United States, the FBI will now expand its mission to helping recover ancient artifacts that were stolen or looted from Iraq's museums, FBI Director Robert Mueller said today.

"We are firmly committed to doing whatever we can to secure these treasures to the people of Iraq," Mueller said at a Justice Department news conference, announcing that FBI agents are being sent to Iraq to help with the investigation.

The bureau is also cooperating with Interpol, the international police organization, to interdict sales of Iraqi artifacts through legal or underground markets.

In Paris today, experts meeting under the auspices of the United Nations said they strongly suspect that some of the looters had the keys to museum vaults in which the most valuable pieces were stored for safekeeping before the outbreak of hostilities.

The potential for damage to the museums had been recognized before the war started, and the failure to protect antiquities dating to the earliest stirrings of civilization in Mesopotamia has been roundly criticized around the world.

Given the reported extent of the pillaging, it is unclear how successful the FBI will be in recovering the loot. The gold and ivory harp of Ur, crafted in the biblical birthplace of the patriarch Abraham, is but one of hundreds of treasures missing from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad.

In Washington, the head of a presidential advisory panel on cultural property said he has resigned to protest the failure of U.S. forces to guard the museums.

"It didn't have to happen," Martin Sullivan told the Reuters news service. "Our priorities had a big gap. In a preemptive war that's the kind of thing you should have planned for."

Sullivan has chaired the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for eight years, beginning during the Clinton administration. The panel is one of dozens of expert committees that advise White House policymakers on issues ranging from foreign intelligence, to education, to transportation.

Meanwhile, suspicions mounted that some knowledgeable thieves utilized the outbreak of lawlessness in Iraq as cover to make off with the most the valuable artifacts.

"It is now almost certain that at least some of the shocking despoliation of the museums in Mosul and Baghdad was organized by Iraqi gangs taking orders from foreign collectors," said Eleanor Robson, a professor at All Souls College in England and a member of the British School of Archeology in Iraq, writing in today's Los Angeles Times.

"The thieves knew what they were looking for," Robson said in an opinion piece. "The breathtakingly beautiful, 5,000-year-old Uruk vase has vanished, while a convincing plaster-cast replica of the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III (king of Assyria 858-824 BC) remains unscathed in a sea of empty, shattered display cases."

In Paris, some 30 experts assembled by the U.N. to assess the damage came to a similar conclusion.

"It looks as if part of the looting was a deliberate, planned action," McGuire Gibson, president of the American Assn. for Research in Baghdad told the Associated Press. "They were able to take keys for vaults and were able to take out important Mesopotamian materials put in safes."

The staff of the Baghdad museum has told reporters they begged U.S. troops for help, but could not get a detachment of soldiers assigned to protect the site. The looters quickly overwhelmed a small contingent of museum security guards. Iraqi police assigned to protect the museum had fled with the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime.

Robson said the most valuable pieces may never again be seen publicly. Hundreds of smaller objects are likely to wind up more or less openly on sale.

"These items will appear for sale for $50 or $100 in antiques stores all over the Middle East, Europe, North America or on Ebay," she wrote. "The unsuspecting or the unscrupulous will buy them as novelty Christmas presents or coffee-table pieces."

She called for a global ban on the export and import of ancient artifacts. "Obviously that won't help with all the antiquities that have been looted from Iraq," she said, "but it could prevent such contract looting in the future."

U.S. Forces Fail Iraqi Treasures Again
U.S. Forces Fail Iraqi Treasures Again
Sanjay Suri - IPS - 4/30/03

LONDON, Apr 29 (IPS) - U.S. forces looked the other way while Iraqi museums were being looted; now they are looking the other way as many of these looted treasures are taken out of Iraq, says Donny George, Director of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad.

"The Americans are controlling the border check points but they are not controlling who is going out or what they are taking with them," George told a packed press conference at the British Museum in London Tuesday.

George, who drove out of Iraq into Jordan said there were no controls enforced by U.S. troops. "On the other side in Jordan they are checking everyone thoroughly," he said. "And they have caught a dozen people trying to smuggle looted treasures from Iraq's museums," he said. "I am very sorry to say that almost all of them have been journalists."

At the moment it is only media people who are moving freely in and out of Iraq, George said. "But the U.S. control is almost zero, and today anyone can take anything and go out of Iraq," he said. "This is a tragedy. We are appealing to the U.S. forces to stop this bleeding of antiques that is going on."

George, who was at the National Museum in Baghdad just before the looting began, said much of the looting could have been prevented if only the U.S forces had moved a tank about 50 metres from where it had been positioned.

"We could see that the looters were outside," George said. Appeals were made to the tank crew to move up but they said they had no orders."

George's graphic account of what followed raises serious questions about the U.S. role. "We saw tanks coming at us from both sides on Tuesday April 8," he said. "Members of the militia jumped into our compound and heavy fighting began. In the circumstances we all had to leave the compound."

The fighting was followed by the looting, which continued right until Sunday. The violence in Baghdad all these days meant that George and his staff could not return to the museum. "On Sunday we went to the U.S. officers at Palestine Hotel to do what they could to stop the looting," he said. "But it was not until Wednesday that they positioned four tanks to guard the museum."

That was after a week of the looters having a free run of the museum, George said. It was a week also after the first appeal to the U.S., and three days after a formal appeal to the U.S. administration at their offices in Palestine Hotel.

Much of that looting through the week was clearly pre-planned, George said. "There were two kinds of looters, he said. "Some came in just like they went into other buildings to loot what they could," he said. "But some knew what there was in the museums, and they knew what they were looking for."

George produced a glass cutter to show the kind of equipment some looters came with. "We found four of these," he said. "Some had come prepared with equipment to cut through the glass cases." There were some important fake statues in the museum which were never touched, he said.

"Some of the most important masterpieces were taken," he said. Among these he listed the following:

- The Warka Vase, a limestone vase decorated with reliefs from 3100 BC. - Gold rosettes and copper cup, dated 2500 BC. - Inscribed statue of King Entemena of Lagash, 2400 BC.

Of two figures of the reign of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III, one was looted and one returned - in three pieces.

But the museum curators still do not know what is missing, George said. The looters got into the store rooms that housed about 170,000 precious objects. Only when these are examined will they know what is missing. That process can take six months at the very least, he said.

Some of the objects looted are being brought back after an appeal made through local imams, George said. Daily appeals are being broadcast also on the local radio stations.

George dismissed a suggestion by a journalist from the U.S. that the looting could have been an "inside job" by museum staff and by Saddam Hussein's thugs. "I know how Saddam Hussein cared for antiquities," he said. "In one case some thieves entered a museum and cut off the head of an object. Saddam had their heads cut off as punishment."

George said he was not praising Saddam Hussein for that action, but he said it indicated that Saddam Hussein's men were not likely to be behind the looting and destruction of the museums.

Well, it is quite possible to assume that the museum insiders were involved in looting. Collapse of the regime may open new business opportunities, and some people started collecting the starting capital. The stolen treasures may be soon sold to the private collectioners for cheap price, and the new millionaires will emerge in Iraq...