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The following document is from http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/apr2003/muse-a16_prn.shtml
The sacking of Iraq’s museums: US wages war against culture
and history
By Patrick Martin
World Socialist Web -- 16 April 2003
The looting of Iraq’s museums and National Library, with
the destruction of much of Iraq’s cultural heritage, is a
historic crime for which the Bush administration is responsible.
US government officials were warned repeatedly about possible
damage to irreplaceable artifacts, either from American bombs
and missiles or from post-war instability after the removal of
the Iraqi government, but they did nothing to prevent it. Their
inaction constitutes a gross violation of the 1954 Hague Convention
on the protection of artistic treasures in wartime, adopted in
response to the Nazi looting of occupied Europe during World War
II.
At least 80 percent of the 170,000 separate items stored at
the National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad were stolen or destroyed
during the looting rampage that followed the US military occupation
of Baghdad. The museum was the greatest single storehouse of materials
from the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, including Sumeria,
Akkadia, Babylonia, Assyria and Chaldea. It also held artifacts
from Persia, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire and various Arab
dynasties.
The museum held the tablets with Hammurabi’s Code, perhaps
the world’s first system of laws, and cuneiform texts that
are the oldest known examples of writing—epic poems, mathematical
treatises, historical accounts. An entire library of clay tablets
had not yet been deciphered or researched, in part because of
the US-backed sanctions that restricted travel to Iraq.
The 5,000-year-old alabaster Uruk Vase is the earliest known
depiction of a religious ritual. The stone face of a woman, carved
5,500 years ago, is one of the oldest surviving examples of representational
sculpture. The world’s oldest copper casting, the bust of
an Akkadian king, dates from 2300 BC.
Another significant loss came from the burning of the nearby
National Library, containing tens of thousands of old manuscripts
and books, and newspapers from the Ottoman Empire to the present.
The library’s reading rooms and stacks were reduced to smoking
ruins.
Ironically, the only hope for the survival of some archaeological
treasures is that they might have been removed from the museum
before the war, to be displayed in one or another of the private
residences of Saddam Hussein and his family. A large selection
of artifacts made of gold was stored for safekeeping at the Iraqi
Central Bank, but that facility was looted and burned as well.
US officials ignored warnings
US claims to have been taken by surprise by the ransacking
of cultural facilities in Baghdad, Mosul and other cities are
not credible. Such a tragedy was not only predictable, it was
specifically warned against. In late January of this year, a delegation
of scholars, museum directors and collectors visited the Pentagon
and explained the significance of the Iraq National Museum and
other cultural sites. One participant told the Washington Post,
“We told them the looting was the biggest danger, and I felt
that they understood that the National Museum was the most important
archaeological site in the entire country. It has everything from
every other site.”
The Archaeological Institute of America called on “all
governments” to protect cultural sites, and it appears that
the Iraqi government took this appeal far more seriously than
the American or British governments. After looting in 1991 during
the uprisings that followed the first Persian Gulf War, the Iraqi
government passed legislation restricting the export of historical
artifacts.
There is a long tradition of concern for history and cultural
heritage in Iraq. As soon as even nominal independence was established,
in the 1920s, the Iraqi government required that reports be filed
with the museum on all archaeological “digs.” More recently,
all excavated material had to be submitted to the museum for cataloguing,
making the facility the central database for all such work in
the country.
As an American assault on Baghdad loomed, officials of the
National Museum made preparations to safeguard their priceless
collections, removing some items to secret locations and putting
the bulk of the artifacts in specially secured vaults under the
building, protected from bomb damage by layers of brick and cement.
Those items too large to be removed from the galleries were carefully
wrapped.
Looters took or destroyed everything in the galleries, then
broke into the underground vaults and plundered their contents.
They also destroyed the card catalog and wrecked the museum’s
computer system.
The Pentagon not only knew in advance of the potential threat
to Iraq’s cultural heritage, the US military received direct
appeals as the looting began to safeguard the National Museum.
One Iraqi archaeologist, Ra’id Abdul Ridhar Mohammed, told
the New
York Times he had gone directly to a squad of marines
aboard an Abrams tank in Museum Square, less than a quarter mile
from the museum, and asked them to stop the looting.
The marines went to the museum, chased away the first wave
of looters, then left after 30 minutes. “I asked them to
bring their tank inside the museum grounds,” Mohammed told
the Times, “But they refused and left.” He continued:
“About half an hour later, the looters were back, and they
threatened to kill me, or to tell the Americans that I am a spy
for Saddam Hussein’s intelligence, so that the Americans
would kill me. So I was frightened, and I went home.”
The archaeologist added, “A country’s identity, its
value and civilization resides in its history. If a country’s
civilization is looted, as ours has been here, its history ends.
Please tell this to President Bush. Please remind him that he
promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a
liberation, this is a humiliation.”
The politics of cultural destruction
There are direct commercial reasons for the Bush administration
to permit the plundering of Iraq’s cultural treasures. According
to a report April 6 in the Sunday
Herald, a Scottish newspaper, among those who met with
the Pentagon before the onset of the war were representatives
of the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), a lobbying
group for wealthy collectors and art dealers that has sought to
relax Iraq’s strict ban on the export of cultural artifacts.
The group’s treasurer, William Pearlstein, has criticized
Iraq’s policy as “retentionist” and said he would
urge the post-war government to make it easier to export artifacts
to the United States. The group sought to revise the Cultural
Property Implementation Act, the US law that regulates such international
trafficking in artistic treasures and antiques. According to this
press account, “News of the group’s meeting with the
government has alarmed scientists and archaeologists who fear
the ACCP is working to a hidden agenda that will see the US authorities
ease restrictions on the movement of Iraqi artifacts after a coalition
victory in Iraq.”
The Los
Angeles Times reported Tuesday a Northern California collector
of Iraqi art had been “contacted surreptitiously before the
war and told that Iraqi antiquities would soon become available.
He speculated that the thieves acted in accordance with a plan,
but no such design has been revealed.”
Appeasing a group of millionaires with a taste for Oriental
curiosities would certainly fit the profile of the Bush administration.
Much more fundamental, however, is the political value for the
American ruling elite of allowing such repositories of Iraq’s
history and culture to be destroyed.
The goal of the US military occupation is to impose colonial-style
domination over Iraq and seize control of its vast oil resources.
It serves the interests of American imperialism to humiliate Iraq
and condition its population to submit to the United States and
the stooge regime to be established in Baghdad. Attacking the
cultural resources that connect the Iraqi people to 7,000 years
of history is part of the process of systematically destroying
their national identity.
The tragic result is that treasures that survived even the
Mongol sack of the city in the 13th century could not withstand
the impact of 21st century technology and imperialist barbarism.
Bush, Rumsfeld and company personify the new barbarians: a “leader”
who is himself only semi-literate and wallows in religious backwardness;
an administration populated by former corporate CEOs for whom
an artifact of ancient Sumer is of more interest as a tax shelter
than as a key to the historical and cultural development of mankind.
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